Destructing Causal Deconstruction
“There is nothing so plain boring as the constant repetition of things that are simply false, and sometime not even faintly sensible; if we can reduce this a bit, it will be all to the good.”
— J. L. Austin
Sometimes it is the proper business
of philosophy to call us to our senses, to remind us of what is and is not
sensible. Still, philosophy often seems
at her best and highest when she outrageously challenges the self-satisfied
dictums of our so-called common sense.
After all, as the Copernican, Newtonian, and Einsteinian revolutions
have shown us, even the most solid and unquestionable of our beliefs may not
stand fast for us tomorrow.
So, when the winds of fashion carry
rumors from the continent of Derrida’s derring-do, of his deconstructing our
most basic notions, we may well have reason for excitement, perhaps even for
feeling anxious, threatened, or challenged.
Has he really shown that some of our most basic concepts contain the
seeds of their own destruction? And,
what new vistas of intellectual adventure might be opened to us in the
aftermath, when we are forced to reconstruct from the rubble-heap of our
completely deconstructed world view?
For
guidance in these deep and troubling matters, I have turned to Jonathon Culler
(On Deconstruction; Cornell
University Press, 1982, pp. 85-9), an enthusiastic and highly respected
expositor of deconstruction. I shall
consider only the first example he gives to illustrate the deconstruction
approach, namely, the Nietzschean deconstruction of causality. Culler assures us that, while this example
poses numerous problems, it can serve for the moment as a compact instance of
the general procedures we encounter in the work of Jacques Derrida. In the interests of charity, I shall assume
that Culler is mistaken, and that this “deconstruction of causality” does not
in fact represent Derrida or the deconstruction approach at its best.
I.
Culler begins by acknowledging the
central importance of causality:
“Causality is a basic principle of our universe. We could not live or think as we do without
taking for granted that one event causes another, that causes produce effects.”
Already, however, Culler seems to be
softening us up for the kill. In what
sense do we just “take for granted” that one event causes another? Perhaps it is true that ordinarily I take for
granted that turning the key will cause my engine to turn over. And, given that my horseless carriage is not
entirely reliable, sometimes I take too much in taking this for granted. But, I want to say, it simply is not true
that I only take for granted that turning ignition keys causes engines to turn
over. I know that this causal relation
obtains, and I know it from vast experience, from knowledge of the principles
of mechanics and electricity, from knowing how automobiles work. But, of course, this knowledge claim of mine
presumably is what deconstruction calls into question.
II
Second, Culler cautions that the
deconstruction of causality does not show that the principle of causality is
illegitimate or that it should be scrapped.
To the contrary, deconstruction asserts “the indispensability of
causation.” Curiously enough, however,
deconstruction preserves the notion of cause only because it must use the
notion of cause to undermine the notion of cause:
“Deconstruction itself relies on the
notion of cause … To deconstruct causality one must operate with
the notion of cause and apply it to causation itself.” That is to say, “deconstruction works within
the terms of the system … in order to breach it.” Since deconstruction systematically employs
the concepts or premises it is undermining, it is in a position “not of
skeptical detachment, but of unwarrantable involvement, asserting the
indispensability of causation while denying it any rigorous justification.”
Culler remarks that it is difficult
for some to accept this ambivalent attitude.
Indeed. When a philosopher shows
that applying a concept to itself leads to absurdities, usually he is
considered to be constructing a reductio,
showing that the concept is illegitimate and should be scrapped. This is not an unusual procedure. What is
unusual, however, is to find a philosopher pointing out absurdities and then
boldly embracing them.
III.
Now, in what sense does
deconstruction question, undermine, breach, or disrupt the system that employs
causality? The astonishing answer is
that it boldly challenges and calls for a reversal of the traditional scheme
that makes the cause an origin, logically and temporally prior to the
effect: “Deconstruction reverses the
hierarchical opposition of the causal scheme” by producing an “exchange of properties,”
showing that the argument which elevates cause can be used to favor effect.”
