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The scientific implications of vertical causality

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  • The scientific implications of vertical causality
• The scientific implications of vertical causality

• The scientific implications of vertical causality

  Magical Realist > Oct 29, 2018 09:57 PM

  https://philos-sophia.org/scientific-imp...causality/
  
  "Following Galileo, Descartes and Newton, Western civilization succumbed to the spell of what I have termed horizontal causation. From the publication of Newton’s Principia, in 1687, to the discovery of quantum physics in the early twentieth century, scientists assumed without question that, at bottom, the universe constitutes but a gigantic “clockwork,” in which the disposition of the parts determines — with mathematical precision! — the movement of the whole. And even after physicists were forced, in light of the quantum facts, to abandon the aforesaid clockwork paradigm, their view regarding causality remained yet every bit as “horizontal” as before: the only concession on the part of the experts, it appears, was to add the term “random” as an admissible epithet in the description of physical causality. Fundamentally the universe, to this day, is conceived officially as a “clockwork,” howbeit one which no longer functions with one-hundred percent precision: one might say that in addition to rigid cogwheels, it now comprises some “wobbly” components which in effect play the role of “dice.” The large picture, therefore, has scarcely changed at all: to this day Nature is perceived on scientific authority as a dull affair: merely “the hurrying of material particles, endlessly, meaninglessly” as Whitehead1 lamented long ago.
  
  With the rediscovery, however, of what we have termed “vertical causation” or VC, the picture has changed. Let us recollect, first of all, how this finding came about: vertical causality made its appearance precisely in our consideration of the so-called “quantum measurement problem.”2 Having reached the conclusion that the measuring instrument could not be a physical object, but must be corporeal, it became apparent that the so-called “collapse of the wave-function” cannot therefore be effected by means of physical — or what I term horizontal — causation, since a transition between two distinct ontological domains cannot but be instantaneous. And this fact in turn entails the recognition of a hitherto unrecognized kind of causality: a mode which differs fundamentally from physical causation by virtue of the fact that it acts, not by way of a temporal chain of events, but instantaneously.
  
  “[E]ven from a purely scientific point of view, what is called for at this moment in history is an enlarged and vastly deepened understanding of Nature: it is high time to … become philosophically literate once again.”
  
  Following this recognition we discovered that the newly-found vertical causality explains a number of physically incomprehensible phenomena, from Bell’s famed nonlocality to the prosaic fact that cricket balls don’t multilocate.3 The story, however, does not end on the level of physics: turning to the opposite end of the scala naturae — to man the anthropos namely — and availing ourselves of William Dembski’s 1998 theorem to the effect that “horizontal causation cannot produce CSI (complex specified information),” we drew the obvious yet startling conclusion that in producing CSI, we humans avail ourselves (demonstrably!) of vertical causation. What confronts us here is a scientific proof, no less, of what is traditionally termed “free will.”
  
  It appears thus that VC plays a decisive role not only in physics, but in the biosphere as well: that in fact its effects preponderate as one ascends the ladder of organic forms. I might add that when it comes to the enigma of visual perception, it turns out (in light of the discoveries of a cognitive psychologist named James Gibson) that here too VC plays the pivotal role: for it happens that what Gibson terms “the pick-up of invariants in the ambient optical array” is something horizontal causation simply cannot effect.5 In particular: a perception of movement cannot be obtained by sampling the data “in time”: here too a “supra-temporal” and consequently instantaneous mode of causality proves to be necessary.
  
  I would like finally to reiterate, in light of the aforesaid recognitions, that I consider scientific inquiry into the effects of VC within the various ontological strata of interest to science — from the “mineral” or inanimate to the different plant and animal genera, up to the human — to constitute the most challenging vistas open to fundamental scientific inquiry in our time. As regards research of a foundational kind, we seem to be approaching the end of what can in principle be understood on the basis of horizontal causation; and I surmise that much of what presently obstructs us at the frontiers of scientific inquiry may prove indeed to be effects of VC. In a word, I surmise that even from a purely scientific point of view, what is called for at this moment in history is an enlarged and vastly deepened understanding of Nature: it is high time to jettison our Galilean, Cartesian and Newtonian assumptions to become philosophically literate once again."

