Questions tagged [causality]
The causality tag has no usage guidance.
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Is the existence of physical substances, such as organisms, compatible with physicalism?
I have come across an objection to substance metaphysics on the basis that it is incompatible with physicalism, exemplified in the context of organisms causing their parts to move. The objection is as ...
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Can the Paradox of Phenomenal Judgement be resolved with a non-causal theory of knowledge?
In The Conscious Mind (Chalmers, 1996), David Chalmers presents the paradox of phenomenal judgement, a contradiction that arises from the dualism of consciousness and some empirical facts, and that ...
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Causality, compatibilism and the recognition of determinism
What I seem to know so far:
So in a deterministic universe, pretty much everything is laid out and this means there is no free-will if this was a deterministic universe, you and I would not have the ...
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Can loops/cycles (in a temporal sense) exist without beginnings?
I know this might seem like a question that might belong in a Computer Science forum but I wanted a more philosophical explanation and example.
When programming, I sometimes write poor implementations ...
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a Solution to The Problem Of Casuality and Thing-in-Themselves (Problem of Affection)
i have been interested in "the problem of affection" in Transcendental Idealism for a while now and a possible solution came to my mind,
Kant says that TIT Causes our Phenomena as if TIT (...
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causality and locality in universe
In continuation to Mechanistic view of the universe my second question is does locality implies causality and vice versa ? We have seen in previous question where causality sometimes locality doesn't ...
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Mechanistic view of the universe
I was chatgpting and found Encouragement of the Mechanistic View The mechanistic view in physics is driven by several key principles:
Determinism: The idea that the future behavior of a system can be ...
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Can causality be translated into logical formalism to analyze it via mathematical logic?
An observation about causality:
It produces state change. It happens via some thing operating on another thing changing it into the effect. A thing happens that's not an invariant.
Furthermore, it ...
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Act and Potency Prescinded From Causality in Thomism
Did the Thomistic Commentators, including but not limited to Cajetan, prescind potency and act from causal relations? In other words, did they consider the notion of potency and act as separate from ...
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upward downward topdown bottomup causation
can u tell me more about upward and downward causation . Is it same as bottom up and top down causation. What about one cause having lot of effects and one effect having lot of causes ?
Any chart/...
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is there any inconsistancy if i claim thing-in-itselmselves are giving our mind "causality"?
i'm simply testing this out
the "problem of affection" in kant happens because kant says causality is an apriori knowledge
can't we just say, thing-in-itself gives us "causality" ...
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How does dialectical causality work in practice?
I'm currently reading Evan Thompson's Mind in Life (2007). He was a collaborator of Fransisco Varela on Autopoiesis so he expands it from biological forms to, ultimately, cognitive science. It's an ...
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Is consciousness causally superfluous?
I cannot for the life of me even conceptualize the idea of conscious decisions causing an actual, physical effect (unless one becomes an idealist).
Consciousness will always be a first person ...
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What does the essence of anything matter, if its effect is the same?
This came to me as a generalization of another question:
What does the algorithm matter, if the input-output game plus performance is the same?
And lead me to a rabbit hole of following philosophical ...
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The question about "trumping" in Lewis's "causation as influence
In Lewis's "Causation as Influence," in section 1.4 titled "Trumping," Lewis describes a scenario as a case where a causal chain can be said to preempt a potential causal chain ...
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Does ontological commitment to unobservables in science give one ontological commitment to causality?
If we have ontological commitment to an unobservable like electrons, are we ontologically committed to the causal relationship between their existence and the observable phenomena we use to know that ...
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Can moral realism, physicalism, and physical causal closure be all true at the same time?
For illustrative purposes, let X be the set of all instances where Bob has tortured and eaten babies alive for fun. (Also assume that X is non-empty, to avoid trivial responses.)
Suppose that ...
user66156
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Justification for Aristotle's principle of causality?
[W]hen... a potential is actualized.. something already actual must be
what actualizes it. This is sometimes called the principle of
causality. (Feser, Edward. Five Proofs of the Existence of God. ...
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Is God necessarily superfluous? [closed]
Unless you are a believer in a physical God, you must assume that God, through some mysterious way, causes physical effects while being “non physical” himself (whatever that means). But each physical ...
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Are causal anti-realism and metaphysical realism compatible?
Could the existence of a mind-independent reality be compatible with believing that causal relations aren't real? If so, how could the latter be justified? Could one make an instrumentalist case like ...
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What are some examples of inmanent causes and effects in everyday nature?
Reading Spinoza's Ethics I find myself fascinated by the distinction bewteen inmanent cause and transitive cause.
In the Ethics comes like so:
E1 PROP. 18. God is the indwelling and not the transient ...
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How many dimensions does time have?
As phrased in the title, How many dimensions does time have?
If one considers time by itself (in isolation from other putative phenomena such as space or spacetime), what can be said about the ...
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Is magic an event that has no known cause or explanation?
Is an unknown cause for an event considered magic until that event has a known cause.
I was thinking about radioactive quantum events. As far as I know, these events have no known specific cause ...
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Is the principle of cause and effect bound to material?
I am having a hard time finding an answer to my question. The reason I’m asking it is to figure out if cause and effect could have existed before the universe was created. If anyone has insight on ...
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Is there any principle that requires only things that begin to exist have a cause?
