Maverick Philosopher

The Spook Stuff Chronicles

Danny Dennett meets Caspar the Friendly Ghost.

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In Dennett's case, de mortuis nil nisi bonum dicendum est has expired.

Idolatry, Desire, Buddha, Causation, and Malebranche

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Does causation have a moral dimension?

This upload was 'occasioned' (all puns intended) by my meeting with the amazing Steven Nemes yesterday at Joe's Real BBQ in charming old town Gilbert. Among the topics we discussed were idolatry, desire, and Buddhism.

He strode up, gave me a hug, and handed me three books he has recently published. A veritable writing machine, he's out-Fesering the phenomenal Ed Feser. And it's good stuff. I dove into his  Trinity and Incarnation this morning and will be discussing in future posts the shift in his views from orthodox or what he calls catholic (lower-case 'c') Christianity to a position reminiscent of Advaita Vedanta he calls "Qualified Monism."

From the Mail Bag: Occasionalism

A reader  e-mails:

Great blog, thanks for writing it!

Are you familiar with the writings of the Muslim philosopher Al-Ghazali and his idea now called "Occasionalism"?  It seems to me that the person of faith must give up his/her faith in cause and effect for the supernatural to make sense, and Al-Ghazali seems to be the only person to have ever understood this.

Thanks again for your blog!  It's fantastic!

Am I familiar with occasionalism?  Indeed I am and have given it quite a bit of thought.  I advocate a contemporary version of occasionalism in "Concurrentism or Occasionalism? American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, vol. LXX, no. 3, Summer 1996, pp. 339-359. This post will give the reader some idea of what occasionalism is.

Does the believer have to give up his faith in cause and effect for the supernatural to make sense?  No, at the very most he would have to abandon certain views of causation.  That there is causation in the natural world is undeniable, a 'Moorean fact,' a datum.  Anyone who denies this is a lunatic who belongs in the same 'bin' with eliminativists in the philosophy of mind.   

For if one were to deny causation, then one would in effect be denying that there is any difference between causal and non-causal event sequences.  But surely there is such a difference as all will admit including al-Ghazali and Malebranche.  I flip a switch (e1) and the light goes on (e2).  At the same time as e2 occurs the phone rings (e3).   E1-e2 is a causal event sequence. E1-e3 is not.  Philosophers are not in the business of denying such data as these.  Philosophical questions about causation first arise when we ask what it is for one event to cause another.  That there is causation is a pre-philosophical datum.  What causes what is a question for experience and science.  What causation is is a philosophical question. In particular, what distingusihes a causal from a non-causal event-sequence?  The questions and problems ramify out endlessly from here.  For example, if causation is a dyadic relation, and events are its relata, and if a relation cannot obtain between x and y unless both x and y exist, does this commit us to the tenseless existence of events and the rejection of presentism in the philosophy of time? And of course beyond all this lies the ultimate terminus of the philosopher's quest, the Uncaused.

Some theories of causation are inconsistent with theism, but not all are.  For example, if it is maintained that all causation is event-causation and that there cannot be be agent-causation, then classical theism is ruled out.  For the causa prima of classical theism, God, is obviously an agent-cause. And I should also point out that one can be a theist without holding an occasionalist theory of causation.  For example, once could be a concurrentist.  But this is not the place to go into these details.

If God Cannot Cause Himself, How Can He Know Himself?

This from a reader:

If we say God cannot create himself since this implies a contradiction (God existing prior to himself to act on himself), how can we say God does anything with regard to himself?

For instance, we say God knows himself. But how is this possible, seeing as God would need to first exist, in order to know himself? Knowledge is a relation in the mind to what is outside it. If I "know" a thing, I have the thing, the thing that is not me, in my mind. But if there is only simply God, how does he "have" himself in his mind?

An interesting question worth thinking about.

I grant that God cannot create himself. For if he creates himself then he causes himself to exist, and nothing can cause itself to exist. For a thing cannot enter into a causal relation unless it exists. So if God causes himself to exist, then his existence is logically, if not temporally, prior to his existence. And that, we agree, is impossible.

The main point is that the existence of a thing cannot be logically prior to its existence. (And if it cannot be logically prior, then it cannot be temporally prior either.) But the existence of a knower not only can but must be logically prior to its self-knowledge.  I cannot know myself unless I exist, but I can exist without knowing myself. In the finite case, then, it is clear that existence is logically prior to self-knowledge, and indeed other-knowledge as well.

Now God is omniscient and exists in all possible worlds.  So there is no possible situation in which he does not know himself or fails to know everything there is to know about himself. If we think of God as omnitemporal as opposed to eternal, then at every moment he enjoys full self-knowledge. At every moment, his existence and self-knowledge are simultaneous. But this is not a problem since there is no problem with God's existence being logically prior to his self-knowledge even if the former is not temporally prior to the latter.  We get the same result if God is eternal.

In sum, God's existence cannot be logically prior to God's existence as it would have to be if God creates himself. But God's existence can be logically prior to God's self-knowledge.

