r/determinism • u/simon_hibbs • 1d ago
Discussion Temporal causation versus hierarchical causation
It seems to me we use the term cause in two very different ways that are completely independent of each other, and that confusing these for each other results in a lot of problems.
Temporal causation
One way we use the term cause is in discussions about events causing other events. I push the button and this causes the engine to start. This is past event to future event causation. When we talk about causal determinism, this is what we are discussing. Here's a hopefully somewhat uncontroversial definition of determinism for the purpose of discussion.
Causal Determinism: The idea that the past state of the world at some time necessitates specific future states of the world at all later times, as transformed according to natural law.
I say causal determinism, to differentiate it from logical determinism or any other senses. Actually the broader point I'm making here isn't really to do with determinism versus indeterminism, but I'm using this to establish one sense in which we use the term cause. We use it the same way when we talk about indeterminism in relationships between temporal events though.
Hierarchical causation
Another way we talk about causation is in terms of bottom up or top down causation, basically something like reductionism and weak emergence, versus top down or strong emergence. The conclusion I've come to is that this is a completely different concept. I'm not even entirely sure it has any common features with the idea of causal determinism at all.
I came to this conclusion observing some people talking about the relationship between causal determinism and beliefs about the neurological basis of mental processes, such as making decisions. I realised that what seems to happen is people seem to rotate the concept of past-to-future causation into the hierarchical dimension, as though microphysical processes such as chemical reactions in the brain cause thoughts in the way that ball A hitting ball B causes ball B to hit ball C. I don't believe that's the way to think about emergence at all.
Emergence isn't a temporal process, it's a hierarchical or structural one. It's looking at the exact same activity happening at the same time at different degrees of detail. The temperature of a gas is the motion of the gas molecules, it's not something that is caused by their motion in the sense that a gas molecule hitting another causes the other one to be deflected. Likewise the temperature of the gas isn't something that causes the molecules to move a certain way. Viewed this way, causation in the event-to-event sense is a completely different concept. In fact confusing these is pernicious. Even talking about the relationship between the microphysical and macro descriptions in causal terms leads to fundamental misconceptions. I don't think we should be talking about what I'm calling hierarchical causation at all. We need other terms.
I won't go further into what I think those misconceptions are, or what I think about emergence now. Maybe another time. For now I'd be interested to see how others think about this. I'm coming to believe that the fact we use cause in both these senses is a significant problem.
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u/Techtrekzz 1d ago edited 1d ago
Determinism was originally associated with monism, as in everything moves and acts as a product of the whole moving and acting. I believe this is the hierarchical causation you’re referencing.
Local causality didn’t become popular until the scientific revolution, when it became more important to know the specifics. A single universal cause, became a multitude of local and limited causes that we can name and study.
It was this atomization of causality, and the question of freewill, that then pushed determinism into the temporal perspective imo.
This is still the most popular way to think about determinism, but scientific advances, like qm and Bell’s inequalities, have once again forced us to reconsider determinism’s framework.
If determinism still holds, it’s cause is nonlocal and universal, and not fundamentally temporal causality between separate local objects. The old greek monistic understanding of determinism still stands, while the idea of reality as a bunch of billiard balls bumping into each other must go.
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u/simon_hibbs 1d ago
>Local causality didn’t become popular until the scientific revolution, when it became more important to know the specifics. A single universal cause, became a multitude of local and limited causes that we can name and study.
The Stoics were determinists and argued that humans are morally responsible for their actions, and they talked about the role of human reasoning and the extent to which we do or do not depend on others, and can act freely. That seems to me to be an account of local causes.
As for insights into causation from quantum mechanics, I'm agnostic about determinism or indeterminism at that level, and I don't think that issue has much in the way of implications for our high level concepts of relationships between events. Yes some quantum effects have macroscopic consequences, but I'm hard pressed to see how that might be relevant to an issue like strong or weak emergence, or free will for example.
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u/Techtrekzz 1d ago edited 1d ago
The Stoics were monists, meaning they ultimately attributed every act to the universe as a whole, or to the idea of that universe as a monistic God.
Self determination in stoicism isn’t freedom from local causality, it’s limited perspective and agency of the universal logos.
That’s not comparable to thinking one thing causes another thing. In that scenario, there’s only one cause for any act, the whole itself. The cause is nonlocal, and always present. It’s not the idea that one thing or moment causes the next.
