Philosopher's carnival
on philosophy has a great post on causation.
Raising an concept that is sadly lacking from most people's world views.
In general we associate the active elements of the world as things that can be at fault and so we tend to also describe them as causes. For example if a baseball is thrown against my window, and the window breaks, our intuition is to say that the moving baseball is the cause of the broken window. However if we distance ourselves from the association between agency and causality it should seem reasonable to say that the disposition of the window to break is also part of the cause of the broken window, after all if the window had been stronger the ball would have simply bounced off. Another source of confusion when studying causality is time. At different times different events might be seen as the cause of the current state of affairs. For example earlier I described the ball as a cause of the window being broken. However if we look further back in time it would seem that the person who threw the ball was a cause of the broken window, and further back than that their parents are the cause of the person’s existence, and thus the cause of the broken window, and ultimately the big bang is the cause of everything.
he also has some cool diagrams
Analyzer shows that Quantun intederminancy isnt helpful in regard to libiterian free will. Ie that a libiterian is no more free if QI controls them than if some determinist principle does it.
atopian argues human rights shouldn't be used as a basis for morality - I think what he means is Negative human rights. But it is a good point anyway.
Raising an concept that is sadly lacking from most people's world views.
In general we associate the active elements of the world as things that can be at fault and so we tend to also describe them as causes. For example if a baseball is thrown against my window, and the window breaks, our intuition is to say that the moving baseball is the cause of the broken window. However if we distance ourselves from the association between agency and causality it should seem reasonable to say that the disposition of the window to break is also part of the cause of the broken window, after all if the window had been stronger the ball would have simply bounced off. Another source of confusion when studying causality is time. At different times different events might be seen as the cause of the current state of affairs. For example earlier I described the ball as a cause of the window being broken. However if we look further back in time it would seem that the person who threw the ball was a cause of the broken window, and further back than that their parents are the cause of the person’s existence, and thus the cause of the broken window, and ultimately the big bang is the cause of everything.
he also has some cool diagrams
Analyzer shows that Quantun intederminancy isnt helpful in regard to libiterian free will. Ie that a libiterian is no more free if QI controls them than if some determinist principle does it.
atopian argues human rights shouldn't be used as a basis for morality - I think what he means is Negative human rights. But it is a good point anyway.
posted by Genius at 9:15 PM
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