i mean this one:

Thing is though, i don't believe that because things are beyond our capacity to conceive or measure or predict means anything at all except we simply don't have the capacity to do so.

swarm wrote: ...I find it premature to declare anything beyond our capacity entirely....
>

Actually, you're hanging up on the semantics. A more common and forgiving reception, for the sake of polite conversation, would be the understanding that I'm speaking in the present tense rather than in absolute terms.

i'm no longer defending determinism as something proveable. causality is on the table.

i'm going to move this to a new thread, "the nature of causality"

but if it can break, doesn't that indicate anything about how it works when it's not broken? i.e. that it is a causal radiating array of signals in the physical brain subject to disorder by a break in the normal relationships?

swarm, i literally, if i were evil enough, could go into your brain and take away your will. gone, poof, disabled. my actions would be causal. i would cause your will to fail. doesn't this indicate that your will was matter-dependent and causally constrained to begin with at all?

In the response to stimuli aspect, if you flash a letter on a screen and just look at the immediate physiological response, it changes over time.

How can the same stimuli, in a purely causal system, fail to have the same response each time?

Swarm,

I'm having trouble wrapping my head around what you're saying here.

Me: "an exceedingly long and complex causal chain is still a causal chain"

You: "No, that's precisely where I disagree."

I don't get it. Are you suggesting that if a causal chain has 25 events it's causal, but if it has 26, it's not? A car engine is a pretty complex piece of machinery, but it would seem at least on surface analysis that we can build them to work every time because it's a strict causal system. If not, then why do they work as reliably as they do, at least coming out of the factory?

<"I don't see how you can propose that an event that happened last decade has a strong causal chain that was some how maintained with all the other things that happened only to manifest now some how.">

Why is it a problem for causality to be stored? The brain stores lots of different kinds of information and is continually updating its connections in light of new learning and experience. Some of the most vivid examples of long-term effects come from traumatic events. If someone has PTSD from Vietnam, even decades later it can affect their reactions to current cues. A helicopter flies overhead and their stress levels hit the ceiling. I don't think this can be explained without the sort of long-term causality you're questioning. Imprinting is another example. It's not yet well understood in humans (as far as I know) but in other animals we can study it, like when a goose imprints Konrad Lorenz as it's parent-figure and follows him around. It seems likely to me that humans take imprints for emotional/territorial roles, sexual turn-ons/turn-offs, openness to new experience, and other aspects of our psyches. Even if not, we can still point to causal processes that have long term efficacy like operant conditioning, and other forms of learning.

I'm puzzled that you ask how this all ties into causality. These are all means of reconfiguring our synapses so that certain responses, thoughts and behaviors are more likely than others. It's almost never as simple as billiard balls - there are always lots of variables interacting on various levels of description (biological, physiological, cognitive, social, etc.), but the addition of more causal factors does not lead to the annihilation of causality, it just leads to more complexity.

You have degree in cogsci so I know you're not advocating a magical soul or pixie dust in the synapses. But what then? Randomness? There could be some randomness involved in brain processes but I don't get how this would figure into an understanding of thought and behavior, how it would explain decision-making, or how it would resemble what people commonly refer to as "free will."

I don't know that I want to call the view I'm defending "determinism." The concepts of freewill and determinism have so much theological and Newtonian baggage that they have probably outgrown their usefulness, even if you can manage to pin down exact meanings of the terms. We don't need these categories to understand how having a cognitive system that tunes-in salient aspects of the environment and the 'self' gives a critter greater control. Evolution needs causality to pull this trick off, but only on-average causality, not rigid causality. As long as the house comes out ahead every night, you've got yourself a business.