There is a second problem that the reader conflates with one I just discussed.   If God alone exists, how can God know himself if "Knowledge is a relation in the mind to what is outside it"?  This problem is solved by denying the assumption. Self-knowledge is NOT a relation to what is outside the mind.  I feel good right now, and I know it. The object of my knowledge is an internal state. God's self-knowledge can be said to be analogous to finite self-knowledge. 

Same Cause, Same Referent? More on the 'Same God' Problem

Tree and Scarecrow

Suppose I point out a certain tree in the distance to Dale and remark upon its strange shape.  I say, "That tree has a strange shape."  Dale responds, "That's not a tree; that's a scarecrow!"  Suppose we are looking at the same thing, a physical thing that exists in the external world independently of us.  But what I  take to be a tree, Dale takes to be a scarecrow.  Suppose further that the thing in the external world, whatever it is, is the salient cause of our having our respective visual experiences.  Are we referring to the same thing?  The cause of the visual experiences is the same, but are the referents of our demonstrative phrases the same?  Could we say that the referents are the same because the cause is the same? 

If this makes sense, then perhaps we can apply it to the 'same God?' problem.

'Same cause, same referent' implies that the cause of my tokening of 'That tree' is its referent. It implies that we can account for successful reference in terms of physical causation. The idea is that what makes my use of 'that tree' successfully refer to an existing tree, this particular tree, and not to anything else is the tree's causing of my use of the phrase, and if not the tree itself, then some physical events involving the tree.

But the notion of salience causes trouble for this causal account of reference.  What make a causal factor salient?  What makes it jump out from all the other causal factors to assume the status of 'the cause'?  (Salire, Latin, to jump.)  After all, there are many causal factors involved in any instance of causation.  Can we account for reference causally without surreptitiously presupposing irreducibly intentional and referential notions?  Successful reference picks out its object from others.  It gets to an existing object, and to the right object.  Causation might not be up to this task.  I shall argue that it is not.

We often in ordinary English speak of 'the cause' of some event, a myocardial infarction say, even though there are many contributing  factors: bad diet, lack of exercise, hypertension, cigarette smoking, high stress job, an episode of snow-shoveling. Which of these will be adjudged 'the cause' is context- and interest-relative. A physician who gets a kick-back from a pharmaceutical concern will point to hypertension, perhaps, so that he can prescribe anangiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitor, while the man's wife might say that it was the snow shoveling that did him in.  A liberal might say that the heart attack was caused by smoking.

Or suppose a short-circuit is cited as 'the cause' of a fire.  In terms of fundamental physics, the whole state of the world at time  determines its state at subsequent  times. At this level, a short-circuit and the power's being on are equally causal in respect of  a fire. Our saying that the short-circuit caused the fire, not the power's being on, simply advertises the fact that for us the latter is the normal and desired state of things, the state we have an interest in maintaining, and that the former is the opposite.  Desire and interest are of course intentional notions: to desire is to desire something; to be interested is to be interested in something.

What these examples show is that there is an ordinary-language use of 'cause' which is context-sensitive and interest-relative.  The ordinary notion of cause, then, resting as it does on our interests and desires, presupposes intentional notions. I cannot be interested in or desire something unless I am conscious of it. And I   cannot adjudge one state of affairs as normal and the other as  abnormal unless I have interests and desires. 

In the case of my tokening of 'that tree,' what justifies us in saying that it is the tree that causes the tokening as opposed the total set of causal conditions including sunlight, my corrective lenses, my not having ingested LSD, the absence of smoke and fog, the proper functioning of my visual cortex, etc.?  How is it that we select the tree as 'the cause'?  And what about this selecting?  It cannot be accounted for in terms of physical causation.  The tree does not select itself as salient cause.  We select it.  But then selecting is an intentional performance.  So intentionality, which underpins both mental and linguistic reference, comes back in through the back door.

The upshot is that an account of successful reference in terms of causation is viciously circular.  What makes 'that tree' as tokened by me here and now refer to the tree in front of me?  It cannot be the total cause of the tokening which includes all sorts of causal factors other than tree such as light and the absence of fog.  It must be the salient cause.  To select this salient cause from the among the various casual factors is to engage in an intentional performance. So reference presupposes intentionality and cannot be accounted for in non-intentional, purely causal, terms.  Otherwise you move in an explanatory cricle of embarrassingly short diameter.

The point could be put as follows: I must already (logically speaking) have achieved reference to the tree in a noncausal way if I am then to single out the tree as the physical cause of my successful mental and linguistic reference. 

Of course, I am not denying that various material and causal factors underpin mental and linguistic reference.  What I am maintaining is that these factors are useless when it comes to providing a noncircular account of reference.

Now if causation cannot account for reference, then it cannot account for sameness of reference.

Dale and I are both in perceptual states.  These two perceptual states have a common cause.  But this common cause cannot be what makes one of our references successful and the other unsuccessful.

Christ and Allah

The above questions are analogs of the 'Same God?' question. Suppose a Christian and a Muslim each has a mystical or religious experience of the same type, that of the Inner Locution.  Each cries out in prayer and each 'hears' the inner locution, "I am with you," and a deep peace descends upon him.  Each is thankful and expresses his thanks.     Suppose God exists and is the source of both of these locutions.  But while the Christian may interpret the source of his experience in Trinitarian terms, the Muslim will not.  Suppose the Christian takes the One who is answering to be a Person of the Trinity, Christ, while the Muslim takes it to be Allah who is answering.  In expressing his thankfulness, the  Christian prayerfully addresses Christ while the Muslim prayerfully addresses Allah. 

