My answer: Attributing causation is part of our human instincts. We are born with some desire to do it. We may develop that skill by reflecting on it during our lifetime.
(How did we humans develop that instinct? Evolution, probably. Humans who had mutated to reason about causality died less – for instance, they might have avoided drinking from a body of water after seeing something poisonous put in, because they reasoned that the poison addition would cause the water to be poisonous.)
There isn’t any better explanation. If you don’t accept the idea of causality as given, you can never explain anything. Roryokane is using causality to explain how causality originated, and that’s not a good way to go about proving the way causality works or anything but it is a good way of understanding why causality exists, or rather just accepting that we can never prove causality exists.
Our instincts are just wired to interpret causality that way, and that makes it a brute fact. You might as well claim that calling a certain color yellow and then saying it looks yellow as a result of human nature is a non-explanation, you might be technically right to do so but in that case then you’re asking for answers you’re never actually going to get.
You might as well claim that calling a certain color yellow and then saying it looks yellow as a result of human nature is a non-explanation, you might be technically right to do so but in that case then you’re asking for answers you’re never actually going to get.
That would be a non-explanation, but a better explanation is in fact possible. You can look at the way that light is turned into neural signals by the eye, and discover the existence of red-green, blue-yellow, and light-dark axes, and there you have physiological justification for six of our basic colour words. (I don’t know just how settled that story is, but it’s settled enough to be literally textbook stuff.)
So, that is what a real explanation looks like. Attributing anything to “human nature” is even more wrong than attributing it to “God”. At least we have some idea of what “God” would be if he existed, but “human nature” is a blank, a label papering over a void. How do Sebastian Thrun’s cars drive themselves? Because he has integrated self-driving into their nature. How does opium produce sleep? By its dormitive nature. How do humans distinguish colours? By their human nature.
But causality is uniquely impervious to those kind of explanations. You can explain why humans believe in causality in a physiological sense, but I didn’t think that is what you were asking for. I thought you were asking for some overall metaphysical justification for causality, and there really isn’t any. Causal reasoning works because it works, there’s no other justification to be had for it.
My answer: Attributing causation is part of our human instincts. We are born with some desire to do it. We may develop that skill by reflecting on it during our lifetime.
(How did we humans develop that instinct? Evolution, probably. Humans who had mutated to reason about causality died less – for instance, they might have avoided drinking from a body of water after seeing something poisonous put in, because they reasoned that the poison addition would cause the water to be poisonous.)
This is a non-explanation, or rather, three non-explanations.
“Human nature does it” explains no more than “God does it”.
“It’s part of human nature because it must have been adaptive in the past” likewise. Causal reasoning works, but why does it work?
And “mutated to reason about causality” is just saying “genes did it”, which is still not an advance on “God did it”.
There isn’t any better explanation. If you don’t accept the idea of causality as given, you can never explain anything. Roryokane is using causality to explain how causality originated, and that’s not a good way to go about proving the way causality works or anything but it is a good way of understanding why causality exists, or rather just accepting that we can never prove causality exists.
Our instincts are just wired to interpret causality that way, and that makes it a brute fact. You might as well claim that calling a certain color yellow and then saying it looks yellow as a result of human nature is a non-explanation, you might be technically right to do so but in that case then you’re asking for answers you’re never actually going to get.
That would be a non-explanation, but a better explanation is in fact possible. You can look at the way that light is turned into neural signals by the eye, and discover the existence of red-green, blue-yellow, and light-dark axes, and there you have physiological justification for six of our basic colour words. (I don’t know just how settled that story is, but it’s settled enough to be literally textbook stuff.)
So, that is what a real explanation looks like. Attributing anything to “human nature” is even more wrong than attributing it to “God”. At least we have some idea of what “God” would be if he existed, but “human nature” is a blank, a label papering over a void. How do Sebastian Thrun’s cars drive themselves? Because he has integrated self-driving into their nature. How does opium produce sleep? By its dormitive nature. How do humans distinguish colours? By their human nature.
But causality is uniquely impervious to those kind of explanations. You can explain why humans believe in causality in a physiological sense, but I didn’t think that is what you were asking for. I thought you were asking for some overall metaphysical justification for causality, and there really isn’t any. Causal reasoning works because it works, there’s no other justification to be had for it.