That is to say, deconstruction shows
that “If the effect is what causes the cause to become a cause, then the
effect, not the cause, should be treated as the origin. … If either cause or
effect can occupy the position of origin, then origin is no longer originary; it
loses its metaphysical privilege.”
In short, Culler is advancing an
idea as revolutionary as any that Einstein ever proposed about space and
time. He really is suggesting that we
may well have gotten things exactly backwards in the causal scheme: The whistling of the teapot might be what
precedes and causes the boiling of the water!
IV
The arguments for this reversal of
the causal order are as astonishing as the suggestion itself. We are told that “the concept of causal
structure is not something given as such but rather (is) the product of a … chronological
reversal.” The basic fact of “inner
experience” is that the effect is experienced before we experienced the
cause. The cause is imagined only after
the effect has occurred. So, in the
phenomenalism of the “inner world,” we (illegitimately) invert the chronology
of cause and effect.
For example, when we feel a pain, we
may be caused to look for a cause.
Spying a pin, we might suppose a causal sequence between the pin and the
pain. But, when we infer that the pin
cause the pain, we forget that the pain (in plain fact) came before the pin in
our experience, and we reverse the perceptual and phenomenal order of our
actual experience. “The experience of
pain … causes us to discover the pin and thus causes the production of a
cause.” So, Culler concludes, “pain can
be the cause in that it may come first in the sequence of experience.”
It is tempting to object that we
often experience causes before their effects (we see the pin enter, then feel
the pain). But, Culler replies that
“only the experience or expectation of the effect enables one to identify the
phenomenon in question as a (possible) cause.”
In any event, says he, the mere “possibility of an inverted temporal
relation suffices to scramble the causal scheme by putting into doubt the inferring
of causal relations from temporal relations.”
So, to repeat, “If the effect is what causes the cause to become a
cause, then the effect, not the cause, should be treated as the origin.”
V.
Provoked by arguments such as these,
it is difficult not to dismiss them with Queen Victoria’s retort that, frankly,
we are not amused. But, when honest
philosophizing goes astray, as all too often it does, one should try to be
helpful. So, what can one say?
The core of Culler’s argument is
that our traditional causal scheme has been “produced by a metonymy or
metalepsis (substitution of cause for effect).”
But, it seems much more plausible to suggest that his bizarre reversal
of the causal order is produced by ellipsis (omission of words required to make
the sense of a sentence clear).
Culler suggests that “the effect is
what causes the cause to become a cause.”
As it stands, this is plainly false.
The whistling of the teapot might indeed cause me to notice that the
teapot is boiling. But, it does not
follow that the whistling causes the boiling.
Nor does the whistling cause the
boiling to become the cause of the boiling.
No, the whistling simply causes the boiling to become noticed as the cause of the
whistling. So, perhaps Culler simply lost track of the
sense of his sentence when he went from “The effect causes the cause to become
(noticed as) a cause” to “The effect causes the cause to become … a cause.”
(ellipsis, omission)
There is, of course, a strained
sense in which effects could be said to cause their causes to become causes. That is to say, causes would not be causes if
they had no effects, just as mothers would not be mothers if they had no
children. So, there is a sense in which
we might say that children are the causes of their mothers’ being mothers. But, it would be a silly misunderstanding to
infer from this that every child must be his or her own father, outperforming
even Oedipus the King. Children are not
the causes of their mothers’ being mothers in this sense. They are not liable to paternity suits.
Still, one suspects that something
deeper than slippery word-play must be at work in this claimed deconstruction
of causality. In fact, a close reading
of the argument (given in section IV above) seems to reveal a phenomenalism (or
empiricism?) so radical that it is assumed that we cannot know anything but our
stream of experience – the “inner life” – as though everything, as it were, is
but a dream. But, even so, would this
deconstruction work?
Could an effect cause a cause to
become an effect, even if only in a dream? Well, perhaps dreaming that I hear a
shot could cause me to dream that I turn and see a person shooting
bottles. Since it is only a dream,
perhaps dreaming the “effect” could cause me to dream the “cause.” But, this still is not a case where an effect
causes its cause. Here, we simply have a
dream event causing us to dream that it had a certain cause. And, besides, life is not a dream.
