Re: BHA: Causal powers of absence - are they real?

[LH Engelskirchen <lhengels@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

1.   Positivity wins?  I agree with Hans that if reality were
clogged with presences, change would not be possible.  However,
this doesn't establish that absence must be causally efficacious.

On the other hand, to say that absence is not causally efficacious
doesn't imply that "positivity, not negativity, wins."  Our access
to the world is through our experience of it.  Since our experience
is limited (e.g. we don't hear high frequencies, etc.), in this
simple rudimentary sense -- not involving any statement about what
the world beyond our experience is like -- "negativity wins."  A
whole lot of of the world is absent to us.  But in fact we can
infer things about the world from our experience of it and know we
cannot reduce the world to our experience.  We may infer, if this
is the conclusion we are led to, that "negativity wins."

The hesitation is in regards to causal efficacy.

2.   Is "nothing" efficiently causal?   The attack on the Humean
doctrine of causation asserted the existence of things with causal
powers.  Isn't it impossible to think of things with causal powers
without a conception of absence?  Causal mechanisms express always
a coming to be of what is not yet, that is of an absence.  Doesn't
that make the concept of absence analytic to the concept of cause?
So in that sense absence is both presupposed and essential to
causation.  But is absence causally efficacious?

In Scientific Realism and Human Emancipation, pp54-55, RB writes:
"Now if we are to avoid the absurdity of the supposition of the
production of (new and changing) knowledge ex nihilo . . . . this
process must be conceived as iteratively dependent upon the
employment of antecedently existing cognitive resources, taken from
the same or some other domain. . . ."

Knowledge is here understood by analogy to material, ie causal,
production.  How could we treat knowledge production ex nihilo as
absurd, but not causal production?

In RTS (180) RB writes that the concept of a "field of potential"
seems closest to meeting science's requirements for what ultimate
entities must be like.  This can be understood in two ways: (1) the
ultimate constituents of the world are possibilities; (2) the
ultimate constituents of the world are the possibilities of
"bodies" or "entities" where these words refer to any form of
matter or energy whatsoever, including physical fields with powers.

If the ultimate constituents of the world are mere possibilities,
then I think this is no longer a materialism.  Not that there is
anything wrong with that, as Seinfeld would say.

So if the proposition is that "nothing," as a matter of ontology,
is efficiently causal, then I would think this is no longer a
materialism.

3.   The prisoner.  In fact the prisoner behind bars characterizes
our existential circumstance.  There are always things we are not
free to do.  A rockslide blocks our path.  We are obliged to turn
back and not free to go on.  Our bodies are constructured so that
we are not free either to fly or walk on water.

There are two ways absence is causally relevant to these examples.
In the first sense, absence is relevant as the limit of material
possibility.  The laws of the physical world are not such that we
can fly.  But this does not express any causal potence of absence.

Absence is relevant in a second way.  As beings blessed with the
capacity to use language we can imagine counterfactuals.  We can
imagine the absent, the not yet.  We can construct visions in our
mind's eye of a future which does not exist.  But this is semiotic
work and does not imply any causal power of absence.  It lays the
basis for causally transforming the world and in this sense is a
final cause.  The land is parched; we dig a canal.  Marx called
labor purposive activity and by this meant that it always realizes
an absence in the sense of something that existed in the
imagination before it was realized in labor.  But it is labor that
causally transforms the world.  Also, the material limits we
confront in the physical world can be transcended in this way, e.g.
we construct mechanical aids to sustain our weight in air.

4.   The tiger behind the door.  Is there a source in Bhaskar,
Louis, for "information as an ont?"  Meanings are real, but I think
they are not real like bodies are real and that we have a tendency
to ignore this distinction "on causal criteria."  At least I have
done so.   Whatever x1 and x2 know, the furniture of the world is
the same in both cases.  This example too always characterizes our
material situation.  All kinds of things causally impinge on us
that we do not perceive.  If x1 doesn't perceive some aspect of the
world's presence, e.g. he doesn't "hear" the vibrations in air made
by the tiger's roar, then this is a failure of his modeling of the
world.  We always leave behind aspects of the world in our modeling
of it (negativity wins), but x1 is eaten by the tiger, not by
absence.  This is like Aristotle's example of the ship perishing in
the storm for lack of a pilot (we didn't realize a storm would come
up).  We say the absence of the pilot caused the ship's loss.  But
the storm caused the ship's loss.  The absence of the pilot
expresses the negation of the causal possibility that would have
led to safety.

The environment as the not self is a negation of the self and there
where the other is the self is absent.  Certainly the other as the
bearer of an absence can be efficiently causal.  The problem is
only with "nothing creating ex nihilo" and whatever romance
attaches to that.

I thought laughs were absent in the "last" Seinfeld, but found the
episode provocative.  "Who has ever heard of a 'guilty bystander?"
their defense attorney asks.  The small self-critique of a comic of
the times who offered trivia in preference to rage?

Howard

Howard Engelskirchen


     --- from list bhaskar@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ---