УМСТВЕННАЯ ОБСТАНОВКА (№ 2) — Научная обусловленность и законы природы

MENTAL FURNITURE #2 - Scientific Causality and the Laws of Nature

I promised in the last article to talk about Moshe's 'mental furniture.' I begin with the notion of causality. The scientific and pedagogical traditions that inform Moshe's work employ causality. Moshe loathed facile, uncritical 'cause-effect' reasoning. However, he adhered to scientific explanation in those domains where it was applicable. Scientific causality in the proper context is a forcefully persuasive concept. When misunderstood it can be misused and inappropriately applied. Pedagogical causality concerns itself with the quest for understanding, freedom and self-determination and will receive its own column.

David Bohm begins his book Causality and Chance in Modern Physics with "In nature nothing remains constant. Everything is in a perpetual state of transformation, motion and change. However, we discover that nothing simply surges up out of nothing without having antecedents that existed before. Likewise, nothing ever disappears without a trace, in the sense that it gives rise to absolutely nothing existing at later times. This general characteristic of the world can be expressed in terms of a principle which summarizes an enormous domain of different kinds of experience and which has never yet been contradicted in any observation or experiment, scientific or otherwise; namely, everything comes from other things and gives rise to other things." He goes on to say, "This principle is not yet a statement of the existence of causality in nature. Indeed it is even more fundamental than causality, for it is at the foundation of the possibility of our understanding nature in a rational way."

To arrive at scientific causality, relationships that remain constant amidst the complex processes of change and transformation are noted and studied. Specific constant relationships that emerge and are not coincidental are interpreted as 'necessary relationships.' 'Causal law' is the term given to necessary relationships between objects, events, conditions or other things at one given time and those at later times. However, the necessity of a causal law is never absolute. For example, things usually fall to the ground when we release them from our hand. Let's say it is a photo of Moshe and 'by chance' it's caught up by a gust of wind and is blown up, up and away. Bohm: "...one must conceive of the law of nature as necessary only if one abstracts from contingencies." Contingency is defined as the opposite of necessity. Chance as a form of contingency is outside the scope of things that can be treated by causal laws. Chance events do not necessarily follow from any specifiable laws. How and what does one abstract from contingencies?