Well, then, would deconstruction
work here if nothing existed but the “inner life” – a Humean stream of
“experience,” whatever this is supposed to mean? I suspect that a large part of Hume’s
skepticism about causation did stem from his view that we can know nothing but
ideas (mental images or representations), combined with the fact that no images
of any kind seem to have normal causal powers.
For example, the successive images we see on the screen at a cinema do
not cause one another. The image we see
of a gun being fired does not cause the subsequent sound we hear of a gun being
fired, nor does it cause the following images of smoke and gore. But, it is one thing to deny any causality
between ideas in the Humean theatre of the mind (beyond constant, regular
association). It is quite another thing
to suggest, as Culler does, that the observed smoke and gore of fired guns
causes the firing of those guns. Not
even Hume, I think, would have found this sensible.
VI.
I think that the deconstruction of
causality gains its greatest appeal in its claim to be absolutely empirical,
strictly faithful to the facts of experience.
Is suggests that (in point of fact) we very often experience the
presumed effects first, and only later experience the events that by metalepsis
we place in the position of cause. The
half-truth contained in this suggestion is that we do indeed often notice
effects before discovering their causes.
But the remainder of this suggestion is plainly false. We never ever
experience an effect and later experience the event that caused it. For example, we never first hear the sound of
a vase breaking into shards upon the floor, and then turn to see it falling to
its destruction … unless we are hallucinating.
So, contra Culler, it simply is not true that we invert the temporal
order of our experiences of causes and effects.
Whenever we do actually experience or witness the occurrence of a causal
event, we always experience it prior to (or simultaneously with) experiencing
its effect.
There are, of course, cases where we
first experience the effect, and subsequently experience the item that caused
it. For example, when sitting on a
couch, I might first experience a pain, and only later see see the pin that caused the pain. But, this is not to experience the event that
caused the pain – it is only to experience the item that caused the pain. (Standing on the railroad tracks, I might
first hear the whistle, and then turn to see the train, the cause of the sound
I heard. But, again, this is only to see
the thing that caused the whistle, not to subsequently experience the
particular event or action that caused the whistle.)
So, again, the deconstruction of
causality seems only to rest on careless inattention to language, not on
extraordinary attention to the order of our experiences. To call a pin the cause of my pain is not to
say that it is the causal event that resulted in my pain. The pin is the cause of my pain only in the
sense that it is the item that pierced my flesh, causing my pain.
One cannot help wondering what
Culler would say if we put aside the pin that had caused him pain, and showed
it to him years later. Would he then be
even more convinced that the pin he sees could not possibly be the thing that
caused his prior pain, since he is experiencing it now, years after the pain
that it supposedly caused? His reasoning
commits him to this absurd contention.
But, again, the reply is this:
While the particular event (the
piercing of his flesh that caused his pain years ago) cannot now be observed,
the item that pierced his flesh and
caused his pain still can be observed and experienced again and again.
VII.
As remarked earlier, Culler does
admit that at least “sometimes we observe the cause first and then the
event: we see a baseball fly toward the
window and then witness the breaking of the window,” But, even in this case, he
thinks that one “might reply that only the experience or expectation of the
effect enables one to identify the phenomenon in question as a (possible)
cause.” Now, why on earth does Culler
imagine that this constitutes a reply?
The
first time that I see a baseball flying toward a window, I indeed might not
identify it as a potential cause of the breaking of a window. Nevertheless, the absence of any expectation
on my part that it will break the window does not prevent it from breaking the
window. Nor does my lack of prior
experience here (the fact that I have never before seen a baseball break a
window) prevent me from seeing it break the window. And, as we learn as children, covering our
faces and trying not to see the breaking of the window does not slow down the
baseball in the least.
Prior experience or prior
expectation might be necessary for my seeing an event as a potential
cause. But, surely, my experience or
expectation does not itself cause or even contribute to the causation of the
expected event. For example, I might eat
poisonous mushrooms without awareness or expectation of the unpleasant effect
that they later will have on me. And,
even if I do eat them with this effect plainly in mind, deliberately setting
out to poison myself, my actual experience of the actual effect will occur only
after the experience of eating them.
After all, even if I have a vivid imagination and have an extremely
realistic “experience of being poisoned” prior to eating the mushrooms, I still
am only imagining the future effect – I am not yet experiencing it. Besides, unless I am a hypochondriac, the
chemical properties of the fungi, not my prior imagery, will produce the
anticipated effects. So, disappointingly
enough, there is absolutely nothing to this part of his argument either.
VIII
One last note on Culler’s argument: While
he insists on reversing the causal order of things in almost every area, he
does manage to get the order right when it suits him. For example, he does have it right when he
suggests that the experience of pain sometimes causes us to look for and
discover a pin. But, why be so
selectively perverse? Why not argue for
a reversal of the causal order even here?
Why not reverse it everywhere?
Why not say that the pain did not cause me to look for a pin? Why not say instead that looking about for a
pin was the cause of the pain, since the pin was the cause of the pain, and the
experience of looking for a pin came before finding the pin that caused the
pain. Why not say that only my prior
experience of pains causing me to look about enabled me to identify my looking
about as being caused by the pain, so that really the looking about was the
cause of the pain, not the pain the cause of looking about? Having swallowed the camels, why strain at
the remaining few gnats? Even madness is
enhanced by consistency, unless we want to track down and deconstruct
consistency too while we are about it.
If we accept Culler’s claim that we have gotten the causal
order of all or many things backwards, we are saddled with an insurmountable
problem: How then should we even begin
to understand or explain how or why things happen as they do? As I watch the hands on my wind-up clock
slowly turning, how am I to explain their ability to wind up the mainspring,
lacking the momentum to do that? How
could feeling a pain be causally responsible for my being stuck by the
pin? What would the underlying causal
mechanism be, by which pains bring about the wounds that ordinarily think are
their causes? How could the whistle of
the teapot be the cause of the water’s boiling? What on earth could Culler (or the editors
at Cornell University Press who approved his manuscript) have been
thinking? Was he thinking of the fact
that microwaves cause heat by producing sound?
But, then, what did he think produced the whistle? One must think that he really wasn’t thinking
here at all.
Now, if all causation (every tiny link in the causal chain)
were reversed, then perhaps we could maintain a consistent causal story. But, ordinary causation will be preserved
only if all events are reversed. If only a select few arbitrarily selected
chunks of history trade places with each other in the causal chain, as Culler
seems to want it, then causal explanation will entirely break down. On the other hand, if all causal processes in
the causal chain are reversed, so that the history of our world unfolds like a
film run in reverse, pains still will not cause pins to pierce our flesh. Rather, it seems, they would cause pins to be
expelled from our flesh. But even this
is not clear. If our universe were
running in reverse, it isn’t clear that large objects such as pins and hammers could
have the important and decisive role in causal explanations that they now
have. Most causal explanations would
have to refer to the component micro-parts of the whole system.
In order to try to think about this more clearly, let us
greatly simplify our picture of the kind of world in which we live. Let us imagine that we live in a simplified
Newtonian world. Basically, the
simplified picture is this: Everything that
exists is, so to speak, composed of tiny little billiard balls (atoms) whose
behavior is completely covered by the laws of motion and gravitation. Such a system is completely deterministic –
the original positions and directional velocities of the balls determine every
future state in the universe. Each
successive state of this universe is just another link in the great causal
chain, leading inexorably to the next link in the chain (next state in the
universe). Now, as an expository
fiction, let us also imagine that there is a first cause in this universe, and
let us call Him “God.”
Suppose that, in the beginning, God has all the billiard
balls (atoms) of our universe all bunched up together on the great pool table
of infinite space, and that He calls the Heavenly Host around Him to
observe. “Watch this,” He commands,
rubbing a goodly extra amount of chalk on His cue. He carefully (very carefully) arranges the balls just right, sights down his cue,
and (taking very careful aim), He BREAKS (this is the Big Bang). Now, since this is a completely deterministic
system, and since God has infinite Intelligence, He can call every pocket at
every future instant for every ball (atom) in the game, all the way to the
eventual “heat death” of the universe.
