No Causation without Reification

Based on the original post, and OP comments, it sounds like the proposal here is:

Thesis: Not once ever has causality existed in the territory.

Support: There's nothing I can say that does not involve drawing a map.

Which, to me, looks like textbook "begging the question" - OP is picking one specific thing that can be said: "A causes B" and saying "look: causality can't be in the territory because it's just an idea in the map, just like everything else."

But that provides no insight or additional information. There's nothing special about "causality" not being in the territory, any more than saying "apples" aren't in the territory or "atoms aren't in the territory" or "justice isn't in the territory" or "paradoxes aren't in the territory" 

Once you place "the territory" beyond the reach of mere words to describe, it ceases to be possible to talk about what attributes it does or does not have. You can't usefully say "the territory doesn't have causality" when you have already said "I can't talk about the territory"

Even within the meta-map that places the territory outside the reach of mere words, it remains useful to talk about the presence or absence of causality at the limit of what words can reach. Is there time at the quantum interaction level; does it behave in the same way; are there iff relationships between superstrings - I'm certainly not qualified to opine on the answers, but the questions are of at least theoretical interest. (and theory with no practicality can still be useful - imaginary numbers were just a plaything of the mind for hundreds of years, until suddenly they became the math of a key industry)

Hume made this point in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. :) 

Edit: added a link. 

My point is that the entirety of what we think we mean when we say $A⟹B$ is ontological, i.e it's in the map. Not once ever has causality existed in the territory.

and 

This means that there's no aspect of the territory that is causality. There's no $A$, there's no $B$, there's no $⟹$, there's just "is".

I'm glad I'm not the only one who finds this self-evident. The world indeed just is. You can think of it in timeless terms, or in evolving terms, but it doesn't change anything. You are a part of the world and so you just are, as well. There is no causality in you except for a physical process in your brain doing what feels like reification.

I thought that the argument you made was quite assertive. I don't think it's nearly as obvious as you claim that causality is in the map, even though it is a possibility that is often underappreciated.

Whenever I read or think about causation, I wish language allowed to make the distinction between the two types:

• $A⟹B$         (A is sufficient to cause B): Too many bullet holes cause death.
• $\neg A⟹\neg B$   (A is necessary to cause B): Lack of vitamin C causes scurvy.

It sounds like you're begging the question here.

Unless you are positing strict determinism, or full timeless physics, or literal "there is no territory," a causing b just means a is either a necessary, sufficient, or both condition for b. Define a and b at whatever level you want to call the "territory."

My point is that the entirety of what we think we mean when we say A⟹B is ontological, i.e it’s in the map. Not once ever has causality existed in the territory.

Is there an argument to support that?

Try to imagine what the world is like if you’re not modeling it. Are you picturing atoms? Particles? Wave functions? Strings?

Wrong!

Those are all models we impose on the world to make sense of it. Useful ones, usually, but still models

And is there an argument to support that?

I can see how the mere usefulness of a map level category isn't sufficient reason to believe that the feature exists in the territory. But, equally, the usefulness of a map level feature is no reason to believe that there is not something corresponding to it in the territory. Nor is the fact that it is a map level symbol. Maps are not necessarily false, nor necessarily true.

What’s an example of a misconception someone might have due to having a mistaken understanding of causality, as you describe here?

Formally, we often model causation as the action of one thing implying another, and we might formalize this with mathematical notation like $A⟹B$ to mean some event or thing $A$ causes some other event or thing $B$ to happen.

Causation is not so easy to model. I have a job that requires a degree. This implies that I have a degree. But my having this job did not cause me to have a degree (to clarify, perhaps the expectation of gaining such a job caused me to get the degree, but not the job itself). From ET Jaynes, after a similar example:

This example shows also that the major premise, ‘if A then B’ expresses B only as a logical consequence of A; and not necessarily a causal physical consequence, which could be effective only at a later time. The rain at 10 am is not the physical cause of the clouds at 9:45 am. Nevertheless, the proper logical connection is not in the uncertain causal direction (clouds ⇒ rain), but rather (rain ⇒ clouds), which is certain, although noncausal. We emphasize at the outset that we are concerned here with logical connections, because some discussions and applications of inference have fallen into serious error through failure to see the distinction between logical implication and physical causation. The distinction is analyzed in some depth by Simon and Rescher (1966), who note that all attempts to interpret implication as expressing physical causation founder on the lack of contraposition expressed by the second syllogism (1.2). That is, if we tried to interpret the major premise as ‘A is the physical cause of B’, then we would hardly be able to accept that ‘not-B is the physical cause of not-A’. In Chapter 3 we shall see that attempts to interpret plausible inferences in terms of physical causation fare no better.

Judea Pearl is supposedly working on defining causation, though I know little of it. I think he talks abut "backwards causation" and the examples of it that I've heard (if I recall correctly) sound like they confuse the job with the expectation of the job. Maybe causation is an incoherent idea.

This means that there's no aspect of the territory that is causality. There's no A, there's no B, there's no ⟹, there's just "is".

Here's how I think of it: I have sensory data coming in (what I see and hear and so on), and every word I associate with that data is an abstraction that seems to match with a useful pattern within the data (e.g. "I'm looking at a table"). So I think we kind of agree with the "There's no A or B" (the table is not fundamentally part of the universe, it's my model of some collection of actual universe "stuff"^[1]), though I would phrase it in a way in which people might think we disagree. I think it still makes sense to talk about A or B (tables are real), it's just that statements like "A is true" become a lot more slippery (but not in a "Everybody has their own truth, man" way). And this is the case, as you say, even at the level of atoms, though our sensory data is intermediated with other high-tech tools (e.g. electron microscopes or whatever).

Where I think we disagree is "there's no ⟹". Maybe there isn't. But the universe apparently follows some rules. The laws that physicists found may be implications of these rules, but they might be the rules themselves. For the sake of analogy, the "code" that the universe runs on might contain "matter/energy cannot be created or destroyed", and I think it's fair to consider this to be part of the universe (though whether we can establish that a rule is actually in the code is another matter). The rules might also contain something about causation.

Anyway, great post.