I’ve defended the legitimacy of philosophy in this age of empirical thought and will continue to do so but I admit to being less than impressed with the state of philosophical thought about causation. It strikes me as being localized in the way of pre-modern physics and pre-modern geometry. Localized physics (such as special relativity) and localized geometry (such as Euclidean geometry as used in pre-modern physics) has its valid applications in human thought, including analysis of our universe, but most events and states of being in the universe can’t be understood by billiard ball physics. And that’s the comparison which is appropriate for the first stages of my efforts to understand causation from a more ‘modern’ viewpoint.
We are ourselves organisms and not bodies controlled by some sort of entity, mind or soul or free-will or whatever, which is focused at a point. Nor are we even controlled in any direct way by a highly focused region of the human brain. Many philosophical thoughts and literary images of human nature seem to fall under the illusion that our true selves are autonomous agents which exist in extension-free points, perhaps in our brains. In fact, our selves are distributed over our entire body and over our immediate environments through our relationships with other human beings, non-human beings, things, weather, and so forth. Certainly, the prefrontal lobes of our brains are more ‘us’ in some real sense than our little toe is but I’m advocating a model similar to a field in physics in which that little toe has a certain ‘intensity of us-ness’ but the prefrontal lobe has a greater intensity. Neuroscientists often speak this way but typically as if this ‘us-ness’ is purely a mental construction rather than being reflective of relationships to an objective external world.
If a human mind can encapsulate the world — as I’ve claimed in my writings, then that man will begin to see causation in the context of that more complex world. Those relationships and strange entities found by modern physics in the realm of the very small and the very large are far richer than premodern empirical knowledge would indicate. Modern empirical knowledge hints of possibilities which seem the stuff of dreams to some and of nightmares to others.
Are these larger-scale and smaller-scale realms of being relevant to a man qua man? Do strange forms of physical interaction and strange relationships between strange entities mean anything to us in making sense of our lives? Do they mean anything in our moral lives? Or should we stick to forms of reasoning which correspond roughly to physics and mathematics as understood at the time of Aristotle? And that’s the problem. Metaphysical reasoning, including the analysis of causation, concerns understanding of being in its totality. The aspects of being described by physics and mathematics are but part of that totality but there must be a coherence. Modern physics and modern mathematics doesn’t fit well inside a totality which was originally constructed with thoughts which included premodern physics and premodern mathematics.
The strangeness of quantum mechanics isn’t just grist for our mental mills, it’s the foundation of stability in physical being. The modern gravitational theories and the cosmological theories they spawned are also not just grist for our mental mills, they indicate a surprising sort of unity of physical being in this universe. The modern expansion of the very concept of what mathematics is also isn’t just grist for our mental mills, but rather hints of the ever broader horizons of reason which are found in Creation when human thinkers allow themselves to respond wholeheartedly to such hints.
We need new languages and new concepts for our understanding of causation in Creation and for the moral discourse which can flow from an enriched understanding of causation. We need words and phrases and images which speak of man as a being spread out over time and space, a morally coherent agent but not one tightly focused and able to make free-will decisions independent of his environment, the causative factors which work upon his being or even the effects which will come from his acts.
We need to see ourselves, as causative agents and objects, in terms of interfaces to multi-dimensional regions of our world. We need to think in terms of many to one or many to many or even one to many. This doesn’t mean we should replace a failed moral calculus with a moral tensor calculus. It does mean that we should recognize that as creatures born into this universe, creatures who develop in this universe, creatures with minds which can — at least in principle — encapsulate this world, our properties and our relationships with other creatures will be amongst the richer and more complex possibilities of this universe.
Creative thinkers, novelists as well as philosophers and scientists, need to soak themselves in the new views of physical reality that new words and concepts might emerge in strange images and metaphors which will be stumbling blocks to all those with rigid ways of thought. I’m trying to do this myself, though my middle-aged brain is responding somewhat slowly to relearning the knowledge I’d learned poorly as an unmotivated math major in college and to learning from scratch what was not covered before I’d dropped out of the ‘higher’ track in math and out of physics entirely. Yet, it’s having some effect upon my thoughts.
Understanding the world comes not when we use some sort of preformed entity, material or immaterial, to process data gathered from the sands of Africa or the realms of deep-space. Understanding the world comes when we shape our minds in response to that data, making it ours in the deepest sense. That is, we begin to encapsulate those parts of our world which we perceive or can speculatively perceive.