• RE: The scientific implications of vertical causality

  C C > Nov 2, 2018 02:11 AM

  "Vertical" mapping would also be a way of representing hierarchical "causes" that would be prior in rank to space and time sequences (nature). Thus how the former stratum could anonymously orchestrate the experienced world. In terms of the latter's own internal logic and "storyline", everything would still routinely have a potential explanation within the boundaries of science and mundane theory (including probabilistic / statistical remedies contributing to neutering any initial seeming "mysteries" and long-lived series of coincidences). Kant, of course, set a transcendent will as hierarchically prior to the time-ordered appearances / mechanistic version of one's psychological output. Likewise as safely anonymous from empirical scrutiny as a game-creator team's insulation from their programmed characters on the screen.
  
  

  Stuart Greenstreet: . . . They are discoverable, Kant claims, because human actions, just like physical events, must be systematically connected. Our actions take a law-like path because they are ruled by the causality of reason:
  
  “Reason does not here follow the order of things, as they present themselves in appearance (ie. as compelled by the causal principle), but frames for itself with perfect spontaneity an order of its own according to ideas.... And at the same time reason also presupposes that it can have causality in regard to all these actions (ie the causality of reason) since otherwise no empirical effects could be expected from its ideas.” (B576)
  
  If human actions were nothing but physical events – merely the by-products of physical processes – they would be subject to natural laws which determine physical events. But actions are not determined indirectly as physical events. They themselves fall under a set of rules in their very character as actions:
  
  “Reason though it be, it must nonetheless exhibit an empirical character. For every cause presupposes a rule according to which certain appearances follow as effects; and every rule requires uniformity in its effects.” (B576-71)
  
  All of Kant's explanations, so far, still leave a crucial question unanswered. The causality of reason presupposes a rule whereby one willed action systematically follows another. So actions can be explained by tracing them to their sources. How, then, is the will able to escape an endless causal chain and initiate a new series of actions, one which begins purely of itself? We must look more deeply into Kant's startling claim that if we could exhaustively investigate all the appearances, [ie empirical evidence] of men's wills we would see that every human action had followed from its prior conditions and could have been predicted.
  
  He does not mean that it is possible to predict a person's action at any given moment in advance of it being performed. After it has been performed, and has entered a causal series, the action will be explicable within that framework. Given what we then know we could have predicted the action. The causal series does not precede that action, but includes it. Kant's meaning is easier to grasp in the light of his claim that human actions are necessitated by facts about character. Until a person has finally decided how to act (say, whether or not to lie) her choice remains open. She could have a change of heart. Therefore until she has acted, any estimate of her character is underdetermined by the data. Every moral choice she makes as she conducts her life yields more data about her essential character. It is the action she actually performs which enables us to see, retrospectively, how it fitted into a pattern and could have been predicted. We will be in exactly the same position at her next point of decision, and so on.
  
  Earlier, I stressed the distinction between transcendental principles of causality (which must exist for experience to be possible) and the natural causality of material things (particular empirical causal laws discovered by science). Transcendental causality is not an event in the worldly chain of events. It is, in Kant's words, “the ground which determines the causality of natural things to an effect in accordance with their proper laws.” Transcendental causality stands behind all events and outside of time. It is non-temporal. Now recall the argument: physical events have empirical causes; human actions are not determined indirectly as physical events; they conform as actions to the rules of the transcendental causality of reason. Now maybe we can make sense of the claim that the will is spontaneously able to originate actions. This is possible, Kant says, because
  
  “[the] first beginning of what we are here speaking is not a beginning in time but in causality. If, for instance, I at this moment arise from my chair, in complete freedom, without being necessarily determined thereto by the influence of natural causes, a new series, with all its natural consequences ad infinitum, has its absolute beginning in this event, although as regards time [it] is only the continuation of a preceding series.” (B748-9)
  
  An act of the will, says Kant, ‘follows upon' natural causes “but without arising out of them”. Although human actions follow the train of natural events they arise from the transcendental causality of reason. They are not, therefore, time-bound. ‘First beginnings' – spontaneous human actions – are possible at any point in our lives because they respond to rules which exist outside of the temporal order. They can occur without interrupting nature's causal chain. --Kant versus Hume on the Necessary Connection ... Philosophy Now, Issue 49, 2005

  
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• RE: The scientific implications of vertical causality