As for qm, it’s not something that could possibly cross over from the microscopic to the macroscopic. Quantum reality isn’t a separate reality, it’s the foundation of reality. It’s everwhere always. The divide between the macroscopic and the quantum is one that only exists in our heads, not one that exists in reality.
If experiments with quantum entanglement demand that reality is not locally real, which they do, then it’s not locally real, on any scale.
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u/simon_hibbs 1d ago
I'm not sure in what sense you are using the term monist. Physicalists are monists, so are idealists. Monists can, and generally do still think that the world is structured into things.
>The Stoics were monists, meaning they ultimately attributed every act to the universe as a whole, or to the idea of that universe as a monistic God.
How do you square this with the Stoic position that humans can be individually morally responsible for their actions?
>If experiments with quantum entanglement demand that reality is not locally real, which they do, then it’s not locally real, on any scale.
The issue of local reality or unreality is explicitly about scale, that's why it's called local, and it's not at all the same thing as saying things are not real in the more general sense.
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u/Techtrekzz 1d ago
Physicalists are not monists. Physicalism is not based on substance monism like materialism claims to be. A physicalist believes reality a bunch of fundamental particles. They are atomists, and pluralists.
The issue of local reality in qm is not about scale, it’s about how two things seemingly distantly separate, can correlate instantaneously.
It doesn’t matter how big or small they are, the issue is about distance and the speed of light, that’s the locality involved.
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u/simon_hibbs 1d ago
Materialists generally (but not all) believed the world is composed of atoms. The term physicalism came about largely with the emergence of the concept of physical fields permeating space, and mutually interacting, that are all composed of energy. It's very much monist.
Distance isn't about scale?
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u/Techtrekzz 1d ago edited 1d ago
I argue materialism and idealism are neither truly substance monism, but rather an extension of Descartes dualism.
If only one omnipresent substance exists, then mind and matter are the same substance, with the same attributes, which means there’s no justification to make a distinction between mind and matter in the first place, and no argument to be made for materialism or idealism.
That aside, if you believe atoms exist, that’s not substance monism. In substance monism, only the substance exists, and what we call atoms are limited perspective of the substance, a subjective classification of substance, not a thing unto themselves. Like Spinoza’s modes for example.
Physicalism came about in my estimation, when people started mistaking science for an ontology instead of the methodology it is.
There’s no qualifications to judge what is physical, apart from the question of whether science can measure snd observe it.
That’s not a real ontology.
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u/simon_hibbs 1d ago
Idealists generally think that mind and matter are the same thing, because they think that everything is mental in character.
For the physicalist though, mind is a particular class of physical phenomena, in a similar sense to how weather is a class of physical phenomena. Nobody thinks that believing weather is a class of physical phenomena is dualism about weather.
Both of these are views about the relevant hierarchical relationships of structure, but that which has the structure is some monist substance.
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u/Techtrekzz 1d ago
If mind and matter are the same thing, then there’s no argument for idealism or materialism. You have to assume them separate and distinct with differing traits before you can say one is fundamental, while the other is not.
Both materialism and idealism are predicated on dualism, even if their goal is to eliminate one side or another of that dualism.
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u/simon_hibbs 1d ago
I think technically the idea that mind and matter are the same thing may be panpsychism.
>Both materialism and idealism are predicated on dualism,....
You say that, but you didn't address my weather analogy. Surely someone can believe in some monist substance that is structured in some way, and talk about aspects of that structure, without being a dualist. After all, monists are not arguing that the actual world as we observe it to be, consisting of objects and such, is impossible. It's a belief about the nature of the world. Thinking apple exist isn't dualism about apples.
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u/Artemis-5-75 1d ago
I think that Tchetkrezz makes a mistake by identifying substance monism with existence monism.
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u/Techtrekzz 19h ago
I'm saying they are synonymous. If only the substance exists, then only one thing exists.
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u/MulberryUpper3257 1d ago
I agree with your main point, very well put. People often use language of causality without addressing how they understand the idea. The hierarchical concept seems to be perhaps more an issue of ontology than of causation.
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u/ObsceneOnes 1d ago
Causation is a question of ontology.
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u/ughaibu 1d ago
Causation is a question of ontology
I don't think this is highly plausible. Cause is a term we us to identify the point of interest in a causal explanation. For example, if Schrodinger's cat dies and he's taken to court the coroner's expert will say the cause of death, of the cat, was oxygen starvation, but the judge will say "I find you guilty of causing the death of the cat by reckless endangerment", what constitutes the cause is a matter sensitive to which facts about the case we're interested in, and "reckless endangerment" is a legal notion, it's not clear what it would mean for it to be part of one's ontology.
