[Serious] Thomism: Then & Now

[The Grand Nudger]

I do tend to say final cause when speaking of the final cause in a causal chain a lot, yeah.

I offered my thoughts and questions on thomist final causes a bit back, if you wanted to answer those…(or the ones I just asked that you ostensibly were responding to). I guess you could just call me an ignorant shot lord again, too.

[emjay]

I do tend to say final cause when speaking of the final cause in a causal chain a lot, yeah.

I offered my thoughts and questions on thomist final causes a bit back, if you wanted to answer those…(or the ones I just asked that you ostensibly were responding to).  I guess you could just call me an ignorant shot lord again, too.  

Yeah, that's what got me a bit confused earlier on... trying to work out what you meant by a plurality of final causes, whether you meant the final cause of every element in the series or whatever. Took me a while to realise you weren't using it in that sense, and therefore to get what you were saying. Shows what happens when you start thinking in these terms more and more, which I have been doing thanks to this new interest in classical philosophy. But also shows how perfectly understandable it is not to be thinking in these terms all the time - if you've not got Aristotle on the brain all the time, which I doubt you do. So yeah, I too hope this thread doesn't just descend into condescending oneupmanship, especially over something as petty as that.

[vulcanlogician]

According to Nussbaum,

Aristotle's 4 types of causes:

material cause - made of a certain material
formal explanation - structure
efficient explanation - environment
final cause - teleological (end).  Purpose and function of living things -- they continue to grow towards their natural condition. 

Quoting this because I think this is a decent summary of the four causes. I've been thinking a bit about these, and the topic has reemerged in the thread, so here are my thoughts:

I think modern science could be made analogous with these four causes. Chemistry could elaborate on the material cause. What we know about immutable physical laws could elaborate on the efficient and formal causes. But what modern physicists have zero need for is the final cause. Because the phenomenon (let's say a tree growing from a sapling into adulthood) is sufficiently explained by the other three causes. It's not like the final cause is wrong per se. Just superfluous in the final analysis.

Anyway. That's what I was thinking.

[Belacqua]

This YouTuber has a good rundown of the 5 Ways.

Splendid video! Thank you for posting it. 

Again, it is a kind of summary, and people not familiar with some of the arguments, especially near the end, will want a more full explication. 

But it's nice to hear someone so clear and knowledgeable!

[emjay]

Yeah, thanks Neo... it's a good resource that I think I'll be referring back to a lot going forward, especially the first three videos, which I found very helpful and clarifying. The last two, not so much, finding them incredibly confusing, but then I haven't really got into Plato's Forms etc much yet so that's understandable and in any case, we're nowhere near discussing them yet anyway.

[emjay]

I've just thought of an interesting thought experiment regarding potentiality and actuality in an essential series, as per the First Way...

Say you have one of those executive desk toys where there are five metal balls on strings, just looked it up, it's called a 'Newton's Cradle'.
But now say for the purposes of this thought experiment that this is going on in a frictionless environment, space for instance, so once the balls are put in motion, they can move in perpetual motion in this context.
Note 1: I am talking about motion here in this example, but I know Tommy (as my dad refers to him and I will now too ), is also talking about change. I don't think that makes any difference here though for this thought experiment, because I'm trying to think about it in terms of potentiality and actuality, rather than specific physics processes (which indeed, forgive me if I get anything wrong on that score - I'm not a scientist).
Now another issue to clarify before it confuses anything is that I do need to talk about time in this thought experiment, even though we accept that the first way... or any essentially ordered series... is not about time in it's relation to causality, as you've been clarifying... ie it's about tracking 'down' in an instant of time rather back in time. I need to talk about time in a different sense... I'll get to that...

Say we measure at t0 an essentially ordered series starting with say the hand as the first mover, accepting for the sake of argument that it is pure act. The hand starts the first ball moving, so if the essentially ordered series is essentially snapshotted at that time, t0, it goes down to a first cause that must be pure act. But if we then snapshot the series at a later time, t1, once the balls are bouncing back and forth in perpetuity, it appears a pure act cause is no longer required... that at that time/instant it can only be traced back in a circular loop of cause > act > cause > act, sorry, potentiality > actuality > potentiality > actuality. In other words it looks like it creates something like a self-sustaining causal loop, even if we substitute potential/act for traditional views of causality, that only needs something to, literally in this case, 'get the ball rolling' (or moving), but which can thereafter leave.