Are Christian and Muslim referring to one and the same divine being?  Yes, if the referent is the source/cause of the inner locutions.  But this common cause does not select as between Christ and Allah, and so the common cause does not suffice to establish that Christian and Muslim are referring to one and the same divine being.

Related articles

A Sketch of Armstrong's Naturalism and Why I am not a Naturalist

Georg Lichtenberg, Aphoristically, on the Freedom of the Will, with Pedantic Commentary

Free Speech and Islamic Terror: Locating the Bone of Contention

'Religion of Peace' is not a Harmless Platitude

There is No Provision in Islam for Mosque-State Separation

Is Natural Causation Existence-Conferring?

When I reported to Peter Lupu over Sunday breakfast that Hugh McCann denies that natural causation is existence-conferring, he demanded to know McCann's reasons.  He has three. I'll discuss one of them in this post, the third one McCann mentions. (Creation and the Sovereignty of God, p. 18)

The reason is essentially Humean.  Rather than quote McCann, I'll put the matter in my own rather more detailed way.

But first I should limn the broader context.    McCann's God is not a mere cosmic starter-upper.  He keeps the universe in existence moment to moment after its beginning to exist -- assuming it has a beginning --  such that, were God to cease his creative sustenance, the universe would vanish.  On such a scheme, God is needed  to explain the universe and its continuance in existence even if it always existed.  But now suppose natural causation is existence-conferring and the universe always existed.  Then the naturalist might argue as follows:  (i) the universe is just the sum-total of its states; (ii) each state is caused to exist by earlier states; (iii) there is no first state; ergo (iv) every state has an immanent causal explanation in terms of earlier states; (v) if every state has an explanation of its existence in terms of earlier states, then the universe has an immanent, naturalistic explanation of its existence; ergo, (vi) there is no need for a God to explain why the universe exists, and (vii) if there were a God of McCann's stripe, then the existence of the universe would be causally overdetermined.

The above reasoning rests on the assumption that natural causation is existence-conferring.  This is why McCann needs to show that natural causation is not existence-conferring.  Here is one reason, a Humean reason.

One monsoon season I observed a lightning bolt hit a palm tree which then exploded into flame.  A paradigm case of event causation.  Call the one event token Strike and the other Ignition.  One would naturally say that Strike caused Ignition.  To say such a thing is to refer to the salient cause without denyng the  contribution of such necessary causal conditions as the presence of atmospheric oxygen. 

But what exactly did I observe?  Did I observe, literally observe, an instance of causation?  Not clear!  What is clear is that that I observed two spatiotemporally contiguous events.  I also observed that Strike occurred slightly earlier than Ignition.  Thus I observed the temporal precedence of the cause over the effect.  But I did not observe the production (the bringing-into-existence) of the effect by the cause.  Thus I did not observe the cause conferring existence on the effect.  Strike and Ignition were nearby in space and time and Ignition followed Strike.  That I literally saw.  But I did not literally see any producing or causing-to-exist.  What I actually saw was consistent with there being no causal production of the effect by the cause.  Admittedly, it was also consistent with there being unobservable causal production.

The point is that conferral of existence by natural  causation is not empirically detectable.  One cannot see it, or hear it, etc.  Nor is there any such instrument as a causation-detector that one could use to detect what one's gross outer senses cannot detect.

Nothing changes if we add the third Humean condition, constant conjunction.  Some event sequences are causal and some are not.  How do we distinguish the causal from the noncausal?  Since we cannot empirically detect existence-conferral, we cannot say that causal event sequences are those that involve existence-conferral.  So the Humean invokes constant conjunction: in terms of our example, whenever an event of the Strike-type occurs it is spatiotemporally contiguously followed by an event of the Ignition type.  Accordingly, there is nothing more to causation on this empiricist approach than regular succession.  A causal event sequence is one that instantiates a regularity.  What makes a causal sequence causal is just its instantiation of a regularity.  But then, causation is not the bringing into existence of one event by another.  The two events are what Hume calls "distinct existences."  The events are out there in the world.  But the causal link is not out there in the world, or rather, it is not empirically detectable. 

I hope my friend Peter will agree to at least the following:  if we adopt a regularity theory of causation, then natural causation is not existence-conferring.  The regularity theory can be stated as follows:

RT. x (directly) causes y =df (i) x and y are spatiotemporally contiguous; (ii) x
occurs earlier than y; (iii) x and y are subsumed under event types X and Y that
are related by the de facto empirical generalization that all events of type X are followed by events of type Y.

If this is what causation is, it is is not existentially productive: the cause does not produce, bring about, bring into existence the effect.  On the contrary, the holding of the causal relation presupposes the existence of the cause-event and the effect-event.  It follows that causation as understood on (RT) merely orders already existent events and cannot account for the very existence of these events.  Since Peter is a B-theorist about time, he should be comfortable with the notion that the universe is a four-dimensional space-time manifold the states or events of which are all tenselessly existent logically in advance of any ordering by whatever the exact relation is that is the causal relation.

