I suppose it’s natural for scientistic philosophers (those who are dedicated to shaping a view of the world that is limited to scientific concepts — what would you call such a willingly adopted style of self-blindered philosophy? I don’t know. Maybe “normal”) — to think of causal descriptions of phenomena as very accurate kinds of statements. Maybe Newton’s law of inertia would serve as a typical example: An object in motion tends to continue in motion; an object at rest tends to stay at rest; and f = ma. We can use mathematics to make our description of physical processes as accurate as we like.
However, this truth is completely overshadowed by a careless application of the concept of causality itself. This dawned on me one day as I was thinking about a simple example of causes. Suppose a man suddenly finds himself outside a thirteenth story window of a high-rise building. This is a peculiar, and as we might say, unstable situation. The force of gravity creates a force that accelerates his body vertically toward the center of the earth, but his path, unfortunately, is blocked by the street below, and the collision of his material self with the concrete leads to what in ordinary language we would call “death.”
Now, this event has to be explained. It starts with the coroner, who examines the body carefully to determine the cause of death, and he writes in, internal injuries sustained in a fall. Not exactly physics, but we know what he means, don’t we.
The physicist explains the whole thing easily, using the theory of gravity. The man’s fall is the direct result of the action of Gravity, where F, the force of acceleration, is calculated by G times Mf (the mass of the faller) times Me (the mass of the earth) divided by the square of the distance between them. As coincidence would have it, this acceleration comes out to be “g”, or, colloquially, one “g” of acceleration. And thus gravity has caused the man’s death.
But there is a police detective examining the case as well, and he cannot help but be aware of the fact that, despite the ordinariness of the action of gravity, it is not ordinary for people to fall out of thirteenth story windows. This invites his curiosity, and on investigation, the hypothesis emerges that another man (hereinafter called “the murderer”) did wantonly and with full intention push (“shove”) the victim (“George”) out the window, to his death.
The interesting thing is the way these three different types of people, one a coroner, one a physicist, and one a police detective, build a causal theory to explain the same result: a corpse lying on the street. In the first case, the corpse (why is he dead?) is explained by internal injuries. In the second, the corpse is explained by gravity. In the third, the corpse is explained by a murderer’s push. So which is the actual cause of this event? It would appear that the cause depends entirely on how the observer wants to contextualize (“frame”) the event.
I’m not trying to say there is no cause. In fact, we seem to have too many causes. Eventually some philosopher will stand up, armed with a theory of determinism, and argue that the cause of the man’s death is the Big Bang, and all the other causal views are just shortsightedness. What I am trying to say is that apparently Hume’s note, that there is no physical cause present over and above the objects and actions themselves, is supported by our ability to name several different causes of extremely different types all as the cause of the same event. Each causal explanation supports a different theoretical framework, namely medicine, physics, and forensics. It’s also interesting to note that the detective will collaborate with the coroner, and assume the physicists’ theories are true and relevant, so nobody gets left out of the story making.
It all reminds me of the shell game, where the man behind the table shuffles the shells and then asks you under which shell is the pea. What is going on here?
July 14, 2009 at 2:25 am
this really has nothing to do with the point of your post, just something i thought i’d share: it always bugs me when people say the force of gravity is m1*m2/d^2. the “m1″ part is purely an artifact, one of the way we define force. actually i guess you may already know this, the more i think about it the more obvious it is. but anyway..the thing is is that gravity acts with the same “”force”" on any object whatsoever, whatever the mass. that’s why the smaller ball falls at the same acceleration as the larger ball. yes, the larger ball has more mass and thus it could be reasoned that it took more force to make it accelerate by the same amount, but even its larger mass could be considered as a merely more numerous collection of atoms, and gravity obviously acts on each atom the same. so you see that concept of force relies on treating all the atoms as one group, and then, essentially, *pretending* that they were all acted upon in aggregate by a local mover sort of like a finger pushing it–because that’s sort of context force was invented for and is more often used in.
of course, the granularity i chose of atoms is completely arbitrary, the point is that *how much* object is there doesn’t affect how much it’s pulled by the other object at all. consider, even, einstein’s reformulation of gravity as simply a curvature in spacetime. i even made a gravity simulation program once (okay, two or three times, in different languages), and the simplest way to compute results was not m1*m2/d^2, it was m2/d^2 (aside from having to separate the force into its vertical and horizontal components, since this is computers).
of course, to be fair, now that i think about it, the “local mover” affair actually does apply in a lot more cases than i thought — any case where something is blocking the going together of two objects gravitationally attracted — such as a finger holding up a basketball. in that case, because of the way atoms stick together (i.e. the phenomenon of solidity and hence particular objects), the end force on the finger is actually the mass of the earth times the mass of the object divided approximately by the the distance from the center of the earth squared and, i’m guessing, multiplied by the gravitational constant. but this fact has nothing to do with objects out in space.