That is to say, He can plot and predict the course and career of every
atom in your body, every atom in the fiery furnace of every star, and of course
every sound and motion you will ever produce.
There are several things worth noting about this picture of
an Infinite Intelligence playing with a completely deterministic, Newtonian
universe. First, if a God working with
such a system wanted to create a universe with exactly the same history as
ours, (exactly, down to the last sigh, whisper, and rustle of every leaf in the
breeze), then He could indeed produce it by paying sufficient attention to the
original arrangement and impulse given to the component atoms at the beginning. Needless to say, it would be a wild
understatement to say that the shots He was calling were long shots. They would be very long shots, indeed, but no
problem in principle for an Infinite Intelligence working with a completely
deterministic system. And, the Newtonian
universe is such a system.
The second thing of interest is that God would not need to
plan His shots at all to get a universe as glorious, beautiful, and apparently
planned as ours. He could just mix and
scramble the original atoms as carelessly as you please, and break with His eyes closed. That is to say, the Newtonian universe is
much like a kaliedoscope that yields beautiful patterns no matter how we shake
it. With a different original
configuration of the component parts, of course, there would be different
galaxies and different solar systems in different places, evolving different
forms of intelligent, creative life.
(Darwin’s theory does not simply explain how intelligent and creative
life forms can evolve without their being designed by an intelligent creator –
it shows that the evolution of such marvelous life forms is virtually inevitable in any universe made of
roughly the same number and type of deterministic components as ours, so long
as the original impetus is sufficiently large.
No matter what the original random
jumble, any deterministic universe marches inexorably toward complex,
organized life, because only the random structures that can survive
continue.)
The third thing to notice about the Newtonian universe is
that it is the kind of mechanism that theoretically could run in reverse, so to
speak. Now, it is very difficult to
believe that this is a possibility, but it is.
When I throw a stone out upon the still waters of a pond, see the
splash, and watch the ripples spread to spread to the shores as the stone sinks
into the mud at the bottom of the pond, I am inclined to think that I am
observing an event that simply could not run in reverse in this world. At first glance, it seems that it would be absolutely
impossible for ripples to begin at the shore and proceed to the middle, or for
something as infirm and runny as water to heave a stone from the center of the
pond back into my hand. We tend to
think of the energy from the stone as becoming so randomly diffused throughout
the water that the direction of this event could never be reversed by reversing
the vectors of the atoms involved. But,
of course, this is a mistake. In a
Newtonian universe, all the energy that is diffused by the thrown stone is
diffused in a completely determined, precise, non-random manner. It is random only in the sense that we
limited beings do not have the means to keep track of it. So, if all the motions of all the atoms in
the system were suddenly reversed, then the stone would indeed be ejected from
the water, just as surely as all the billiard balls (even on an uneven table)
would return to their original formation if their motions and the motions of
all atoms in the system suddenly were reversed.
(The fact that this latter would happen even if the table were uneven
shows that the force of gravity does not have to be reversed for this reversal
of the succession of events to occur.
And, the fact that gravity does not have to be reversed to yield a
reverse-world seems yet another reason to regard gravity as being a queer and
somehow not very respectable kind of force.)
So, if God suddenly reversed the vectors (speed and velocity)
of every atom in the Newtonian universe we have imagined, then everything would
happen in reverse. Rivers would run
uphill, and raindrops would go up to the clouds, even though gravity still
operated normally. Stones we had thrown
into the water would be ejected, and bubbles we had blown under water would
descend from the surface back into our mouths.
Billiard balls that had come to rest on the table would begin slowly to
move, increase their speed, bounce off the sides, and return to their original
formation, knocking the cue back into our hands. The blood and entrails of mice in spring
traps would return to the mice, and the springs would return to set position,
and the mice then would back away, and so on and on. The light in a room would converge from the
surfaces of objects to the filament of an incandescent light bulb, heating it
to white hotness, moving electrons through its cord back to the turbines at the
dam, pushing water up into the reservoir.