Peter should tell me whether he accepts this much.

Of course, the naturalist needn't be a Humean about causation.  But then the naturalist ought to tell us what theory of causation he accepts and how it can be pressed into service to explain the very existence of events.  My challenge to Peter: describe a theory of natural causation on which the cause event confers existence on the effect event, as opposed to merely ordering already existent events.  Nomological and counterfactual theories won't fill the bill (or satisfy the Bill.)

Here is another little puzzle for Peter to ruminate over.  Causation is presumably a relation.  But a relation cannot obtain unless all its relata exist.  So if x directly causes y, and causation is a relation, then both x and y exist.  But then x in causing y does not confer existence on y.  To the contrary, the obtaining of the causal relation presupposes the logically antecedent existence of y.

This little conundrum works with any theory of causation (regularity, nomological, counterfactual, etc.) so long as it is assumed that causation is a relation and that no relation can hold or obtain unless all its relata exist.  For example, suppose you say that x causes y iff had x not occurred, then y would not have occurred.  That presupposes the existence of both relata, ergo, etc.

For details and a much more rigorous development, see my article "The Hume-Edwards Objection to the Cosmological Argument," Journal of Philosophical Research, vol. XXII, 1997, pp. 425-443, and the second article below.

Related articles

Causation, Existence, and the Modified Leibniz Question

Could the Universe Cause Itself to Exist?

Causation, Existence, and the Modified Leibniz Question

Letting 'CCB' abbreviate 'concrete contingent beings,' we may formulate the modified Leibniz question as follows: Why are there any CCBs at all?  We have been discussing whether this question is a pseudo-question.  To be precise, we have been discussing whether it is a pseudo-question on the assumption that it does not collapse into one or more naturalistically tractable questions: questions that can be answered by natural science.

My thesis is that the modified Leibniz question is a genuine question that does not collapse into one or more naturalistically tractable questions.

I

Consider a universe that consists of a beginningless actually infinite series of contingent beings. Let us assume that each CCB in this universe is (deterministically)  caused by a preceding CCB.  The beginninglessness of the series insures that every CCB has a cause.  Since every CCB has a cause, each has a causal explanation in terms of an earlier one. And since each has a causal explanation, the whole lot of them does. (Some may smell the fallacy of composition in this last sentence, but let's assume arguendo that no fallacy has been committed.)  Accordingly, the totality of CCBs, the universe, has an explanation in virtue of each CCB's having an explanation. 

Some will say that on this scenario the modified Leibniz question has received a naturalistic  answer.  Why are there CCBs as as opposed to no CCBs?  Because each CCB is causally explained by other CCBs, and because explaining each of them amounts to explaining the whole lot of them.  And since the question has this naturalistic or universe-immanent answer, the specifically philiosophical form of the question, the question as Leibniz intended it, is a pseudo-question.

Others, like me, will insist that on the scenario sketched the question has not been answered.  We will insist that a legitimate question remains:  why is there this whole infinite system of contingent beings?  After all, it is contingent, just as its parts are contingent whether taken distributively or collectively.  There might not have been any concrete contingent beings at all, in which case there would not have been any CCBs to cause other CCBs.  And nothing is changed by the fact that the series of CCBs is actually  infinite in the past direction.  The fact that the series always existed does not show that it could not have failed to exist.  The temporal 'always' does not get the length of the modal 'necessarily.'  If time is infinite in both directions, and the universe exists at every time, it does not follow that the universe necessarily exists.  But if it contingently exists, then we are entitled to ask why it exists.

It is no answer to be told that each member of the universe, each CCB, is caused by others.  I may cheerfully grant that but still sensibly ask: But what accounts for the whole causal system in the first place?

Please note that a possible answer here is: nothing does.  The existence of the universe is a brute fact.  Nothing I have said entails a theistic answer. My point is simply  that the modified Leibniz question is a genuine question that cannot be answered by invoking causal relations within the universe.

II

There another line of attack open to me, one that focuses on the connection between causation and existence.  It seems to me that the naturalist or 'immanentist' must assume that if x causes y, then x causes y to exist.  The assumption, in other words, is that causation is existentially productive, that the cause brings the effect into existence.  But on what theory of causation that the naturalist is likely to accept is  causation productive?

This is a huge topic and I can only begin to explore it in this post.  Suppose our naturalist, good empiricist that he is, subscribes to a Humean or regularity theory of causation along the following lines:

RT. x (directly) causes y =df (i) x and y are spatiotemporally contiguous; (ii) x occurs earlier than y; (iii) x and y are subsumed under event types X and Y that are related by the de facto empirical generalization that all events of type X are followed by events of type Y.

 If this is what causation is, it is is not existentially productive: the cause does not produce, bring about, bring into existence the effect.  On the contrary, the holding of the causal relation presupposes the existence of the cause-event and the effect-event.  It follows that causation as understood on (RT) merely orders already existent events and cannot account for the very existence of these events. 

Of course, the naturalist needn't be a Humean about causation.  But then he ought to tell us what theory of causation he accepts and how it can be pressed into service to explain the very existence of CCBs.

