skyteacher » Fri Oct 17, 2014 9:47 am wrote:Sorry I always can’t seem to see or perceive whether I am preaching. I thought
preaching is best for religion, this is not a religious thing I am saying. I guess I am still learning. Or is it you taking me as preaching due to 'relevant past experience'?
Well, I was speaking of it rather loosely to mean painting a picture to those who already have experience with what you are talking about, seeing as how there was little in the way of clues to it for me. (Something like "preaching to the choir.")
skyteacher wrote:The above uses of ‘cause’ are talking about different aspects, but about the same word, the same meaning of ‘cause’. We can agree that philosophical language sometimes goes round, twist and turns, in order to reach the most precise meaning, and gets heavier.
I'm not sure I follow this, but in the usual way causation is understood, it temporally precedes its effect. Thus, for skakos to say the universe may have a cause, this implies the universe and its cause are two different things, with the latter temporally preceding the former. There's something other than the universe that is its cause. The trouble with this, of course, is that the universe, by definition, is all there is. Well, it's all there is, respecting what science takes for its target. Perhaps your view of what constitutes the universe is different.
Aristotle, as you may know, argued for four different kinds of causes: efficient, material, formal, and final (telos or purpose). Efficient causes are those that we seek when we wish to explain how certain events came about. "What were the causes of the civil war?" Or "What caused this disease?" The others are more related to what we think of as emergent properties, those that depend on some underlying constituency, shaped or otherwise tending toward some sort of equilibrium, typically dynamic.
sky teacher wrote:'Cause’ I am talking about is…reason, purpose, objective, direction (in order to be or exist), a position or state of being that produces a need to change to another position or status, for ANY reason.. a hypothetical state of becoming or result, affect, change that may take place after an event, in due response to the ‘cause’..
Hmm...
I can only assume 'reason', 'purpose', 'direction' represent a list of kinds of causes, each applicable to certain sorts of entities. Do rocks have a purpose, for example? Do they have a reason for their existence? Do they have a direction? With respect to 'direction', this as well is a bit obscure. I'm thinking you intend something like a treasure map.
And the use of 'need' seems as well to be confined to certain objects that operate on that basis. Do rocks have needs? Why even have that requirement in your usage of 'cause'?
But more significantly, the ordinary use of 'cause', the one used in ordinary conversation, where we might ask "what caused X?" seems to be completely absent.
But, I suppose, you need to have meaning in your life, and this being paramount, you chose to offer up your own view of causation so that it would satisfy you, rather than have anything to do with the topic.