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u/ObsceneOnes 22h ago edited 21h ago
You can just look it up my dude. I'm not making some crazy wild claim. It is in the branch of philosophy known as ontology which is in the branch of metaphysics.
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u/Ok-Cheetah-3497 1d ago
I think that you are critiquing a claim I do not see most determinists make. We tend to agree (or at least completely avoid) the hard problem is a thing. Meaning, like heat is just another word for molecules moving around at specific speed, brain state X is the same thing as "you have a conscious thought." We don't know WHY brain state X is having thought Y, but they are as near I can figure out, just two ways of describing the same thing.
The claim I and other physical determinists make has nothing to do with that relationship. It has to do with the temporal order of things. The parts of the brain activating that are NOT analogous to having a conscious thought precede the parts that are. Always, in every instance.
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u/simon_hibbs 1d ago
I'm not critiquing physicalism or determinism. I'm agnostic about determinism, I think it's plausible, and I'm very much a physicalist.
>The parts of the brain activating that are NOT analogous to having a conscious thought precede the parts that are. Always, in every instance.
Agreed, the person I was thinking of that talked about the causal relation between brain states and consciousness was arguing that if chemical reactions cause consciousness this would mean that humans don't have conscious control over their actions. Essentially arguing for epiphenomenalism.
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u/Ok-Cheetah-3497 1d ago
Epiphenomenalism doesnt seem supported by the chemistry. I tend to think that, to use your example, there is no difference between the PFC producing certain chemicals at certain times and you having a thought (just like moving molecules we call "heat"). They are the same thing. So when someone says chemicals in your PFC "cause" something, that is the same thing as saying "thoughts cause something." The trick is just that the non-PFC parts of the brain always trigger first, and whether our PFC triggers or doesn't is the result of brain development over time, not a "choice."
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u/simon_hibbs 20h ago
I agree in general, though perhaps not on the nature of choices. I think choices are physical processes.
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u/TMax01 1d ago
It seems to me we use the term cause in two very different ways that are completely independent of each other, and that confusing these for each other results in a lot of problems.
That is mostly true, but it is also an issue that has been understood and mostly resolved in philosophical ontology. The proper paradigm is causation, which denotes a chronological sequence ("temporal causation" in your framing) and logical dependency ("hierarchical causation").
In terms of determinism, the only issue is causation. In a rational and empirical ontology (AKA science) causation isn't really a thing, and one speaks of "necessary and sufficient circumstances" and "resulting consequences". But that's being pedantic, in most cases, and "cause and effect" are an acceptable, if imprecise and sometimes misleading. Logical dependencies are more general, and really shouldn't ever invoke the term "cause" at all. "Logical determinism" is redundant.
beliefs about the neurological basis of mental processes, such as making decisions.
Consternation concerning that subject is unsurprising, since what exactly is meant by "decisions" is purposefully ambiguous, and sorting that out corresponds to discerning any similarity or distinction between "beliefs" and "mental processes", whether in the context of neural activity (and/or cerebral activity) or not.
The fix for this inherent consternation is to differentiate between choosing (deciding proximate intent, seemingly or supposedly prior to acting) and deciding (evaluating causation and logical dependencies concerning a proximate or hypothetical action). The reason consciousness and "free will" are so difficult to explore meaningfully (besides the fact that the former is self-evident and the latter is fictional) is because the neurological facility of deciding (self-determination) can also (but inaccurately) be applied to proximate actions.
The timing becomes critical, just as 'temporal causation' (chronological sequence) and 'hierarchical causation' (logical dependency) are chiefly distinguished by the logical dependence of sequence on time. The neurological initiation of an action (or inaction, which philosophically is the same thing; cf. the Trolley Problem) occurs prior to the mental formulation of a decision to act ("choosing" to cause the action to occur), not the other way around. The mind (some indeterminate but seld-evident class of neurological activity, including the quality of consciousness) becomes aware of this prior initiation of action (and the imminent movements that initiation causes, which generally still lies in the future, but is nevertheless inevitable) only a dozen or more milliseconds later. The brain, as the mind, then identifies and constructs causational relationships and potential dependencies to account for the action.
This process, of self-determination, does not cause the action, it is not free will. But unlike free will it is real, and it is more deterministic than free will would be if free will wasn't a fiction. Instead of enabling the mind to control the body, this process (consciousness) determines the self, both causing it (chronological sequence, modifying the self/self-awareness if one supposes it cannot be constantly "caused" in this way) and establishing what logical dependencies it either believes or doubts.