For details and a much more rigorous development, see my article "The Hume-Edwards Objection to the Cosmological Argument," Journal of Philosophical Research, vol. XXII, 1997, pp. 425-443.  

Could the Universe Cause Itself to Exist?

I recently considered and rejected the suggestion that a universe with a metrically infinite past has the resources to explain its own existence.  But what if, as the cosmologists tell us, the universe is only finitely old? Could a variant of the first argument be nonetheless mounted?  Surprisingly, yes.  Unsurprisingly, it fails.

The following also fleshes out a version of what I called Cosmologism and listed recently as one possible type of response to the Leibniz question, 'Why is there something rather than nothing?'

BACKGROUND INFORMATION: Written in the summer of 1999. Submitted to The Royal Institute of Philosophy, 25 January 2000. The acceptance letter is dated 14 February 2000. Published in Philosophy 75 (2000), pp. 604-612. Copyright held by The Royal Society of Philosophy,  London.  Philosophy pagination is provided  in brackets, e.g., [P 604]. Endnote numbers are also given in brackets, e.g., [1].

ABSTRACT: This article responds to Quentin Smith's, "The Reason the Universe Exists is that it Caused Itself to Exist," Philosophy 74 (1999), 579-586. My rejoinder makes three main points. The first is that Smith's argument for a finitely old, but causally self-explanatory, universe fails from probative overkill: if sound, it also shows that all manner of paltry event-sequences are causally self-explanatory. The second point is that the refutation of Smith's  argument extends to Hume's argument for an infinitely old causally self-explanatory universe, as well as to Smith's two 'causal loop'  arguments. The problem with all four arguments is their reliance on Hume's principle that to explain the members of a collection is ipso facto to explain the collection. This principle succumbs to counterexamples. The third point is that, even if Hume's principle were true, Smith's argument could not succeed without the aid of a theory of causation according to which causation is production (causation of existence).

Memory, Memory Traces, and Causation

Passing a lady in the supermarket I catch a whiff of patchouli.  Her scent puts me in mind of hippy-trippy Pamela from the summer of '69.  An olfactory stimulus in the present causes a memory, also in the present, of an event long past, a tête-à-tête with a certain girl.  How ordinary, but how strange! Suddenly I am 'brought back' to the fantastic and far-off summer of '69.  Ah yes!  What is memory and how does it work?  How is it even possible? 

Let's start with the 'datanic' as I like to say:

1. There are (veridical) memories through which we gain epistemic access to the actual past, to events that really happened.  The above example is a case of episodic personal memory.  I remember an event in my personal past.  To be precise, I remember my having experienced an event in my personal past.  My having been born by Caesarean section is also an episode from my personal past, and I remember that that was my mode of exiting my mother's body; but I don't remember experiencing that transition.  So not every autobiographical memory is a personal episodic memory.  The latter is the only sort of memory I will be discussing in this post.  The sentence in boldface is the nonnegotiable starting point of our investigation. 

We now add a couple of more theoretical and less datanic propositions, ones which are not obvious, but are  plausible and accepted by many theorists:

2. Memory is a causal notion.  A mental image of a past event needn't be a memory of a past event.  So what makes a mental image of a past event a memory image?  Its causal history.  My present memory has a causal history that begins with the event in 1969 as I experienced it.

3. There is no action at a temporal distance.  There is no direct causation over a temporal gap.  There are no remote causes; every cause is a proximate cause.  A necessary ingredient of causation is spatiotemporal contiguity.  So while memory is a causal notion, my present memory of the '69 event is not directly caused by that event.  For how could an event that no longer exists directly cause, over a decades-long temporal gap, a memory event in the present?  That would seem to be something 'spooky,' a kind of magic. 

Each of these propositions lays strong claim to our acceptance.  But how can they all be true?  (1) and (2) taken together appear to entail the negation of (3).  How then can we accommodate them all?

Memory trace theories provide a means of accommodation.  Suppose there are memory traces or engrams engraved in some medium.  For materialists this medium will have to be the brain.  One way to think of a memory trace is as a brain modification that was caused at the time of the original experience, and that persists since that time.  So the encounter with Pam in '69 induced a change in my brain, left a trace there, a trace which has persisted since then.  When I passed the patchouli lady in the supermarket, the olfactory stimulus 'activated' the dormant memory trace.   This activation of the memory trace either is or causes the memory experience whose intentional object is the past event.  With the help of memory traces we get causation wthout action at a temporal distance. 

(Far out, man!)

The theory or theory-schema just outlined seems to allow us to uphold each of the above propositions. In particular, it seems to allow us to explain how a present memory of a past event can be caused by the past event without the past event having to jump the decades-long temporal gap between event remembered and memory.  The memory trace laid down in '69 by the original experience exists in the present and is activated in the present by the sensory stimulus.  Thus the temporal contiguity requirement is satisfied.  And if the medium in which the memory traces are stored is the brain or central nervous system, then the spatial contiguity requirement is also satisfied.

Question:  Could memory traces play merely causal roles?

