Re: Could you give me your analysis of this?

[John Kineman <***>]

Howard,

Yes, yes. So what? Do we not like the word?  The Copenhagen convention
that suggested an an uncertain foundation for reality has itself been
questioned, has it not? In string theory are we not attempting to
rebuild some deeper ontologies? The word ontology itself is about "the
kinds of existents." So, there we go with reality again. There is no
more justification for claims of "existents" than there is for claims of
cause. So let's get rid of "ontologies" too and have a non-ontological,
a-causal view of nature - then we can just drop all this science stuff
and talk about our feelings, which, by the way, is not a bad idea. But
if we are curious in an intellectual way, if we look for regular
patterns, we are implicitly thinking of something both "real" in the
sense that it is an "existent" and causal in the sense that one thing
appears to be a precursor for another, an indicator, a predictor, an
analogy, a cause, etc. It would be silly to suggest we expunge the idea
of cause from ecology, environmetal science, geology, geophysics,
sociology, biology, or, I dare say, physics, generally. All these
admonitions mean is that we shouldn't think of it too ridgidly, but we
do need ways to think, right? Doesn't it then boil down to which
thoughts are more useful for a given purpose? In that, I for one do not
accept that a pure instrumentalism, as you argue here, is necessarily
better than framing one's ideas in terms of some "reality" concepts. If
I say "smoking causes cancer" I don't there there is much improvement in
saying that "smoking establishes conditions under which, in an unbiased
and significant sampling of events, one tends to find the a-causal
appearance of conditions known as cancer at levels that correllate with
the incidents of smoking at statistical levels beyond random chance" or
something to that effect. On the other hand, if someone takes the
simpler statement too serciously and forgets the caveats inherent in the
second, we can easily overlook the many other conditions that affect the
correlation. Nevettheless, we conclude that smoking causes cancer at a
general level of understanding and that becomes a useful causality when
doing an environmental impact assessment. It is no different with other
proposals of causality - they have use for the theory at hand.

JK

Howard Pattee wrote:

> Correction: Last paragraph
>
> The Epicurean concept of chance [not cause] is now accepted in physics as ontologically chaotic events that have no cause.
>
>
>
> > Howard