Class 41: What Is Cause Like?

Every probability and statistics class I’ve ever heard of starts with math applied to observations—with all notions of what probability is and what cause means brushed aside. By the time these subjects are, often reluctantly, discussed, the Deadly Sin of Reification has struck and the student believes his equations are Reality. This is wrong and backwards, which is why we first study, intensely, what cause means. All can read this chapter, even if you haven’t been following the Class.

Uncertainty & Probability Theory: The Logic of Science

Video

Links: YouTube * Twitter – X * Rumble * Bitchute * Class Page * Jaynes Book * Uncertainty

HOMEWORK: Given below; see end of lecture.

Lecture

This is an excerpt from Chapter 7 of Uncertainty. Besides the books mentioned below, see especially Robert Koons’s Is St. Thomas’s Aristotelian Philosophy of Nature Obsolete? (The answer is no.)

In order to grasp cause, we need a brief, a very brief, introduction to the Aristotelian metaphysics of change. These are ancient views, once largely abandoned but becoming current one again for the very good reason they are correct. Philosophers like Nancy Cartwright, William Wallace, Ed Feser, and others are restoring a full and robust philosophy of Aristotelian causality back to the sciences. And there are other groping calls for scientists to sort out just what scientific pronouncements are: predictions or understanding of cause? What follows in this section is a precis of Feser’s Scholastic Metaphysics. Full arguments are not given here, just enough information is provided to grasp the essential concepts; interested readers should follow up with the authors mentioned.

Contingent things, such as the book or “device” you are holding, exist as composites of act and potency, or actuality and potentiality. A lump of clay is potentially a vase. A lump of clay is not potentially a 1965 Barracuda with a 273 cu in. LA V8 (a weepingly beautiful automobile) nor is it potentially a stereo. A vase is in potentia to being a pile of shards. A vase is in actuality a vase, and a lump of clay is in actuality a lump of clay. The reader is in potentia to receiving a salary of fifty-thousand a year, unless he already possess that trait, and is therefore in actuality receiving it. And so on.

Some thing or things must cause every potentiality to become an actuality, that is, something actual must cause every change, where every change is an actualization of a potential. A potter is required to turn the potential vase in a lump of clay into a vase, while a child (in any of dozens of ways) can actualize the shards which are in potentia in that same vase, once it it completed. Feser (p.33) : “These potentialities or potencies are real features…even if they are not actualities.” Potentialities therefore exist in a certain sense, but in potentia. For instance, the number of numbers between 0 and 1 is potentially infinite, but not actually infinite in practice, a fact which has special consequences in measurement.

Whatever is changed, is changed by another: whatever is in potential, is made actual only by something actual. Whatever cannot be changed, is not changed. It is not the lump’s potential to be a vase that turns it in into a vase, it is an actual potter. The potter uses his power of making a vase; his hands are the efficient cause. The formal cause is the form of the vase, the material cause is the clay itself, and the final cause is the goal, the desire for the vase and not an ashtray. Clearly, the potter has the power to make the vase even when he is not making it (say, when he’s taking his Barracuda out for a spin). Aquinas said ,”nothing can be reduced from potentiality to actuality, except by something in a state of actuality” (Summa Theologiae I.2.3; quoted in Feser, p. 40). This is the principle of causality which I take as axiomatic. Things do not happen without causes, potentialities are not made actual by nothing, for nothing is not a thing, and that which is empty of everything has no power to cause anything. If things happened, i.e. change occurred, for no reason, then there would be no way to know that this change was a potentiality made actual by something actual or that this change happened for no reason or by magic. Batter steps up the plate and knocks on over the right field wall. Was this flight of the ball one of the times Nothing stepped in and did its non-cause trick which didn’t cause the ball to take flight but which made it look like the ball was at one moment on the bat and the next soaring through the air for no reason? Or was this the time the batter gets the credit? Why bother doing science if you’re not sure nature is going to cooperate or be whimsical? Change does not occur without it being caused. There is no magic.

Science deals with the contingent: (p. 106) a “contingent thing is such that its existence is distinct from its essence, where its essence is in potency relative to its existence, which actualizes it…To cause a contingent thing is thus to actualize a potency…whatever is contingent has a cause…” which is everything in science. This is not to say that everything has a cause; only that contingent things do, because only contingent things can be in potency. In Summa Contra Gentiles (Chapter 99, 2), Aquinas said, “Whatever sometimes is and sometimes is not, results from a cause: for nothing brings itself from not-being to being: since what is not yet, acts not.” Only contingent things can sometimes be and sometimes not be.

