It’s only the outputs you experience that you have first hand knowledge of causing.
Just as the Earth causes rain, snow, and wind.
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I’m wondering if you appreciate the meaning of these words.
You will never know however, if more or less delay in your game and the subsequent timing of your leaving the links and its causing you to wait for a stoplight or get a green one, for instance, is a minute precursor factor in a complex sequence of events of timing and placing in God’s providence that could affect someone’s life for their good and to his honor. Think “butterfly in Beijing effect” and then about the timing and placing of events in a providential sequence that you already know about (it’s funny, but Maggie comes to mind ; - ).
Hmmm,… (thought to myself): I have lots of outputs, but I can’t imagine having first hand knowledge of “causing” many, much less most, of them. For example, Cowen and Keltner report 27 distinct categories of emotion bridged by continuous gradients. I’m fairly certain that my emotions are caused but I have no “first hand knowledge” of causing any of them which makes me an unreliable witness to having caused any them.
Moreover, as a subset of the infinite number of dimensionless atoms in the cosmos, I am hard pressed to imagine that any individual dimensionless object–whether one of many in the subset that I would call “me” or one of the many that are not me–could possibly be the uncaused cause of any event in the cosmos. And yet, … there are subsets of those dimensionless objects that claim to be the cause of events in the cosmos.
When I notice disfunctional behavior in someone else, I usually give them the benefit of the doubt and suspect there is some kind of suppressed trauma in the person’s past.
I have a real appreciation for my own and other people’s complex multi layered psychology.
But when it comes to making simple choices and causing basic actions, I am puzzled by all the uncertainty about it.
Neurobiology is one of the most complicated and least understood parts of biology. I would be puzzled by anyone who claimed to have certainty on the subject.
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It’s mildly amusing that this question of whether a person has the ability to act is being considered in a thread on superstition in religion.
I am not questioning the ability of a person to act. It’s the causes that are under question.
You mean whether or not the person is really causing the action.
You’re unable to understand all uncertainty?
Here’s a continuum.
The continuum ranges between two propositions:
- On the left is the proposition “Cosmos makes no sense”.
- On the right is the proposition “Cosmos makes complete sense”.
The heavy vertical line in the middle marks the mid-point between the propositions: i.e. half of the cosmos never makes sense at any moment and the other half makes sense at any sense.
So how certain are you of either proposition or any point on the continuum?
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Interesting question. We are talking about a person acting. I don’t see the connection you are drawing.
Building up a reponse:
Best case Christianity is infinitely better than anything else. Christianity stands on the giant shoulders of ancient Jewish culture. And, if it’s warranted, transcends it. There are many Jews who would completely agree with me about their culture’s fables. If Christianity is warranted, it’s still on the giant shoulders of Jewish fables, Jewish theocratic jurisprudence, as well as the sublime, timeless, radical, truly prophetic, i.e. telling forth, the ball which Jesus picked up and ran to touch and victory with. Warranted Christianity is more intellectually satisfying. Judaist thought evolved superbly along with it, but cannot compete. Because of my second statement:
Roses are red, violets are bluish, if it wasn’t for Christmas, we’d all be Jewish.
: ) no. Judaism would have had no more traction in a secular-pagan Greco-Roman empire than it did in a Christianized one. Statistically Jews are more likely to secularize or convert, Muslims far less.
Judaism alone is no intellectual basis for believing in God. It has no hook. Its claims aren’t outrageous enough; it’s far too tribal.
Yes. I completely agree with it. Without caveat. Jesus swathed Himself in the telling forth of the prophets, took their mantle. And all the humanitarianism He could find in Moses.
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No, that’s not what I mean.
Maybe this will help. I eat a sandwich. I take in the nutrients from the sandwich. That’s me doing it. How is that happening? That has to do with the physiology of my gut. My gut is still part of me.
I act. I make decisions. That’s me doing it. How is that happening? That has to do with neurobiology. My brain and nervous system are still part of me. It is me.
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Good Lord! What do you have against retracing steps in the long and winding road of a thread or a portion of a thread?
Time for a trip down memory lane: …
- T_acquaticus said, in Post #58:
- You responded, in Post #61, with:
- Piqued by your post, I wondered, publicly in Post #65,
- about outputs that I experience yet have no “first hand knowledge of causing any of them”, and
- given my belief that the cosmos consists of dimensionless atoms moving through Absolute Space during Absolute Time, if all those atoms are the uncaused cause of any event in the cosmos, even though subsets of the cosmos claim to be the cause of some or all of the events in the cosmos.
- To which you replied, in your Post #66, with:
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I responded, focusing on your self-acknowledged inability to understand all uncertainty, and I posed a continuum between two propositions and “how certain you were of either proposition or any point between them.”
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If you’re absolutely certain that the cosmos makes sense, well and good.
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If you aren’t, then your uncertainty is part of “all the uncertainty” that puzzles you, no?
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That’s a pretty sharp dilemma, but again we are talking about a person’s ability to act.
I don’t have any problem, or I am absolutely certain, that I can act.
And maybe your hand is moving without you doing it.
Whether unconsciously or because a scientist is stimulating your muscles.
And the answer is that we have no reason to expect them to decay at the same time because that decay is not dependent on the previous conditions. It is truly random. The idea that quantum events happen as they do because of some previous conditions is called hidden variable theory and this has been disproven.
No. Nothing you have said has anything whatsoever to do with solipsism. It is almost as if you have confused solipsism with something else like determinism or materialism.
It is not. Most events don’t have a single cause but many, and the more complex the system the more causes there are. And there is not only the question of why you chose to snap your fingers but exactly when you carry it out and how fast and how hard. It is difficult to tell how much of that is determined and how much traces back the the first causes of quantum fluctuations.
And to the brain and nervous system I would add the human mind (by which I mean an entirely physical/natural self-organization of linguistic information). Not every decision to act engages the mind and its linguistic constructs, but many do.
Of course the Christian is likely to ask, what about the spirit? The evidence does not support the idea of anything non-physical operating the body like a puppet. So the only role I would expect such a thing to play is in making some claim of ownership of those actions for a non-physical extension to our existence.
There are indeed a number of experiences people have of uncontrolled muscle movements. But people who experience such things can tell the difference.
If it is truly random, why do particular radioactive nuclides have known half-lives?
What do you think “half-life” means?
What do you think truly random means?
Just because something is random doesn’t mean all possible results happen with equal probabilities. If you roll two dice the sum is seven more often than any other result. This doesn’t mean it isn’t random. Like so many other things, it is random within the constraint of some probability distribution.
However, some things which seem random can be determined if we have enough information and thus in that sense is not truly random but only apparently so. So when I say something is “truly random,” I mean we cannot calculate what will happen no matter how much we know of the conditions before hand – I do not mean all result are equally probable.
Radioactive decay has a Poisson probability distribution, and the half-life means that given a large number such nuclei, approximately half will have decayed by that time.