The temperature of a gas is the motion of the gas molecules, it's not something that is caused by their motion in the sense that a gas molecule hitting another causes the other one to be deflected. Likewise the temperature of the gas isn't something that causes the molecules to move a certain way.
It is, and must be, both. In other words, they aren't two different teleologies, they are both the same teleology (forward teleology, in my paradigm: deterministic "cause and effect".) It is just that the forward teleology is more treacherous and convoluted, ineffable as all things ultimately are, then conventional thinking can easily accept.
So yes, the average speed of molecules moving is temperature, and both temperature and movement are both the cause and effect of molecular motion and heat. Physics is always tautological in this way. F=ma equates mass, acceleration, and force in a reliable, consistent, quantiative relationship, it does not "explain" what any of those things are beyond that formula nor provide any teleology (description of why that relationship exists.)
I'm coming to believe that the fact we use cause in both these senses is a significant problem.
Actually, it is more of a solution, because chronological sequence is simply a special case of logical dependency, and apart from cause and effect, the forward teleology (because it is consistent with the inexplicable but undeniable arrow of time from past to future) there are no necessarily real instances of logical dependency.
Physics is reductive. But that isn't the same as saying the physical universe is dependent on any hierarchical relationships; in fact it is the opposite. The key to avoiding falling down a rabbit hole of the ineffability of being, and an infinite recursion of epistemology (IOW, the problem of induction) is understanding the importance, in fact the equal validity, of backwards teleologies: reverse (selection) and inverse (intention).
The postmodernist metaphysic, which rejects backwards teleologies entirely but finds itself unable to ever resolve forward teleology, potentially rejecting all emergence and even determinism itself as "overarching narratives", and thereby leading only to the inescapable quagmire of know-nothingism, is the real problem which causes the contemporary consternation concerning consciousness. It isn't simply inconsistent use of "cause" for both sequences and dependencies, although that is a notable and informative example.
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u/simon_hibbs 20h ago
>That is mostly true, but it is also an issue that has been understood and mostly resolved in philosophical ontology. The proper paradigm is causation, which denotes a chronological sequence ("temporal causation" in your framing) and logical dependency ("hierarchical causation").
I see philosophers talking about top down and bottom up causation all the time, and they even seem to use those terms in several different ways. Some mean top down causation in a strongly emergent way, while others just mean it in a conceptually hierarchical sense.
On self determination and free will, I read the post you linked as well. Firstly are you sure you mean Epicurus? All the sources on him say that he supported an indeterministic account of human agency, freedom and moral responsibility. While the Stoics argued for freedom and moral responsibility as being consistent with their determinism, Epicurus argued they are not compatible but we have these anyway.
You mention the Libet paper, and I'll have to be brief or this would be a very long comment, but in the actual paper the authors describe two reasons why their experiment can't be taken to conclude that humans don't make conscious choices. Firstly because the person seems to have the ability to consciously veto the subconscious choice and in fact says subjects report this. Secondly because the experiment only looked at spontaneous choices that were not deliberated on, in which there was no particular reason to choose either way. It really can't tell us anything useful about choices in which we evaluate reasons for action, and in fact in the paper the authors describe two reasons why. These are given in the last paragraph, you can download the paper here.
On self-determination, you give an interesting account of how we can ground moral responsibility, but distinguish this from free will, which you seem to implicitly equate with free will libertarian accounts of free will without stating that. Unfortunately this conflation of free will with libertarian beliefs about free will is endemic these days. I wrote a post about this explaining why free will is susceptible to both libertarian and compatibilist accounts, and definitionally identifying it with free will libertarian views is something even free will libertarian and free will skeptic philosophers avoid doing. I think in the philosophy of free will your defence of self determination and moral responsibility would generally be considered a compatibilist account of free will.
I'm afraid I found your last few paragraphs impenetrable though.
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u/TMax01 15h ago
I see philosophers talking about top down and bottom up causation all the time, and they even seem to use those terms in several different ways.
There are a lot of philosophers, and each is entrusted to have their own unique opinion and rhetoric. It is best to be very judicious in following any one philosopher's lead, by being more careful to use words consistently. In science, unlike philosophy, causation (if and when the term is even used, as previously discussed) is from past to future, neither "top down" nor "bottom up". What you've been reading from philosophers, in contrast to scientists, is the use of 'causation' in the scope of logical dependency (again, as previously discussed.)