A child throws a ball and it hits the vase. As the ball hits, the vase buckles; as the ball hits, the vase begins to break. The “event” is the ball-hitting-vase, and the ball hitting the vase event is simultaneous, which is not to say instantaneous. The ball hitting and the vase buckling happen over a short period of time; they are not different events “entirely loose and separate”, to use Hume’s mistaken phrase: there is one event, the simultaneity. It is not because we “happen” to see, or “chance” upon the spectacle of ball-hitting-vase that we know the ball caused the vase to break. It is because we learn, via induction, that balls traveling at sufficient speed have the power to break vases of this certain type. It is the vase’s nature to break when hit by balls like that under these circumstances. We are back to essence. Understanding essence and powers is to understand cause.

Many modern authors put this the wrong way, saying first the ball hits then the vase breaks. This is not so. There are not two separate events, but one joint event, spread through time. This point is crucial. It is difficult to find modern examples where distinctness in events and separateness in time is not assumed. Of course, that the ball-hitting-vase is spread through time, however brief, does not mean that all events are. Certain quantum mechanical events are thought to be instantaneous (but proof of this is lacking; instantaneous is a remarkably strong attribute). But that merely confirms the view that we are not witnessing “loose and separate” events, but joint ones.

Knowing the ball was the efficient cause of the vase breaking is not the whole story, though it is enough for most (it was for my mother). There are all sorts of forces involved, including the ball’s momentum, friction, elasticity of both objects, and so forth. These are not necessary to understand to say the ball caused the break. These additional forces can be investigated to form a deeper understanding the precise mechanisms and powers and to, say, knowing when the vase will or won’t break. Each of these micro-investigations, as it were, are no different than the gross version. The essence and powers of the forces involved are understood to be causes. But there are limits to our knowledge.

Let’s investigate the ball-hits-vase joint event more closely. The ball and vase are not monoliths, but composed of smaller parts. As the ball pushes into the vase, the molecules of the ball and vase are themselves undergoing change. These changes, which are actualizations of potentials, are caused by something actual, which are the atoms in the molecules. These are also undergoing change, which are again actualizations of potentials, which are also caused by something actual. This might be the interactions of the constituents of the atoms, the electrons, protons, and neutrons, which are also undergoing change. That means there are more actualizations of potentials caused by other somethings which are actuals. These may be quarks, which are themselves pushed about by (say) actual strings (or super-strings), which themselves, perhaps, are caused to change by something “below” (at a more fundamental level than) them. All of this is happening here-and-now, simultaneously, but again not necessarily instantaneously. All of these actualizations of potentialities by other actualities is called a per se times series, or a per se series of events in the here-and-now time.

But you can see that this process cannot continue to infinity. It must bottom out, or nothing can ever get moving; no changes could ever be made. There must be some first cause or first mover or first changer. This makes all other causes in the chain secondary causes. Secondary causes are the subject of physics; the first or base cause belongs to metaphysics. The first cause must be entirely actual and have no potential. It is what makes all “bottom” potentialities actual. It is responsible for every contingent event, at base. This is the prime or primary cause, which is ever-present. Science is and must forever be ignorant of this cause; that is, of the why of this cause, or how this cause is decided or acts. A per se series is a handy explanation of quantum mechanical EPR-like events, or whatever is “beneath” them, as discussed earlier. Again, all of the other here-and-now causes—string into quark into protons into etc.—are secondary causes. All have powers and essences, and it is the goal of science to understand these secondary causes.

There is another type of causal series, this one distinct in time, an accidental series. The classic, and really perfect, example is that a grandfather caused his son to be made and he, your father, caused you to be made. This doesn’t stop with your grandfather, naturally, but continues along a string of relatives into the past (and perhaps into the future, if you are so blessed). Remove one of the knots in the string, i.e. remove one of the causes, and you would not be reading this now.

There are also non-causal accidental series. Unfortunately, in practice, data analysts often think of accidental series as if they were causal. The field of time series analysis comes to mind. Examples of non-causal accidental series: yearly (or monthly or daily or hourly or whatever) average temperature (or sales figures or unemployment rates or suicides, or etc., etc.). Last year’s average did not and could not cause this year’s average. How can an average, a mere weightless number, cause anything? Yet these kinds of series are often supposed to be causal. Result? Misascribed causes and wild over-certainty. I leave discussion of these accidents until the last Chapter.

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