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Originally Posted by lagdonk
Aaron,
I was wondering something. I noted earlier in the thread that you spoke about 'arbitrary circle drawing' when critiquing someone's attempt to distinguish proximate causes from ultimate ones. I'm still unclear why this is so. When I think about disciplines and sciences that deal wholly with mechanistic / deterministic and human-free subject matter, I know that they deal all the time with and ascribe significance to proximate and local causes when explicating or modeling phenomena. And yet it seems you concede that, per your views, since all such phenomena are ultimately causally rooted in the Big Bang, it is their ultimate cause, and identifying local or proximate causes would be 'arbitrary circle drawing.'
Under determinism all phenomena are ultimately causally rooted in the Big Bang. If free willed decisions can be made, then this can impact the causal roots.
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1) Do you think disciplines and sciences that deal with local and proximate causes when discussing non-human phenomena are doing something invalid and/or meaningless, since the Big Bang is the only meaningful cause?
Going back to the tides...
* Why do we have tides?
It's related to the moon's gravitational pull.
* But what about the sun? It's a big thing out there that has a lot of gravitational pull.
Yeah, that's there, too, but it causes a smaller effect.
* But what about the other celestial objects? They have a gravitational pull, too.
Well... yeah... but those effects are even smaller.
So we're sort of in a position where we *IGNORE* things because we have concluded that they are "smaller" effects. This is the arbitrary circle-drawing that we do. We are only paying attention to the things we want to pay attention to. This doesn't necessarily mean that there isn't a level of pragmatism to these "choices," but we can at least recognize the arbitrary nature of it all when pressed on it.
Now what makes it harder is that I don't see any reason to think that humans are the only freely-willed creatures that can impact the flow of the universe. I think when I brought up that the big bang could ultimately be the cause of tides, I think I had a clause in there that said "If there were no freely-willed decisions between the big bang and the creation of the planets" or something like that.
We cannot *test* for freely willed decisions (that's back to the whole empirical question). Therefore, it is better to try to draw as small of a circle as possible to avoid confounding variables such as freely willed decisions. And this is another form of arbitrary circle drawing. But here, we are trying to keep out the types of freely willed decisions that impact an experiment (as opposed to ignoring them).
In the process, we could find ourselves with a perfectly deterministic bubble (like a basic pendulum in physics), but it would be erroneous to assert that the principles inside our little bubble are necessarily going to perfectly generalize to a larger bubble (say, one that includes humans).
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2) If we leave aside the matter of free-willed entities like human beings, does your conception of how the rest of the physical universe operates and unfolds basically conform to a version of determinism (modulo QM), or do you have an alternate view?
As I said above, there's no particular reason to think that humans are the only entities that have free will that can impact the flow of the universe. What those other things might be, I don't know. But I can (if I wanted to) conceptualize a universe that conforms to basic determinism and I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with that.
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3) If, under a limited non-human-affecting determinism, you are willing to concede that it is meaningful or valid for disciplines to identify, focus on, and engage with proximate or local causes when dealing with non-human material phenomena, whose ultimate cause is nonetheless the Big Bang, why does doing so for human material phenomena, if we then extend determinism to encompass it, then shift to 'arbitrary circle drawing' and, presumably, meaninglessness or pointlessness?
I think I've addressed this somewhat above. We draw our circles with a purpose (to simplify the description or to exclude confounding influences). But these are *choices* of what to ignore and what not to ignore. We are actively picking the things that we will focus our attention on, and then we go through a process of trying to weed out all of the other influences until we've got the thing we want.
But once we've got that little deterministic bubble isolated, expanding the bubble becomes dangerous because we don't always know what we're letting in. For example, we might let in freely-willed decisions that will change the results of an experiment for no discernible reason, and which cannot be controlled out of the experiment.