Given (2) and (3), it seems that memory traces must be introduced as causal mediators between past and present.  But could they be just that?  Or must they also play a representational role?  Intuitively, it seems that nothing could be a memory trace unless it somehow represented the event of which it is a trace. If E isthe original experience, and T is E's trace, then it it seems we must say that T is of E in a two-fold sense corresponding to the difference between the subjective and objective genitive.  First, T is of E in that T is E's trace, the one that E caused. Second, T is of E in that T represents E. 

It seems obvious that a trace must represent.  In my example,the sensory stimulus (the whiff of patchouli) is not of or about the '69 event.  It merely activates the trace, rendering the dispositional occurrent.  But the memory is about the '69 event.  So the aboutness must reside in the trace.  The trace must represent the event that caused it  -- and no other past event.  The memory represents because the trace represents.  If the trace didn't represent anything, how could the memory -- which is merely the activation of the trace or an immediate causal consequence of the activation of the trace -- represent anything?  How a persisting brain modification -- however it is conceived, whether it is static or dynamic, whether localized or nonlocalized -- can represent anything is an important and vexing question but one I will discuss in a later post.

Right now I want to nail down the claim that memory traces cannot play a merely causal role, but must also bear the burden of representation.

Suppose a number of strangers visit me briefly.  I want to remember them,  but my power of memory is very weak and I know I will not remember them without the aid of some mnemonic device.  So I have my visitors leave calling cards.  They do so, except that they are all the same, and all blank (white).  These blank cards are their traces, one per visitor.   The visitors leave, but the cards remain behind as traces of their visit.  I store the cards in a drawer.  I 'activate' a card by pulling it out of storage and looking at it.  I am then reminded (at most) that I had a visitor, but not put in mind of any particular visitor such as Tom.  So even if the card in my hand was produced by Tom, that card is useless for the purpose of remembering Tom.  Likewise for every other card.  Each was produced by someone in particular and only by that person; but none of them 'bring back' any particular person. 

Bear in my mind that I don't directly remember any of my visitors.  My only memory access to them is via their traces, their calling cards.  For the visitors are long gone just like the '69 experience.  So the problem is not merely that I don't know which card is from which person; the problem is that I cannot even distinguish the persons.  

Had each visitor left a differently  colored card, that would not have helped.  Nor are matters helped if each visitor leaves a different sort of trace; a bottle cap, a spark plug, a lock of hair, a guitar pick.  Even if  Tom is a guitar player and leaves a guitar pick, that is unhelpful too  since I have no access to Tom except via his trace. 

So it doesn't matter whether my ten visitors leave ten tokens of the same type, or ten tokens each of a different type.  Either way I won't be able to remember them via the traces they leave behind.  Clearly, what I need from each visitor is an item that uniquely represents him or her -- as opposed to an item that is merely caused to be in my house by the visitor.  Suppose Tom left a unique guitar pick, the only one of its kind in existence.  That wouldn't help either since no inspection of that unique pick could reveal that it was of Tom rather than of Eric or Eric's cat.  Ditto if Tom has signed his card or his pick 'Tom Riff.'  That might be a phony name, or the name of him and his guitar -- doesn't B. B . King call his guitar 'Lucille'?

If I can remember that it was Tom who left the guitar pick, then of course I don't need the guitar pick to remember Tom by.  I simply remember Tom directly without the need for a trace.  On the other hand, if I do need a trace in order to remember long gone Tom, then that trace must have representational power: it cannot be merely something that plays a causal role. 

Traces theories have to avoid both circularity and vicious infinite regress.

Circularity.  To explain the phenomenon of memory, the trace theory posits the existence of memory traces.  But if the explanation in terms of traces ends up presupposing memory, then the theory is circular and worthless.  If what makes the guitar pick a trace of Tom is that I remember that Tom left it, then the explanation is circular.  Now consider the trace T in my brain which, when activated by stimulus S causes a memory M of past experience E.  M represents E because T represents E.  What makes T represent E? What makes the memory trace caused by the encounter with Pam in '69 represent Pam or my talking with her?  The answer cannot be that I remember the memory trace being caused by the encounter with Pam.  For that would be blatantly circular.  Besides, memory traces in the brain are not accessible to introspection.

Infinite Regress.  Our question is: what makes T represent E and nothing else?  To avoid circularity one might say this:  There is a trace T* which records the fact of E's production of T, and T represents E in virtue of T*.  But this leads to a  vicious infinite regress.   Suppose Sally leaves a photo of herself.  How do I know that the photo is of Sally and not of her sister Ally?  If you say that I directly remember Sally and thereby know that the photo is unambiguously of her, then you move in a circle.  You may as well just say that we remember directly and not via traces.  So, to hold onto the trace theory, one might say the following:  There is a photo of Sally and her photograph, side by side.  Inspection of  this photo reveals that that the first photo is of Sally.  But this leads to regress:  what makes the second photo a photo of the first?

Conclusion:  To avoid both circularity and infinite regress, memory traces must possess intrinsic representational power.  Their role cannot be merely causal.

A later post will then address the question whether memory traces could have intrinsic representational power.  If you are a regular reader of this blog you will be able to guess my answer.