People sitting on commodes would not be evacuating their bowels, but
would be receiving waste matter into their bodies. If one could watch such a
thing, it would be like watching a film of things running in reverse. (Note that our universe likely is very
different from the Newtonian billiard ball picture. For one thing, it isn’t clear to me how the
billiard ball-atom picture explains chemical bonding of atoms needed to make
molecules. So, it is only a very primitive thought-experiment.)
Now, suppose that in the beginning, the constituent atoms of
our universe were randomly scattered over all space (somewhat as they might be
at the heat death of our universe); and, suppose that God wanted to arrange
them and give them such an impetus that they would result in a history exactly the
reverse of the history of this universe.
Of course this would require exquisite planning on the part of the
Infinite Intelligence, but in principle it would require no more planning than
if He had wanted to arrange the Big Bang in such a way that it would result in
a world with exactly our history, running forward. Both our world and its reverse-world are
systems in which strict deterministic causation reigns. But, there are several important differences
between a world like ours and its reverse-world.
The first obvious difference is that a universe like ours
(running forward, and having wonderfully adapted, complex organisms) requires
no planning. As noted earlier, Darwin’s
theory explains how complex life would evolve almost necessarily, no matter how
the atoms were arranged at the moment of the big bang. God could break with His eyes closed, and
still get a marvelous universe, albeit an unplanned one very different from
ours – different galaxies and evolution
of different forms of life in different places.
A reverse-world, however necessarily would require absolutely
mind-boggling preplanning. Think of the
prior coordination required just to make the atoms in a pond converge to eject
a single stone! Just having one or two
little atoms not lined up quite right at the beginning of a reverse-world would
rapidly lead to increasing chaos, so that complex organisms probably never
would be formed, and certainly the atoms never would succeed in converging at
the big bang position. They would
converge in that direction only for a while before returning again in the
direction of the heat death of the universe.
Noticing that a deterministic mechanism such as the Newtonian
universe can run backwards as well as it can forward, we might begin to wonder
which direction our universe is running.
Some have thought that people in such a reverse-world would not be able
to notice it, since at any instant their brains and thus their memories would
be just the same as they would be in our counterpart brains. Of course the “memories” of reverse-world
people would be false, being “memories” of a childhood that they have not had
and so had not experienced. But,
wouldn’t it seem to them that they remember their childhood, since their brains
would have all the “memory traces” of the brain of one who did have a childhood
to remember?
Well, I just don’t know what to say. But, if all the reverse-world people’s
“memories” are false (being of a “future” that they haven’t yet had), and if they don’t know anything of what has
happened so far in their world (none of that is registered in their
brains), then I should think that we would have to say that they don’t know
anything at all. And, if they don’t know
a single thing, how can we say that they understand or believe anything, or
even that anything seems one way or
another to them?
As for their experiences, they are incapable of ever seeing
anything in the world around them. They
cannot see ducks, for example, because light is always leaving their eyes, not
entering them. When there is an image of
a bird on their retina, it is not caused by the bird that is before their
eyes. So, we can no more say that they
see anything than that their stomachs are digesting the food that is being “reconstituted”
and sent back up their throats, out their mouths, and onto the table. So, what are we to say that they
experience? Even we do not experience
the events that occur in our brains, having no sense organs there.
But, let us say that the reverse-world people do have
“experiences” parallel to ours, only running backwards in time, so to
speak. Shall we suppose that they would
make any more sense of their experience than we would if everyone began
sounding like a recording played in reverse?
Shall we suppose that it would make perfect sense to them, since (given
that their brains are running in reverse) they are thinking backwards in
parallel with their backward experience?
But, can thinking in reverse (going from “Eureka!” to confusion) be
called solving a problem or figuring out something? Suppose that they did have the solution to a
problem. It would be a solution to a
problem that they hadn’t yet thought about.
