I'm curious what people do think about cause and effect. Of course it happens to us constantly -- I touch a certain key on my keyboard and the corresponding letter appears on my monitor.
Still, it seems magic. How does the movement of my finger muscle tell the key what to do, and which interrupt to send, and so on. We speak of forces and so on, but they seem arbitrary, just things that always happen so we expect them to happen and would be sorely upset if (and when) they don't.
If you think about what is going on at the nuclear level when I touch a key, you have all these electrons whizzing about the atoms near the surface of the key, generating a wall of negative electric charge, that repels the wall of similar electric charge on my fingers. It is not causation at all, but just the fact that the odds are overwhelming that the electrons will be there -- they might have gone elsewhere and my finger penetrate into the key and not do the work intended. This doesn't happen because it is hugely unlikely, not because there is real cause. There is no incantation I can do either.
So what we see as deterministic causation is actually an application of one of the laws of probability -- the one called "the law of large numbers." Causation not real but just an illusion emerging from the fact that in our macro world things are often overwhelmingly likely??
Of course the electrons doing their repulsion thing to each other can be seen as a sort of caused thing too, and we can talk about it in terms of forces, but what causes two electrons to always repel each other with a certain force?
Obviously I'm out of my depth here. I'm drowning. Help!
Still, it seems magic. How does the movement of my finger muscle tell the key what to do, and which interrupt to send, and so on. We speak of forces and so on, but they seem arbitrary, just things that always happen so we expect them to happen and would be sorely upset if (and when) they don't.
If you think about what is going on at the nuclear level when I touch a key, you have all these electrons whizzing about the atoms near the surface of the key, generating a wall of negative electric charge, that repels the wall of similar electric charge on my fingers. It is not causation at all, but just the fact that the odds are overwhelming that the electrons will be there -- they might have gone elsewhere and my finger penetrate into the key and not do the work intended. This doesn't happen because it is hugely unlikely, not because there is real cause. There is no incantation I can do either.
So what we see as deterministic causation is actually an application of one of the laws of probability -- the one called "the law of large numbers." Causation not real but just an illusion emerging from the fact that in our macro world things are often overwhelmingly likely??
Of course the electrons doing their repulsion thing to each other can be seen as a sort of caused thing too, and we can talk about it in terms of forces, but what causes two electrons to always repel each other with a certain force?
Obviously I'm out of my depth here. I'm drowning. Help!
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