REFERENCE:  John Heil, "Traces of Things Past," Philosophy of Science, vol. 45, no. 1 (March 1978), pp. 60-72.  My calling card example above is a reworking of Heil's tennis ball example.

 

Representation and Causation, with Some Help from Putnam

1. Materialism would be very attractive if only it could be made to work. Unfortunately, there are a number of phenomena for which it has no satisfactory explanation. One such is the phenomenon of
representation, whether mental or linguistic. Some mental states are of or about worldly individuals and states of affairs. This fact comes under the rubric 'Intentionality.'  How is this intentional directedness possible given materialist constraints? Following Chisholm and Searle, I subscribe to the primacy of the intentional over the linguistic. But let's approach the problem of representation from the side of linguistic reference. How is it that words and sentences mean things? How does language hook onto reality? In virtue of what does my tokening (in overt speech, in writing, or in any other way) of the English word-type 'cat' refer to cats? What makes 'cat' refer to cats rather than to pictures of cats or statues of cats or the meowing of cats?  This, in linguistic dress, is the question, What makes my thought of a cat, a thought of a cat?  And how is all this possible in the materialist's world?

2. The materialist has more than one option, but a very tempting one is to reduce reference to causation. The idea is roughly that the referent of a word is what causes its tokening. Thus 'cat'-tokenings refer to cats because cats cause these tokenings. Suppose I walk into your house and see a cat. I say: "I see you have cat." My use of 'cat'  on this occasion -- my tokening of the word-type -- refers to cats because the critter in front of me causes my 'cat'-tokening.  That's the idea.

3. Unfortunately, this is only a crude gesture in the direction of a theory. For it is obvious, as Hilary Putnam points out (Renewing Philosophy, Harveard UP, 1992,p. 37), that pictures of cats cause 'cat'-tokenings, but   pictures of cats are not cats. Cats are typically furry and cover their feces. Pictures, however, are rarely furry and never cover their (nonexistent) feces. Yet I might say, seeing a picture of a cat over your fireplace, "I see you like cats." In that sentence, 'cat' is used to refer to cats even though what caused my 'cat'-tokening was not a cat but a non-cat, namely, a picture of a cat.

Indeed, practically anything can cause a 'cat'-tokening: cat feces, cat hair, cat caterwauling. Suppose I see Ann Coulter engaged in a 'cat-fight' with Susan Estrich on one of the shout shows. I say, "They are fighting like cats." Nota Bene: my use of 'cat' in this sentence is literal, but it is not caused by a cat! (My example, not Putnam's).

4. Our problem is this: what determines the reference of a word like 'cat'? What makes this bit of language represent something extralinguistic? 'Cat' is a linguistic item; a cat is not. (French   'philosophers' take note.) In virtue of what does the former target the latter? If both a cat and a pile of cat scat can cause a 'cat'-tokening, then the causal theory of reference is worthless unless it can exclude these extraneous (excremental?) cases.

The problem is that 'cat' refers to something quite specific, cats, whereas 'cat'-tokenings can be caused by practically anything. To solve this problem, a notion of causation must be invoked that is also quite selective. It turns out, however, that this selective notion of  causation presupposes intentionality, and so cannot be used in a noncircular account of intentionality. Let me explain.

4. Context-Sensitive versus Context-Independent Concepts of Causation. We often in ordinary English speak of 'the cause' of some event, a myocardial infarction say, even though there are many contributing  factors: bad diet, lack of exercise, hypertension, cigarette smoking, high stress job, an episode of snow-shoveling. Which of these will be adjudged 'the cause' is context- and interest-relative. A physician who gets a kick-back from a pharmaceutical concern will point to hypertension, perhaps, so that he can prescribe a massive dose of angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitor, while the man's wife might say that it was the snow shoveling that did him in.

To take a more extreme example, suppose a man dies in a fire while in bed. The salient cause might be determined to be smoking in bed. No one will say that the flammability of the bedsheets and other room
furnishings is the cause of the man's incineration. Nevertheless, had the room and its furnishings not been flammable, the fire would not have occurred! The flammability is not merely a logical, but also a   causal, condition of the fire. It is part of the total cause, but no one will consider it salient. The word is from the Latin salire to leap, whence our word 'sally' as when one sallies forth to do battle at a
chess tournament, say.   A salient cause, then, is one that jumps out at you,  grabbing you by your epistemic shorthairs as it were, as opposed to being a mere background condition.

Putnam cites the example of the pressure cooker that exploded (p. 48).  No one will say that it was a lack of holes in the pressure cooker's vessel that caused the explosion. A stuck safety valve caused the   explosion. Nevertheless, had the vessel been perforated, the contraption would not have exploded!

What these examples show is that there is an ordinary-language use of 'cause' which is context-sensitive and interest-relative and (if I may) point-of-view-ish. A wholly objective view of nature, a Nagelian view from nowhere, would not be able to discriminate the salient from the nonsalient in matters causal. In terms of fundamental physics, the whole state of the world at time t determines its state at subsequent  times. At this level, a short-circuit and the current's being on are equally causal in respect of the effect of a fire. Our saying that the short-circuit caused the fire, not the current's being on, simply advertises the fact that for us the latter is the normal and desired state of things, the state we have an interest in maintaining, and that the former is the opposite.

