maestro wrote:Causality is an article of faith is it not?
Indeed it is.
maestro: How do you establish that the past fully fixes the future?
David: What else could fix the future?
For a start there's the problem that we can never know definitively that the past and future actually existed and will exist, respectively. For all we know, the past is but a false memory and the future is but a vain dream, and there is only this single moment. Alternatively: for all we know, in each successive moment we inhabit an entirely, distinct, and causally-unrelated-to-the-previous-moment new universe of memories and physical configuration - in one moment you are writing a post in to GF, with memories of having grown up in Australia and becoming a male sage; in the next moment you are a woman of an alien species on a shopping spree on another planet, with memories of being literally put together by your community of parents, and the universe has an entirely different topography to that of the previous moment.
Assuming, however, that neither of these possibilities is true, one answer to your question is "some form of constrained true randomness".
David Quinn wrote:But the future that actually occurs is the one that actually occurs, and is always a product of causation.
Such is your faith. It's interesting then to observe how fond you are of deriding the faith of others, particularly of those who believe in God.
maestro wrote:Consider the following system, an intelligent system with a random process, outside of the causal universe. The intelligent system gets various configurations from the random process and selects those which seem interesting to it.
That's a reasonable possibility. Proof that causality is a faith, albeit that it is potentially true (just like God is a faith, albeit that He is potentially true).
David: I also don't understand the distinction you make between "random" and "causal". A random event is just as causal in nature as a non-random event is.
maestro: It is non-causal in the sense that the present state of the universe is not sufficient to determine the outcome of the random process. The outcome cannot be known until it is revealed.
Great explanation, maestro, and one that can't really be refuted (at least it hasn't been in this thread).
The responses of David and Kevin seem to be to something that they anticipated that maestro would write, or to a selective reading of his words, rather than what he actually did write. First, David's:
Are you equating determinism with predictability here? Unpredictable events are simply events that we, as finite beings, cannot predict. Their unpredictability doesn't constitute evidence that the events are non-causal.
David asks a question out of the blue that reveals what he expected, rather than what maestro actually wrote. David seems to have expected maestro to have written something like "Determinism means that everything is theoretically predictable; randomness means that some things are unpredictable", to which David responds that even in theory, deterministic events are not predictable, and thus that randomness (assuming that it is defined as unpredictability) doesn't contradict determinism. It seems to me that this is in effect a non-response, because maestro is not - as far as I can tell - equating determinism with predictability: he seems to be approaching it from a more nuts-and-bolts perspective, explaining how true randomness is in opposition to fully deterministic causality.
Next, Kevin responds only to the final sentence ("The outcome cannot be known until it is revealed."), ignoring the rest of maestro's explanation:
The fact that something cannot be known until it is revealed doesn't mean that it isn't fully caused.
If Kevin had thought carefully about what maestro had explained, then he would have recognised that under maestro's scheme, the thing is definitively
not fully caused, by virtue of the fact that "the present state of the universe is not sufficient to determine the outcome of the random process". The thing happens, but it is not fully caused. There is a truly random aspect to it. Like David's response, Kevin's response is a non-event, ignoring the actual point that maestro is making.
Both David and Kevin have failed to disprove the possibility of maestro's scenario, and hence the answer to his original question is of a certainty "Yes, causality is an article of faith". Well might David and Kevin be referred to as Defenders of the Faith.
David Quinn wrote:If by random you mean, "springing into existence out of nothing", then there is the further problem of improbability. What are the odds that a completely uncaused event can throw up a configuration that is even remotely meaningful to one's personal situation in life?
What if it were not "completely uncaused", but were rather random within a set of (meaningful) parameters?
Kevin Solway wrote:"Random" only means upredictable [sic].
I disagree with the word "only". Random can also mean non-deterministic, in the sense that maestro wrote above: the present state of the [system] is not sufficient to determine the outcome of the random [event].
maestro: But why should everything be fully causal, there could be events which are uncaused, that is the current state of the universe is not sufficient to fix their outcome, regardless of determinism or predictability.
David: Apart from any other consideration, we don't experience a world in which things appear suddenly, willy-nilly and out of context, which would be the case if non-causal events were possible. For example, a physical mouse suddenly appearing inside one's brain, or a giant electron suddenly appearing in the corner of one's living room. The world would be awash with these sorts of freak events if non-causality was a reality.
This would only be the case if the random events were completely unconstrained, in which case we most likely would not have a universe suitable for the inhabitation of consciousness, given that freak events would be constantly occurring to destroy and injure that consciousness. It would not be the case if, as I suggested above, those random events were constrained in some way.