Is there cause and effect? I said no, and was accused of committing a logical fallacy.
In fact, nothing happens in reality; the only stuff that happens is "in my head." And nothing can be proved about any relation between that "stuff" and the natural world that exists outside of my mind.
I have no clue about what you are trying to say. If you are trying to imply that I don't think there is an objective reality you are wrong.
And so the thought has occurred to me that LeGrande is having a field day, reprising Hegel's original divertissement, his original "party trick," which he laid out in Phaenomonologie: There is no cause and effect; there is only the process of thesis and antithesis, culminating in a transitory "synthesis," which becomes the next "thesis," inviting an "antithesis" in the next iteration of the process, etc., ad infinitum. It's a totally pointless exercise, because it leads no where: These are operations in the human mind exclusively; they do not refer to — even deny — anything going on in the natural world. Indeed, the entire point of the exercise is to divorce ones self from the natural, to curl back into the pleasant experiences of a dreamer, who never has to measure up to anything outside the realm of his own desires. In the end, Hegel's greatest desire was arguably the desire for self-divinization....
I believe this is a case of projection, you see a pattern and posit GOD is the cause. In fact any question or situation has the same answer to you, God is the cause.
As I implied in my original post, ancients attributed to God what they didn't understand, which led to animal sacrifice and the eventual sacrifice of GOD himself. You seem to attribute everything to God too, is there a difference between the ancients and you?
Believing in cause and effect leads to a dark and dangerous abyss.
Not accused, you are committing a logical fallacy. As you posted, I asked whether if a cat were to spontaneously form for no reason out of nothing, would that be of no cause or effect. Your response? "Yes that would be correct. Everything comes from waves of nothing." Doesn't get more fallacious than that.
"As I implied in my original post, ancients attributed to God what they didn't understand, which led to animal sacrifice and the eventual sacrifice of GOD himself."
Again, this begs the question. You have no idea what 'ancients' understood or attributed. You simply make the assertion because you have already begged the question.
Yeah. And the problem between you and me is you not only do not believe in God. You also do not believe in cause and effect — there is only "action and reaction" — which sounds like a total semantic quibble to me. (What is the effective difference between cause and effect and action–reaction?) Plus it appears to be your position that "patterns" that we think we recognize in Nature are simple constructions, "projections," of our own private minds, and not indicative in any way shape or form of universal processes occurring in Nature.
If the world is structured by universal law, by a "logos," an "arche," then we would expect to see "patterning behavior" at all scales. And I do believe this is what we do see.
Your quibble about cause and effect brings to mind a very great skeptic, David Hume (1711–1776), a Scot philosopher of the British Empiricist school, "...one of the greatest figures of the Enlightenment and possibly the most important of all British philosophers."
Hume paid very close attention to the problem of cause and effect. He wrote that "even after we have experience of the operations of cause and effect, our conclusions from that experience are not founded on reasoning, or any process of understanding." He implied that we never "see" causes, only "effects." We cannot observe what is going on at the effective nexus between them. What we see is the effect; and from the effect, we then infer the cause. And logically, this is the best we can do, because
...nature has kept us at a great distance from all her secrets, and has afforded us knowledge of a few superficial qualities of objects; while she conceals from us those powers and principles on which the influence of those objects entirely depends.That is, the immaterial, intangible, non-physical laws of nature are never direct observables. We "see them" only in their effects, as it were.
The skeptic Hume suggests the following is the best we can do with this situation:
I have found that such an object has always been attended with such an effect, and I foresee that other objects, which are in appearance similar, will be attended with similar effects.... From causes which appear similar we expect similar effects....Maybe! But then again,
[And yet] the particular powers, by which all natural operations are performed, never appear to the senses; nor is it reasonable to conclude, merely because one event in one instance precedes another, that therefore one is the cause, the other the effect. Their conjunction may be arbitrary and casual....
Suppose again that [the observer] has acquired more experience, and has lived so long in the world as to have observed familiar objects or events to be constantly conjoined together [i.e., patterning behavior]; what is the consequence of this experience? He immediately infers the existence of one object from the appearance [perception] of the other. Yet he has not, by all his experience, acquired any idea or knowledge of the secret power by which one object produces the other; nor is it, by any process of reasoning, he is engaged to draw this inference. But still he finds himself determined to draw it: And though he should be convinced that his understanding has no part in the operation, he would nevertheless continue in the same course of thinking. There is some other principle which determines him to form such a conclusion.At ths point, dear LeGrande, perhaps you are patting yourself on the back to find such an esteemed intellect as David Hume backing you up on your insight — that cause and effect is a fiction. But Hume never said that. What he was saying is that the linkage of cause and effect is not something discoverable by direct observation and/or rational analysis.
This principle is Custom or Habit. For whenever the repetition of any particular act or operation produces a propensity to renew the same act or operation, without being impelled by any reasoning or process of the understanding, we always say that this propensity is the effect of Custom. By employing that word, we pretend not to have given the ultimate reason of such a propensity. We only point out a principle of human nature, which is universally acknowledged, and which is well known by its effects. Perhaps we can push our enquiries no farther, or pretend to give the cause of this cause; but must rest contented with it as the ultimate principle, which we can assign, of all our conclusions from experience....
Custom, then, is the great guide of human life. It is that principle alone which renders our experience useful to us, and makes us expect, for the future, a similar train of events with those which have appeared in the past. Without the influence of custom, we should be entirely ignorant of every matter of fact beyond what is immediately present to the memory and senses....
But your preferred theory of action–reaction suffers from precisely the same difficulty. You may have "changed the language," but you did not thereby "change the problem."
The other major thing you may have missed is that Hume was saying that the search for the truth of reality is a common, universally human activity, unfolding from the very beginning of human historical records, unto now and presumably beyond the here and now.
Because Ptolemy [geocentric model] didn't get everything right with his theory, didn't mean he got nothing right. He did the best he could — and superbly, it seems to me — given the primitive observational tools he had at hand, in his day.
We celebrate Ptolemy, not for what he got wrong, but for what he definitely got right: That the universe is ultimately knowable by the human mind.
To conclude these remarks, IMHO the advancement of "science," knowledge, episteme, is not an individual project of this or that man, no matter how brilliant; ultimately, it is a social project that, at the end of the day, has to pass muster with the accumulated experience and knowledge of generations of human observers going back to Day One. (So to speak.)
For Hume quite clearly declares: "...causes and effects are discoverable, not by reason, but by experience."
With that in mind, I reprise the following from your last:
As I implied in my original post, ancients attributed to God what they didn't understand, which led to animal sacrifice and the eventual sacrifice of GOD himself. You seem to attribute everything to God too, is there a difference between the ancients and you?My answer is: YES, and NO. I am like the "ancients" (not to mention the "primitives" before them on the time line) in that I express that part of my human nature which "primes" me to acknowledge the presence of the divine in my life and the the world of nature, a "god" (or gods) which draws the human person into relationship with a world beyond himself, whereby the phenomena of the natural world find their fullest explication.
But you want to say folks of such imagination are (evidently) simply barbarous, superstitious savages, as compared with the likes of the splendor modeled by LeGrande, who is a "skeptic," and as already suggested, an anoiac who (seemingly) in his own estimation always knows better than the "stupid" people....
Oh, good night to all! And thank you for writing, LeGrande!
p.s.: All Hume quotes above from An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 1748.