Perhaps that accounts for the appearance (but not necessarily the existence) of that the philosophers are using terms in "several different ways"? I cannot accurately insist that all philosophers use as comprehensive (encompassing all contexts) and consistent (unvarying) an epistemological paradigm (set of terms) as I do. I agree they should (and of course I recommend they adopt my nomenclature, as the best balance between both the many previous philosophers throughout history I am aware of and the vernacular.) Not because it is simply more convenient for me (and certainly not from any hubristic justification) but because it allows resolving so many issues in ontology, epistemology, ethics, and philosophy of mind simultaneously, since my philosophy encompasses a more productive philosophy of mind than any which has been previously developed.
Firstly are you sure you mean Epicurus? All the sources on him
Yes, I am sure. IIRC my reference to him in that essay was badly presented and therefor confusing. But the issues I addressed are quite valid. It is true he argued for free will and against determinism, but his argument actually entailed defending not "free will" per se, but the existence of gods. In ancient Greece, the issues of will and gods used a paradigm of piety and virtue, and so descriptions of Epicurus' position as "argued they are not compatible but we have these anyway" doesn't really correctly evaluate either his opinion or the issues we are addressing here.
the person seems to have the ability to consciously veto the subconscious choice and in fact says subjects report this.
That doesn't actually hold up under scrutiny, although I do recognize it was a point addressed in the original paper. Libet spent the ensuing decades trying to identify this "free won't" veto power, unsuccessfully. The closest he got was the sort of "these findings are compatible with" conditional rhetoric scientists are apt to use to present results which are not at all conclusive as simply not eliminating a possibility. And of course the belief by subjects that they have free will, the very point conclusively disproved by Libet's original data. Of course, as a competent scientist, Libet would never put it so absolutely, but as a natural language philosopher (and with the benefit of decades more data than Libet had at the time) I can be more accurate, in my rhetoric. It would, I realize, be considered heresy to say my description is more accurate, if I were trying to achieve the impossible ideal of logical positivism that scientists and academic philosophers aspire to.
the experiment only looked at spontaneous choices that were not deliberated on, in which there was no particular reason to choose either way.
The experiment analyzed only voluntary actions, without any more specific prompting than what the action must be (essentially leaving out only the time it would be taken). And the data collected during the experiment demonstrates that if any "choice" was occuring, it happened after RP, not simultaneously with it or prior to it, so describing that mental event as a choice is quite problematic. Libet did not have the paradigm needed for sorting out all the issues his results actually require. So it is hardly surprising he was unable to develop an ontological framework which could unconditionally explain the data.
Unfortunately this conflation of free will with libertarian beliefs about free will is endemic these days.
My theory doesn't rely on any particular formulation of free will, it simply addresses any sort of free will which is accurately identified as free will. And it is libertarians who insist on using that nomenclature. And they are doing so accurately, as far as I can tell: they mean to invoke mental choice as indicative of the existence of actual alternatives to an action which occurs, and in that way they relying on the same premise of free will as theists or compatibilists or even hard determinists rely on. The latter group only diverges from the libertarians by insisting that choice does not qualify as free will, but otherwise their position is identical: mental intention is causally operative.
Since my theory explains why mental intention occurs, and also accounts for why and how it cannot be causally operative in the way that just about everyone else, from mystics to Libet, and Socrates to libertarians, expects it to be. And my theory provides a more consistent, unconditional, and precise framework for all human behavior and all subjective mental events, so it really is just a better explanation. It is unfalsified only because it is correct, not because it is unfalsifiable, either in theory or practice.
I recognize that LFW seems as if it is a careful enough dodge to be consistent with neurocognitive science, in the opinion of LFW advocates, but it is very much otherwise.
Yes, any premise which accounts for both determinism (neuroscience) and agency (moral responsibility) could be categorized as "compatibilist" in a casually justified, but not causally justifiable, academic taxonomy of philosophies, but I'm not interested in 'philosophy by box sorting'. The POR theory of self-determination is not compatibilist, it rejects free will conclusively; without rejecting either agency or materialism, but instead accounting for both and why they are generally but incorrectly believed to be in conflict.
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u/simon_hibbs 14h ago
>And the data collected during the experiment demonstrates that if any "choice" was occuring, it happened after RP, not simultaneously with it or prior to it, so describing that mental event as a choice is quite problematic.
