Ginkgo wrote: ↑Fri Jul 31, 2020 1:50 am
BTW Can you please stop quote mining it's getting very tiresome?
I can. But if I do, our messages get progressively longer, and longer and longer...and that's even more tiresome. I would prefer that we really on the little arrow in blue beside our names, which instantly takes us back to the totality of the original message.
I make no attempt to distort your words here. I just tell you what I'm understanding as essential, and clip in order to keep things within reasonable length. Not everything people write is under contest, so I try to keep to those things I mean to strongly affirm or to question, and leave the uncontroversial bits behind.
So, for example, in this response I would not respond to "I think we're talking about two different things," because that's plausible, and because I don't intend to question it. But I would clip in the below, because I have some further questions about it.
Fair enough?
As I said before, causes and effects are so intertwined that it is impossible to trace causality on a linear timeline back to a first cause.
This is the error of thinking epistemology defines ontology, or limits logic. It doesn't.
I concede that we don't know the precise causes for every effect. But that we don't know the precise causes does not even cast a shadow of doubt on the dynamic of cause-and-effect itself. If I don't know what causes the Sun to rise in the morning, that does not remotely imply the sun will not rise in the morning, or that the effect I see (the Sun appearing to "rise") has no cause, or must be assumed to have no cause until I know precisely what it is. Rather, a rational assumption is that it HAS a cause, but one I don't yet understand -- the fundamental supposition of all science, actually.
So cause-and-effect remains real. And we don't need to know precisely
which causes produce
which effects to say so. All we have to know is that the rational assumption is a cause could be found one day, for there will be one.
Here is where the mathematics help us out. Maths, as you know, use symbols to represent actual, empirical quantities. The great thing about using the number "3" for example, is that you don't have to know "three whats?" before you can use it: it works equally precisely for 3 goats, 3 aqualungs, 3 armchairs, 3 planetoids or 3 atomic particles. Mathematics provide universal placeholders for actual things.
So we can model causality mathematically, just as I have suggested you do: count backwards to infinity. That's what it takes to model a chain of infinitely regressing causes. And you'll find it's not just long, it's impossible. So, without knowing precise causes-and-effects, we can decisively prove that ANY chain of causes and effects will not be possible as a chain of infinite length.
Thus, the world is not the product of an infinite chain of causes.
QED.