The ordinary notion of cause, then, resting as it does on our interests and desires, presupposes intentional notions. I cannot be interested in or desire something unless I am conscious of it. And I   cannot adjudge one state of affairs as normal and the other as  abnormal unless I have interests and desires.

5. Recall what the problem was. The materialist needs to explain reference in physicalist terms. He thinks to do so by invoking physical causation. The idea is that the referents of a word W cause W-tokenings. The reference of a word is determined by the causal influence of the word's referents. So it must be cats, and not  pictures of cats, or the past behavior or English speakers that causes  'cat'-tokenings. But surely the past behavior of English speakers is part of the total cause of present 'cat'-tokenings. (See Putnam, pp. 48-49.) 'Cat' does not refer to this behavior, however. To exclude the   behavior as non-salient requires use of the ordinary interest-relative notion of causation. But this notion, we have seen, presupposes intentionality.

6. The upshot is that the above causal account of representation --  which is close to a theory proposed by Jerry Fodor -- is viciously circular: it presupposes the very notion that it is supposed to be   reductively accounting for, namely, intentionality.

Causal Interaction: A Problem for the Materialist Too!

Ed Feser has been giving Paul Churchland a well-deserved drubbing over at his blog and I should like to join in on the fun, at least in the in the first main paragraph of this post.

One of the standard objections to substance dualism in the philosophy of mind is that the substance dualist cannot account for mind-body and body-mind causal interaction. I have already quoted Dennett and Searle to this effect. Here is Paul M. Churchland repeating for the umpteenth time a standard piece of materialist boilerplate:

How is this utterly insubstantial 'thinking substance' to have any influence on ponderous matter? How can two such different things be in any sort of causal contact? (Matter and Consciousness, p. 9)

 

Churchland apparently thinks that a substance, to be 'substantial,' must be material. Churchland thereby betrays his inability to conceive of (which is not the same as to imagine) an immaterial substance.  Note that 'immaterial substance'  is not an oxymoron like 'immaterial matter.' Feser in his series of posts shows just how ignorant Churchland is of the history of philosophy, so it is no surprise that he cannot wrap his eliminativist head around the concept of substance as used by Descartes et al.   But let that pass. The issue for now is simply this: How can two things belonging to radically disjoint ontological categories be in causal contact? But here again, Churchland seems to be laboring under a false assumption, namely, that causation must involve contact between cause and effect. But why should we think that this 'billiards ball' model of causation fits every type of causation? Why must we think of causation as itself a physical process whereby a physical magnitude such as energy is transferred from one physical object to another? On regularity and  counterfactual theories of causation there is no difficulty in principle with the notion of a causal relation obtaining between two events that do not make physical contact.

Idolatry, Desire, Buddha, Causation, and Malebranche

What is idolatry? I suggest that the essence of idolatry lies in the illicit absolutizing of the relative. A finite good becomes an idol when it is treated as if it were an infinite good, i.e., one capable of satisfying our infinite desire. But is our desire infinite? That our desire is infinite is shown by the fact that it is never satisfied by any finite object or series of finite objects. Not even an infinite series of finite objects could satisfy it since what we really want is not an endless series of finite satisfactions -- say a different black-eyed virgin every night as in popular Islam's depiction of paradise — but a satisfaction in which one could finally rest. "Our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee." (Augustine) What we really want, though we don't know it, is the absolute good which is goodness itself, namely God. This idea is common to Plato, Augustine, Malebranche, and Simone Weil.

Hume: Occasionalism Without God?

I wonder if I can get any of my esteemed readers to swallow the following suggestion. Ten years or so ago it came into my head that Hume's analysis of causation in terms of (i) temporal precedence, (ii) spatiotemporal contiguity, and (iii) constant conjunction can be reasonably viewed as occasionalism without God.

Ducasse on the Nature and Observability of the Causal Relation

0. Herewith, some interpretative notes on Curt Ducasse, "On the Nature and Observability of the Causal Relation," in Causation, eds. Sosa and Tooley, Oxford 1993, pp. 125-136.

 

1. Assuming that causality is a relation (not entirely obvious!), the question arises as to what sorts of entity can serve as its relata. Following Schopenhauer, whom he cites, Curt Ducasse holds that in strict propriety only events can be causes and effects. An event is either a change or an absence of a change. Thus a tree's losing its leaves is an event, but a tree is not. In strict propriety, it makes no sense to say that Bill was killed by a mountain lion. One has to say something like: Bill was killed by the attack of a mountain lion. In the attack the lion is the agent as Bill is the patient, but the latter is no more the effect than the former is the cause. The cause is the lion's attack, the effect is Bill's death. Some theorists distinguish between agent-causation and event-causation, but for Ducasse, there is no such thing as agent-causation: causation just is event-causation.

A Hylomorphic Solution to the Interaction Problem?

Interactionist substance dualism in the philosophy of mind is supposed to face a devastating objection, the interaction objection. In the first part of this post I will present this objection in its traditional form and suggest that it is not all that serious. In the second part, however, I take the objection seriously and consider whether Aristotelian- Thomistic hylomorphism has the resources to counter it.