  Magical Realist > Nov 2, 2018 09:03 PM

  Quote:An act of the will, says Kant, ‘follows upon' natural causes “but without arising out of them”. Although human actions follow the train of natural events they arise from the transcendental causality of reason. They are not, therefore, time-bound. ‘First beginnings' – spontaneous human actions – are possible at any point in our lives because they respond to rules which exist outside of the temporal order. They can occur without interrupting nature's causal chain. --Kant versus Hume on the Necessary Connection ... Philosophy Now, Issue 49, 2005

  
  Fascinating. I assume these rules which exist outside the temporal order include those of logic and language and ethics and even form and aesthetics, if we include among "human actions" such creative acts as dancing, singing, poetry, painting, writing, or playing a musical instrument.

• RE: The scientific implications of vertical causality

  C C > Nov 2, 2018 11:03 PM

  (Nov 2, 2018 09:03 PM)Magical Realist Wrote:

  Quote:An act of the will, says Kant, ‘follows upon' natural causes “but without arising out of them”. Although human actions follow the train of natural events they arise from the transcendental causality of reason. They are not, therefore, time-bound. ‘First beginnings' – spontaneous human actions – are possible at any point in our lives because they respond to rules which exist outside of the temporal order. They can occur without interrupting nature's causal chain. --Kant versus Hume on the Necessary Connection ... Philosophy Now, Issue 49, 2005

  
  Fascinating. I assume these rules which exist outside the temporal order include those of logic and language and ethics and even form and aesthetics, if we include among "human actions" such creative acts as dancing, singing, poetry, painting, writing, or playing a musical instrument.

  
  
  Whatever seem to be the fundamental concepts and sensory forms necessary for experience, understanding, etc. But neither Kant nor anyone else could have been expected to nail that precisely, just make attempts at it -- offer examples vulnerable to the future. Traditionally, physicists also tended to be Platonists when it came to the regularities that the universe conformed to.
  
  

  Laws of Nature, Source Unknown (PDF): [...] Steven Weinberg, a Nobel laureate from the University of Texas, Austin, described himself in an e-mail message as “pretty Platonist,” saying he thinks the laws of nature are as real as “the rocks in the field.” The laws seem to persist, he wrote, “whatever the circumstance of how I look at them, and they are things about which it is possible to be wrong, as when I stub my toe on a rock I had not noticed.”
  
  [...] If the laws of physics are to have any sticking power at all, to be real laws, one could argue, they have to be good anywhere and at any time, including the Big Bang, the putative Creation. Which gives them a kind of transcendent status outside of space and time.
  
  [...] Dr. Davies complains that the traditional view of transcendent laws is just 17th-century monotheism without God. “Then God got killed off and the laws just free-floated in a conceptual vacuum but retained their theological properties,” he said in his e-mail message.
  
  But the idea of rationality in the cosmos has long existed without monotheism. As far back as the fifth century B.C. the Greek mathematician and philosopher Pythagoras and his followers proclaimed that nature was numbers. Plato envisioned a higher realm of ideal forms, of perfect chairs, circles or galaxies, of which the phenomena of the sensible world were just flawed reflections. Plato set a transcendent tone that has been popular, especially with mathematicians and theoretical physicists, ever since.

  
  Kant, however, prescribed that none of the speculations historically projected upon that intellectual stratum of the Greeks could be validated or "made immediately real" like experienced objects. His a priori forms for engendering the presentation and conceptual understanding of a sensible world (as well as free will) were instead set in a transcendent version of mind (arguably a kind of mediating stage between noumenal and phenomenal).
  
  In a spin-off variation of Leibniz's own "things in themselves" (monads) participating in the same world despite monads having no "windows", objectivity in Kant's scheme was achieved by rational agents having the same operating system of thought and perceptual forms. (Figuratively a bit like even different web browsers rendering the code of a website into more or less the same appearance on a monitor screen -- unless images, javascript, etc were disabled.)
  
  Potent principles of whatever stripe of Platonism were not the "cause" or origin of the experienced world, as in existing as part of the latter's time-ordered sequence itself; they were prior in rank to the whole of the latter (purely "cause" or "the reason for" as in a hierarchical relationship, if our language forces us to have to use that word [relationship]).
  
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