William Lane Craig argues that everything that begins to exist has a cause. But what about the reverse? Do things that don’t begin to exist not have a cause? Do things that exist past eternally ...
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Can Free Will be Explained?
Explanations are causal, at least to the extent that I'm aware. If I explain X then I basically identify and expand on the cause of X (if X involves an ontological claim the explanans is all about ...
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Is the argument from freewill further supported by causal arguments
The argument from freewill is a paradox that can be loosely described as, if God is omniscient or all knowing then God subject's, man , cannot have freewill as the 'fate' or actions of man have been ...
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Do acausal quantum events come in between two classical events?
You'll have to forgive my ignorance if the answer to this question has lots of examples of how and when this occurs.
My knowledge of determinism is that it is a picture of a chain of events that goes ...
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Are there phenomena which are partially spontaneous and partially causal?
Events can be spontaneous or non spontaneous. Spontaneous is defined as occurring without apparent external cause. Non spontaneous events are causal, that is, there is cause and effect.
Suppose an ...
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Does Hume's objection to causality apply to human actions?
I heard the example with the kid and the toys from this video (TL;DW A kid who has only been playing with cotton toys gets a rubber ball and is surprised to see it bounce. His father is not surprised ...
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What are some examples of spontaneous phenomena?
It is said that almost all phenomena are dependent on cause and effect. There is assumed to be a chain of cause and effect ,leading the philosophers and scientist to believe that there must have been ...
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Explanation of the cause of the event of the beginning of time
Events in the natural world are determined to have temporal cause and a temporal effect.
One temporal event is the cause of another temporal event which is the effect of that temporal cause and forms ...
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Please evaluate my argument about incompleteness theorem and first cause
Here is my argument:
One of the incompleteness theorems is
“If a system is noncontradiction, it is incomplete”
Incomplete means that there are propositions that are true but cannot be proven.
The ...
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cause “for which all causal relations exist”
Suppose there is a cause “for which all causal relations exist”.
The cause exists before “all causal relationships exist.”
Before “all causal relationships exist,” causal relationships do not exist.
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If nothing is preventing something from existing, must it exist?
The question in the title; if there is no existent precluding factor (whatsoever) for the existence of some x, must such a x exist?
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Killing with bare hands vs Rube Goldberg killing machine: How can we connect causes to persons, and so be morally responsible for effects by us?
What brought up this question:
I was watching a television show and was thinking of how powerful individuals can obtain hired guns to do their dirty work. The police and legal system then has ...
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On the framing of causality?
So I shall restrict Nagarjuna's dependent arising of phenomena to the physical realm*. The source of my understanding is "Part Two, Chapter one - Examination of Conditions" of the book the ...
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What's the meaning and roots of the notion of "fault"?
This may sound naive and I'm not a native english speaker, but recently I've started wondering what people really mean by the notion of "fault", for example in the context of saying "it'...
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causation correlation and constraints
We know causation doesn't imply correlation and correlation doesn't imply causation.
I was curious to know does constraints implies correlation or causation.
If A constraints B and B constraints A ...
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What is character, and what role does it play in the decision making of an agent, according to proponents of libertarian free will?
I understand libertarian free will as an agent's ability to choose otherwise, or having more than one course of action available to them, when making a choice at time t, given a fixed past up to t. ...
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Can a totally ordered set with a last element but no first element exist, or is this contradictory?
Can a totally ordered set with a last element but no first element exist, or is this contradictory? An example of such a set would be a set that is ordered from largest to smallest, with there being ...
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Cause of the outcome of quantum events
Do quantum events have no definite cause , a cause but the cause is unknown, they have no cause, they simultaneously have a cause and do not have a cause , there is a known cause, causes of events at ...
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Is it true that there are phenomena without causes?
assume that there is cause A for "existence of all causality"
(A -> all causality exist)
It is contradictory that cause A belonging to causality exists before all causality exists.
Thus, &...
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Are there models of causal regresses where each cause-effect pair is mapped to/from the integers?
Let's substitute the event into an integer
for example
event A is 2
"Cause B" of A is 1
cause of B is 0
Let's represent it like this
So what does an integer less than all integers mean?
the ...
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Is it correct to refute that what exists has a cause?
1.There is a cause for the existence of something.
2.There is causality.
3.There is a cause for the existence of causality.
4.Let's assume the cause A for the existence of causality.
5.A -> ...
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How is causal order not assuming directionality of time?
Hans Reichenbach argues for the causality and causal chain to define a topological coordinative definition of time order. Here is an excerpt from his textbook, The Philosophy of Space and Time, Dover(...
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Is instantiation of properties causal?
Strange question here but can an object instantiating a property be a cause of it instantiating another different property? For example; I instantiate the property of being hairy and warm blooded ...
user50018
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How can we establish that causal relationships existed in the past?
From Hume's problem of induction, it is intuitive to me that, for example, "taking aspirin in the past has relieved my headaches" is insufficient to say with certainty that "taking an ...
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How can mathematical results impact the physical world?
In his 2007 book I Am a Strange Loop, Douglas Hofstadter uses an analogy based on a domino computer.
Indeed, it is possible to build logical gates made of dominoes (see e.g. here) and realize simple ...
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Does Hume undermine determinism? [closed]
The problem of induction (kind courtesy David Hume) states that causality isn't deductively justified.
Determinism, predicated on causality, isn't justified.
Ergo, free will is (at the very least) ...
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