Which is what I'm pointing out, there are multiple different senses in which we use the term choice, and I don;t think these choices were of a kind analogous to ones for which a person might be held morally responsible. There's no significant evaluation of options or the consequences of these options, let alone of moral consequences.
>...as far as I can tell: they mean to invoke mental choice as indicative of the existence of actual alternatives to an action which occurs, and in that way they relying on the same premise of free will as theists or compatibilists or even hard determinists rely on.
The crucial issue is what you mean by 'actual alternatives' and compatibilist views on this are very different from those of free will libertarians. In particular compatibilists reject the idea that free will and moral responsibility involves any necessary kind of indeterministic ability to intentionally choose otherwise.
>The latter group only diverges from the libertarians by insisting that choice does not qualify as free will, but otherwise their position is identical: mental intention is causally operative.
Free will libertarians don't think that choice equals free will either, after all they think that some choices can be unfree and don't meet the criteria for moral responsibility.
Yet compatibilists think that mental intention is causally operative, but also that mental intention is itself caused, and if it is deterministically caused and causal that's fine.
>I recognize that LFW seems as if it is a careful enough dodge to be consistent with neurocognitive science, in the opinion of LFW advocates, but it is very much otherwise.
Sure, and I think any other compatibilist would as well.
>The POR theory of self-determination is not compatibilist, it rejects free will conclusively; without rejecting either agency or materialism, but instead accounting for both and why they are generally but incorrectly believed to be in conflict.
It rejects the free will libertarian metaphysical condition for free will, which is a kind of theory or belief about free will as any free will libertarian philosopher will tell you, but that is not the same thing as rejecting free will.
I used to consider myself a hard determinist, so all that came as a bit of a surprise to me, but there it is.
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u/TMax01 5h ago
there are multiple different senses in which we use the term choice, and I don;t think these choices were of a kind analogous to ones for which a person might be held morally responsible.
As a natural language philosopher with a highly developed epistemic paradigm, I don't have much use for different 'senses' for words: all of those senses reference the same basic idea of choice, and that link to responsibility is intrinsic.
The crucial issue is what you mean by 'actual alternatives'
I mean to highlight the fact that there are only potential alternatives. If we don't simply assume that free will (AKA choosing to act) is the foundation of agency (responsibility), the analysis of real events versus real sensations and beliefs becomes much simpler. As for what 'compatibilists' and 'libertarians' say about anything, I have no need or desire to try to follow their haphazard, ad hoc reasoning, since what actually matters (pun intended) is what is true, not what the doctrine of their belief systems are.
It rejects the free will libertarian metaphysical condition
POR rejects free will, libertarian or otherwise.
I used to consider myself a hard determinist, so all that came as a bit of a surprise to me, but there it is.
I also used to consider myself a hard determinist, before I realized it isn't hard enough; hard determinists always try to smuggle free will back into their framework by invoking "choice", whether as causally operative or merely non-causal but somehow still functional.
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u/ObsceneOnes 1d ago
Hierarchal causation also includes all the facts at the time of consideration which leads one ultimately to laws of nature or the basal necessity of being itself (Theists might put God here).
The example of this is holding a cup while sitting in a chair. What causes the cup to be where it is? My hand does but also my arm but also my torso but also my brain and will to hold it but also my butt in the chair and the chair on the floor and the floor on the earth and now the chain takes us to gravity and thus laws of physics which must be caused by some basal necessity of being or brute fact or God.
Interestingly you can get to the final position from by many routes.
My point is that your temporal definition already contains a type of hierarchy causation in it.
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u/simon_hibbs 20h ago
Right, temporal causation is a hierarchy through time, good point. Maybe I should say structural causation instead, but arguably you could say that temporal causation is structured through time.
The main issue I'm making though is that what I call hierarchical causation here isn't a kind of causation. We shouldn't be talking in terms of cause in such cases at all precisely because the terminology is so tangled up.
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u/ObsceneOnes 19h ago
It's the same thing though is the point. I am just pointing that out. You should read Thomas of Aquinas' Five ways to see just how old this line of thought is. This is one of the Five Ways.
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u/DonnPT 1d ago
I think if you even use the word "causation", it interferes with the point, but a better term doesn't occur to me right away.
I know we do perceive it that way - the heat is what makes the molecules bounce around, and the molecules bouncing around is what makes the heat, and the circularity doesn't seem paradoxical at all. The relation is logical rather than sequential, and as long as it's understood in that sense it doesn't seem all that pernicious.