. He was
points" - that's called the "Kochen-Specker theorem". In other words,
>
> */?The truth arises from arguments amongst friends?/* -- *David Hume*
>
> One of my goals at Friam, believe it or not, is actually to get some
> fundamental issues settled amongst us. We had, last week, a brisk
> discussion about causality. I don?t think I was particularly
> articulate, and so, to push that argument forward, I would like to try
> to state my position clearly and succinctly.
>
> The argument was between some who felt that causality was ?real? and
> those that felt that it was basically a figment of our imaginations.
> The argument may seem frivolous, but actually becomes of consequence
> anytime anyone starts to think about how one proves that X is the
> cause of Y. Intuitively, X is the cause of Y if Y is X?s ?fault?. To
> say that X is the cause of Y is to accuse X of Y. Given my current
> belief that story-telling is at the base of EVERYTHING, I think you
> convince somebody that X is the cause of Y just by telling the most
> reasonable story in which it seems obvious that Y would not have
> occurred had not X occurred. But there is no particular reason that
> the world should always be a reasonable place, and therefore, it is
> also ALWAYS possible to tell an UNREASONABLE story that shows that Y?s
> occurrence was not the responsibility of X, no matter how reasonable
> the original causal attribution is. One of us asked for a hammer and
> nail, claiming that if he could but drive a nail into the surface of
> one of St. John?s caf? tables, none of us would be silly enough to
> doubt that his hammering had been the cause of the nails penetration
> of the table. Not withstanding his certainty on this matter, several
> of us instantly offered to be JUST THAT SILLY! We would claim, we
> said, that contrary to his account, his hammering had had nothing to
> do with the nail?s penetration, but that the accommodating molecules
> of wood directly under the nail had randomly parted and sucked the
> nail into their midst.
>
> How validate a reasonable causal story against the infinite number of
> unreasonable causal stories that can always be proposed as
> alternatives. By experience, obviously. We have seen hundreds of cases
> where nails were driven into wood when struck by hammers (and a few
> cases where the hammer missed the nail, the nail remained where it
> was, and the thumb was driven into the wood.) Also, despite its
> theoretical possibility, none of us has EVER seen a real world object
> sucked into a surface by random motion of the surface?s molecules. So
> it is the comparative analysis of our experience with hammers and
> nails that would have convinced us that the hammering had driven in
> the nail.
>
> So what is the problem? Why did we not just agree to that proposition
> and go on? The reason to me is simple: the conventions of our language
> prevent us from arriving at that conclusion. We not only say that
> Hammers Cause Nails to embed in tables, which is what we know to be
> true, we also say that THIS Hammer caused THIS nail to be embedded in
> the wood. Thus our use of causality is a case of misplaced
> concreteness. Causality is easily attributed to the pattern of
> relations amongst hammers and nails, but we err when we allow
> ourselves to assert that that higher order pattern is exhibited by any
> of its contributory instances. In fact, that in our experience the
> missed nails have not been driven into the wood is as much a real part
> of our notions of causality and hammering as the fact that a hit nail
> is. Causality just cannot be attributed to an individual instance.
>
> The fallacy of misplaced concreteness is so widespread in our
> conversation that we could barely speak without it, but it is a
> fallacy all the same. Other instances of it are intentions,
> dispositions, personality traits, communication, information etc.,
> etc., and such mathematical fictions as the slope of a line at a
> point. Whenever we use any of these terms, we attribute to single
> instances properties of aggregates of which they are part.
>
> Now, how do we stop arguing about this? First of all, we stop and give
> honor to the enormous amount of information that actually goes into
> making a rational causal attribution that hammering causes embedding,
> information which is not available in any of its instances. Second, we
> then stop and give honor to the incredible power of the human mind to
> sift through this data and identify patterns in it. Third, and
> finally, we stop and wonder at whatever flaw it is in our evolution,
> our neurology, our cognition, our culture, or our language that causes
> us to lodge this knowledge in the one place it can never be ? single
> instances.
>
> Are we done?
>
> Nick
>
> Nicholas S. Thompson
> Research Associate, Redfish Group, Santa Fe, NM (nick at redfish.com
> <mailto:nick at redfish.com>)
> Professor of Psychology and Ethology, Clark University
> (nthompson at clarku.edu <mailto:nthompson at clarku.edu>)
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
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