Suppose they were confused.
Should we say they were confused about a question that they hadn’t yet
asked but had already solved? What can
they get right if they do think anything?
If they think that bread nourishes their bodies, they are wrong, since
(at most) their bodies produce bread.
But, would thinking this false thing backwards make them right?
I want to say that this all is nonsense, that we simply don’t
know what we are talking about when we speak of reverse-world people thinking,
knowing, figuring out, and understanding things. Sometimes we are tempted to say that words or
sentences are used to express thoughts, as though we could have thoughts
without having a language to express them.
This lead Wittgenstein to ask, What thought then is expressed by the
words, “It is raining”? Shall we also
ask, What thought is expressed when these words are spoken of thought
backwards? But, we need not wrinkle our
collective brow over this. The
reverse-worlders have no language. They
do not speak. Words never come to their
lips. All that ever happens in their
world is that waves of air molecules converge toward their mouths, causing
their vocal chords to vibrate, and so on.
It is not as though they have something sensible to say, if only they
could speak. They simply do not speak. Nor do they ever learn anything, nothing ever
entering their eyes or ears.
The contentiousness and uncertainty of all this aside, I do
not think that it is presumptuous to say that we do know that our world is not
a reverse-world. Perhaps the best reason
for thinking this (if we need a reason) is that only an Infinite Intelligence
could plan and execute a reverse-world, and there is no evidence that such an
Infinite Intelligence exists.
Reverse-worlds necessarily are highly contrived. The do not evolve naturally, and they are
statistically improbable in the extreme, even for completely deterministic
Newtonian billiard-ball universes. I
suspect as well that reverse-worlds violate the second law of thermodynamics,
but I really haven’t thought it out.
And, our universe does not seem to be as deterministic as Newton
thought. There are many causal events
(at least at the subatomic level) that seem not to be deterministic in our
world. But, as noted above, the tiniest
amount of indeterminacy rapidly causes reverse-worlds to degenerate in the
direction of increased entropy and chaos, so that we have another reason (if
needed) to doubt that ours is a reverse-world.
The evolution of complicated life forms in a forward-running universe,
on the other hand, can accommodate – though it does not at all require – a
small amount of indeterminacy.
Although the causal mechanism (at the micro-level) is running
in reverse in our imagined reverse-world, many of the causal explanations that
we use to explain things would not be valid
(even in reverse) in a reverse-world.
For example, Darwin’s theory would have no power to explain the
existence of apparent, complicated life forms if they were found in
reverse-worlds. An advantageous mutation
could not explain the proliferation (can we even speak of proliferation when
the number is constantly diminishing?) of a species, since the proliferation of
that species would precede the supposedly advantageous mutation. But, neither will causal relations at this
level be the reverse of what they are in our world (the “survival” of the
species will not be the cause of the mutation).
In fact, almost none of the macro-level causal explanations
that we ordinarily give for things will be available (even in reverse) in the
reverse-world. The ground’s being wet
will not be the cause of rain, as it never rains in the reverse-world (water
“drops” are driven up to the clouds, points first, by the prearranged,
concerted actions of the molecules in the earth and air). The ejection of the stone from the water will
be caused by an amazing co-ordination of the micro-parts of the rest of the
universe, converging to produce that effect.
Since the prime causal movers in this reverse-world are so often the micro-parts
(which are too small and too numerous for us to keep track of), even outside
observers would be at a loss to see what might happen next in many cases.
In sum, the point of this last (extended) note on Cullers’
thesis is simply this: His suggestion
that perhaps we have temporally inverted cause and effect, that perhaps we have
gotten the causal order of things backwards, does not bear scrutiny. Ignoring the pathetic “arguments” that he
offered as Nietzsche’s, the suggestion itself is not even faintly
sensible. To suggest that we have gotten
things backwards in thinking that pins cause pains is to abandon all notion of
causality, not to invert it. The reason
for this is that there is no explanation how a pain could cause a pin.
