Q&A: On the Principle of Causality and Intuition
On the Principle of Causality and Intuition
Question
Have a good and blessed week.
I would like to ask several questions (of course, if it is not too much trouble):
In the first book you argue against Kant’s synthetic a priori approach, meaning that the world appears to a person through a filter—the faculty of cognition—and therefore things cannot appear in ways that contradict the rules of cognition, namely causality, space, and time. Refuting Kant’s approach necessarily leads to your own view, that there are modes of cognition that allow us to apprehend the “things themselves” of phenomena and concepts. For if Hume’s problem was solved by Kant’s account, and the fit between the world and the intellect lies in the fact that the intellect “dictates” the world, then there is no basis for the validity of intuition. Therefore I feel a great need to clarify for myself your arguments against Kant.
As I understood it, the argument is that causality is not transcendental, because it is possible to think of things that are not causal; therefore the question of causality and induction remains in place, since there is no necessity that things appear in causal form, and if they do appear that way, it seems that there is causality in the “thing in itself.”
But Hugo Bergmann already asked this about Kant, and explained that although one can conceive of non-causal situations, one cannot imagine situations that contradict causality—that is, the opposite of causality. More generally, all our thinking is causal, and therefore things appear in this way, as Kant claimed.
I would greatly appreciate it if you could explain your refutation of Kant’s account, because I feel, as noted above, that this is the foundation and validity of “The Audible Logic Theory.”
Also, I did not sufficiently understand the source of belief in intuition. That is, while reading the three books I saw the meaning and implications of accepting intuition, but I am missing the first point: why do we really grant it authority? Only because without it we have no explanation for the correspondence between the senses and the intellect and the world itself?
I will end with an interesting observation: at some point I saw an original parable in your writings, about a group of people walking in the desert wearing summer clothes, etc., and the point of the parable was that following tradition relates not only to outward actions but to the content of the concept.
I found an interesting example. In the Talmud, Menachot 62, Rabbi and the Rabbis dispute what is waved in the communal peace-offerings. Rabbi’s view is that the entire offering is waved, whereas the Rabbis hold that only the breast and thigh are waved. The Talmud brings one possibility for explaining the dispute: the Rabbis hold that since the source for the waving of communal peace-offerings is derived from individual peace-offerings, and there only the breast and thigh are waved, so too in communal peace-offerings, because one derives from it and from its details. Rabbi, however, holds: derive from it but establish it in its own context, and therefore the whole animal is waved. Another possibility for explaining Rabbi’s view is that he too holds “derive from it and from its details,” except that the derivation is: “Just as there, it is something given to the priest, so too here it is something given to the priest.” And it would seem that the dispute is whether, when one learns one matter from another law, one learns the external form of the thing or its content.
I thank you in advance for your words, and will note that the subjects discussed in your books interest me very much and provide me with answers to many of the troubling questions I have.
Answer
Hello.
A. My claim is that there is no necessity whatsoever that all things in the world appear to us in a causal form. For example, there could have been a situation in which, from all the events in the world, we would not have been able to extract regularities. We would not have seen that being in fire burns, that applying force moves things, and the rest of the laws of nature. If in actual reality it were not so, the structure of our intellect could not force objects always to move when a force acts upon them. And conversely, if some object were to move without a force, there is no reason we could not notice this (the constraints of thought do not dictate constraints on our sensory observation mechanisms). But we do not see any such phenomenon. There are only very few phenomena we encounter and fail to find the causes that brought them about. None of this is explained by Kant, so his words are rootless and branchless in the empirical sense.
On the other hand, Hume’s question arises, and it is not empirical: how do we manage to discern the causal connection? It is an important question, and I have no explicit answer to it. What I claim is only that this ability of ours is a fact, whether or not we understand it, and facts are not to be denied.
In one of the books I brought the story about my parents: when I told them about someone who was cured of jaundice with pigeons, they laughed at me and said that in the yeshiva (= Gush Etzion!) they were filling my head with bizarre mysticism. I told them that a rational person is not someone who accepts only what he understands, but someone who accepts what has clear evidence behind it, and only afterward tries to understand. If we accepted only what we understand and what seems reasonable to us, we would make no progress at all in science or in any other field.
B. As for intuition, first of all there is the fact that we do indeed believe in it. All our thinking, including about this very question, uses tools of intuition. It is like asking who says our logic is reliable. We have no possibility without it, since even the discussion about logic will be conducted with logical tools. Intuition has the same status (even if it is less certain and less necessary). Second, the proof of the validity of intuition is that our intuitive generalizations (= what seems simplest to us, Occam’s razor) simply work. I elaborated on this in the second book, and a summary appears in Appendix B of my new book on evolution that has just come out. In my opinion there is a clear proof there that our intuition really does work, and not merely that it is forced upon us.
C. As for “derive from it and from its details” versus “derive from it but establish it in its own context,” the example is indeed charming. But it seems to me that in essence it is no different from any other Talmudic-halakhic discussion. The argument is always about what to compare and how to generalize. Here it is simply more explicit, and I think I already noted this in my article “A Good Measure.”
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Questioner:
A. As I understood it, what you mean is that thought does not operate on the cognitive plane. On the other hand, we see that thought prevents us from conceiving certain things that contradict it, since we do not conceive of things opposite to causality. That implies that thought does operate on the cognitive plane.
That is, I understood that it is impossible for thought to show as though something happened (a force causing motion) when in fact it did not happen, but how do we know that it does not prevent causeless events from appearing?
B. The basis for something is always external to the thing itself; and if the validity of intuition rests on itself, is that not a weakness? And indeed, if the initial grounding does not rest on something external, what gives the whole system validity?
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Rabbi:
A. I do not see how an event that happened without a cause would disappear from my sight (note well: not from my intellect but from my eyes). What, suddenly a curtain will come down and I will not see it?
B. Every hierarchical system has to begin somewhere (“tongs are made with tongs”). There are only two solutions to this problem: 1. The first stage is self-caused (like the Holy One, blessed be He, who is the first pair of tongs in the creation of the world). 2. The first stage has no cause.
Now you can choose between the two. By the way, in today’s science and mathematics circularity is not a dirty word, as long as consistency is preserved.
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Questioner:
A. Just as my consciousness can arrange events into the categories of space and time, why can it not transmit only causal events? After all, one really cannot think of something that contradicts causality—as I brought from Hugo Bergmann above—meaning that opinion/thought also affects my capacity.
Is it possible to say that my consciousness makes it appear as though there is a cause?
B. Regarding intuition—my question is that our belief in it still does not help, since our belief in it is also intuitive. (It is like a person who comes to describe the superiority of religious feeling by saying that he senses that the religiously emotional person has spiritual superiority; the feeling he senses regarding that person’s superiority comes from the same source as the religious feeling.)
The proof that intuition “works” is also apparently unacceptable when we want to ground its validity on causality (= which is in practice the ability to prove something from the fact that systems “work”) and then ground the validity of causality on it.
I did not understand in what sense science uses circularity.
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Rabbi:
A. I cannot see how an event without a cause would not be perceived by our cognition. If some object began to move and no force at all were acting on it, would we not see it moving?
B. Circularity is built into our thinking, since the first pair of tongs always has to be made by one of the pairs of tongs derived from it. As for circularity in science, that requires a longer lecture, and this is not the place. The claim that intuition works is self-consistent, unlike the claim that it does not work.