Date: Sun, 7 Mar 1999
micro-macro causality
Thomas M. Miovas, Jr.
>From: Stephen Speicher
>
>Cause answers the question "What?"; causal explanation
>answers the question "How?". We might say that a flame is
>the cause of the boiling water, but a causal explanation
>refers to the underlying thermo and molecular dynamic
>processes.
I think the term "cause" may be used in two different senses in
the above quote. The "What" is the Renaissance understanding of
causality, with a primary focus on antecedent factors leading to
an event; the "How" is closer to the Objectivists understanding
of causality, with a primary focus on the nature of the entities
involved. Personally, I wouldn't use the "What" vs "How"
distinction, since I think it's confusing.
Objectivism rejects the Renaissance understanding of causality
because it understand more thoroughly that an entity acts
according to its nature, rather than the idea that an entity
acts the way it does because something other than it acts on
that entity.
A more thorough understanding of the Objectivist understanding
of causality is that the "What" is that the water is boiling,
whereas the "How" is that it is water. If a brick were placed
over the same flame, it wouldn't boil because it is a brick. In
other words, the cause is the entity and its own action is the
effect. Once one understands this distinction, interaction (the
Renaissance understanding of causality as antecedent factors)
can be understood as a derivative.
What Stephen seems to be trying to do is apply the Renaissance
understanding of causality to molecular and quantum entities
that interact with one another -- thus providing a "deeper"
understanding. However, each of those entities acts according to
its own nature as a primary, and this is the deepest level one
can go. I'll grant you that once one knows the nature of the
constituents of an entity, the overall nature of the entity is
better understood, and therefore one can better understand why
an entity we can perceive acts the way it does; but this doesn't
mean that shifting the antecedents to the sub-molecular level
gives us any better understanding than the metaphysical fact
that a thing is what it is and acts accordingly -- not if one is
not going to understand causality as the action of an entity
arising from the fact that it is what it is.
As a counter-example to Stephen's: In the same electric field,
an electron will move one way, whereas a proton will move the
other way. The antecedent factors are the same (the electric
field), but the entities behave differently. Why? Because an
electron is an electron, whereas a proton is a proton.