Of course it is conceivable that a Newtonian universe could
run backwards, but not without being rigged by a perverse God with the mind of
a Laplacian computer. And, even if we
were part of such a universe, our hearing the report of a gun would could not
be the cause of the gun’s firing, since in such reverse-worlds guns do not fire
and people do not hear (bullets travel into the muzzles of guns, and sound
waves travel away from people’s ears in reverse-worlds). Indeed, reverse-world people would not be
able to make enough sense of anything even to get it backwards. So, again, there seems to be nothing to
Culler’s suggestion. To say any more
would be to prove Austin wrong, that there can indeed be something even more
boring than the repetition of things that are not even faintly sensible,
namely, belaboring the point that nonsense is nonsense.
IX
What I should like to be able to do in conclusion is to offer
a cure or a prophylactic against any further such exercises in nonsense. To this end, I would like to recommend
fidelity to a principle that seems to have been abandoned in recent years. The principle is this: Extraordinary claims require extraordinary
evidence. I think Hume said it
first. For example, if Uri Geller tells
us, say, that he has the telekinetic power to bend spoons with his mind, a
claim that goes against everything we think we know about the causal machinery
of nature, then he needs extraordinary evidence to make his claim plausible and
to overcome our well-founded skepticism.
Or, to use another example, if people would have us believe the
remarkable story that giant reptiles once roamed our planet, then they had better
have very good evidence to back up their story.
And, of course, they do. They
have the bones. So, if Culler would have
us believe the astonishing claim that we have gotten the causal order backwards
with respect to pins and pains, he should be prepared to give remarkably solid
arguments and should provide a sensible account of the causation involved. And, he has done neither.
Unfortunately, adherence to the principle that extraordinary
claims should be backed by extraordinary evidence will not stop this flow of
nonsense. The reason for this is that
many (even supposedly well-educated and intelligent people) simply do not have
any sense or feel for what is and is not extraordinary. They have no sense of Wonder. Nothing, it seems, can astonish them. Why is this?
Is it because they know so little of science that they can “believe”
just anything? Or, do they willfully and
deliberately turn their backs on what they know, not finding reality to their
taste, wishing things to be possible that are not? Or, does it make them feel superior to think
they know more than science knows? (I had a friend who claimed he could levitate
by reciting a mantra he had learned from the Maharishi Yogi. When I asked him why he persisted in
believing that he could violate the laws of nature by reciting a mantra, he
confessed that it made him feel superior to think he could do what all science
tells us is impossible.) In the end, I
do not know how such idiocy gets traction in our universities. But, I cannot believe that such extraordinary
and astonishing claims result from nothing more than an error in computation, a
false step in an argument, a simple little mistake.
PS: One piece of
post-modernist nonsense that should be laid to rest here is the false claim
that Nietzsche would approve of Cullers’ deconstruction of causality. Nietzsche was an unabashed and unapologetic
determinist. It may well be that the
spirochetes caused him to descend into madness, but there is no evidence that
he became so feeble-minded as to think that effects could precede their
causes. The sole evidence that these
people adduce to try to find company in their idiocy is that Nietzsche was
aware that sometimes we can mistake the cause for the effect. This is just the correlation-to-cause
fallacy, sometimes called cum-hoc as opposed to post-hoc. One of his examples of this was that we might
notice that pastors often are effeminate, and this might lead us to think that
being a pastor makes men effeminate.
But, remarks Nietzsche, perhaps we have gotten the causal relation
reversed. Perhaps pastors are generally
effeminate only because effeminate men are more likely to be attracted to that
occupation. This kind of fallacy (taking
the cause to be the effect) is possible only where we are informed of a
correlation between two things and not told which temporally came first. The fallacy of Cum hoc is made possible when
we fail to notice that the correlation between A and B might be explained, not
by the fact that A causes B, but by the fact that B causes A (or, even by the
fact that some third thing C is the cause of both A and B). Committing this fallacy (and noting that it
is a fallacy) does not involve the idiocy
of thinking that the actual effect actually precedes the cause.
So, say we to Culler:
Q.E. ~D.
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