So this speaks more to the Sustainer argument (whichever one that is, sorry, it's still confusing), that says God would need to be ever-sustaining the world, moment by moment. It also potentially speaks to the underlying assumptions about whether an essentially ordered series can go on to infinity in practice... if it gets caught in a causal loop, and you could argue that everything after the big bang is now in such a causal loop, the law of conservation of energy and all that?

[HappySkeptic]

So this speaks more to the Sustainer argument (whichever one that is, sorry, it's still confusing), that says God would need to be ever-sustaining the world, moment by moment. It also potentially speaks to the underlying assumptions about whether an essentially ordered series can go on to infinity in practice... if it gets caught in a causal loop, and you could argue that everything after the big bang is now in such a causal loop, the law of conservation of energy and all that?

Interesting question.  I don't think your Newton's cradle is a causal loop (nor a chaotic system).  It is a simple repeating pattern, and the cause goes back to time 0 in a linear fashion.

As for the universe, it shows patterns and complex interactions, but it isn't a causal loop either.

What you might be grasping for is the idea of a mechanism which exhibits feedback in its causal chain (Newton's cradle being too simple to exhibit anything interesting).  Such a re-entrant system tends to exhibit chaotic behavior.  Chaos doesn't mean random - it means complex and hard to predict exactly, often with fractal patterns and surprising behavior.

The ring system of Saturn is a chaotic system, that exhibits fractal structure.  Consciousness is a re-entrant system, where the output of thinking feeds back into thinking

[emjay]

So this speaks more to the Sustainer argument (whichever one that is, sorry, it's still confusing), that says God would need to be ever-sustaining the world, moment by moment. It also potentially speaks to the underlying assumptions about whether an essentially ordered series can go on to infinity in practice... if it gets caught in a causal loop, and you could argue that everything after the big bang is now in such a causal loop, the law of conservation of energy and all that?

Interesting question.  I don't think your Newton's cradle is a causal loop (nor a chaotic system).  It is a simple repeating pattern, and the cause goes back to time 0 in a linear fashion.

As for the universe, it shows patterns and complex interactions, but it isn't a causal loop either.

What you might be grasping for is the idea of a mechanism which exhibits feedback in its causal chain (Newton's cradle being too simple to exhibit anything interesting).  Such a re-entrant system tends to exhibit chaotic behavior.  Chaos doesn't mean random - it means complex and hard to predict exactly, often with fractal patterns and surprising behavior.

The ring system of Saturn is a chaotic system, that exhibits fractal structure.  Consciousness is a re-entrant system, where the output of thinking feeds back into thinking

Right, fair enough. My dad was just telling me I probably got all that wrong as well (he has a degree in Physics... albeit from a long time ago)... and it wasn't a causal loop in the sense I was thinking, even trying to substitute the concepts of potentiality and actuality, so yeah, withdrawn. It'll take a while to digest everything you're saying here (and what my dad was saying), but it was interesting to think about nonetheless. So yeah, thanks for the input

[HappySkeptic]

Right, fair enough. My dad was just telling me I probably got all that wrong as well (he has a degree in Physics... albeit from a long time ago)

Multiple degrees in physics here as well, but also from a long time ago.  I have been a programmer for most of my career.

[emjay]

Right, fair enough. My dad was just telling me I probably got all that wrong as well (he has a degree in Physics... albeit from a long time ago)

Multiple degrees in physics here as well, but also from a long time ago.  I have been a programmer for most of my career.

Yeah, for my dad, I just mentioned it being a long time ago because he wasn't a scientist by trade (he's retired now), so I don't know how much he keeps on top of the latest scientific developments, but I do know he's very on the ball when he thinks about these sorts of things. So he's very good at logic for instance but at the same time he's perfectly happy for me to refer to him (including specifically, on this forum) as a Philistine when it comes to Philosophy per se... almost wears it like a badge of honour Like he joked that it was because of people like Parmenides (who I introduced him to thanks to all this) who basically said you can't talk coherently about nothing/non-being/non-existence... because of people like him that it took so long for the concept of zero to be invented/discovered That said, I think he's getting more interested now thanks to all of this.