causality, culpability and connectedness


 

Author’s Prologue: This essay speaks to general dysfunction in the world arising from the values and beliefs of a now globally dominant Western civilization.  A science-fostered aberrant belief in the ‘here and now’, aka ‘being’, as the ‘source’ of dynamical behaviour lies at the heart of this dysfunction.  But, as scientist-philosophers such as Ernst Mach and Erwin Schrödinger have shared, our Atman [here-and-now ‘self’] is our Brahman [our everywhere-and-always ‘self’].

 

Yes, it is useful and perhaps necessary to personify a hurricane (e.g. ‘Katrina’) and speak in terms of this ‘local being’, the Atman-hurricane; its ‘birth’, its ‘development’ and intensification/strengthening, its ‘movements’ and its ‘assertive actions’ such as the ‘wreaking of destruction in New Orleans’, and of its dissipation and demise.   But it was never not the Brahman-hurricane, the dimple in the continually transforming spatial plenum, the dimple that could not help but be ‘one with everything’, informed by everything in the universe and spokesman for everything in the universe.  The universe expresses itself through a diverse multiplicity of such ‘spokes-agents’.  Mainstream science and Western civilization (it’s ‘secular’ operative values and beliefs) like to pretend that the Atman world, the ‘here and now’ in terms of ‘local thing-in-themselves beings’ and ‘what they do’ is ‘all there is’.   This implies locally arising (‘here-and-now’ in space and time) behavioural dynamics.

 

The corollary that we can identify the ultimate causal source of a ‘result’ establishes the conditions for ‘moral judgement’ of individual cause-effect behaviour that Western style criminal justice systems are built on.  This essay is to show (by lifting the hood that covers our collection of no-longer questioned historically accumulated assumptions that shape the lenses we now observe/interpret the world through) that ‘cause-and-effect’, based on the notion of a ‘here-and-now’ that it arises out of, is a logic-fabricated illusion; it is Schrödinger’s ‘schaumkommen’ (‘appearances’), Nietzsche’s ‘Fiktion’, and the Vedic’s ‘Maya’.   The intent of this essay, is not to ‘do away’ with the ‘illusion’ of, for example, the ‘Atman-hurricane called Katrina’, but to restore to its natural primacy, its Brahman aspect so that we can understand it in the larger, natural context of an ‘organizing’ amongst many ‘organizings’ within the all-pervasive Organizing-known-as-Nature.   To paraphrase Emerson in ‘The Method of Nature’; “The Organizing not only inhabits the ‘organizings’, it creates them.”

 

When the transcendent Brahman-self is restored to our view of physical dynamics, as relativity and quantum physics insist it must, so that we can understand Atman-selves (‘things-in-themselves that act/interact in the here-and-now) in physically realistic context, our understandings and values shift towards those of the indigenous aboriginal peoples of Turtle Island, and our sense of ‘justice’ rises above ‘reward and punishment’ based on ‘moral judgement of good versus evil behaviour’ to ‘cultivating and sustaining harmony in the relational web/space of community’ where Mitakuye oyasin prevails.

 

* * *

 

The concept of ‘cause-and-effect’ is the mainstay of Western Criminal justice.  Meanwhile, basic flaws in this ‘over-simplistic’ concept have been clearly identified in scientific investigations of the past century; e.g. in ‘chaos theory’, and in relativity and quantum physics.  This essay aims to share insight on how misconceptions of ‘cause-effect- relations can impact interpretations of ‘culpability’ in the criminal justice system and in its investigative approach.

 

The action, ‘X’ of disposing of a stubbed but not totally extinguished cigarette butt in a forested environment, … in perhaps 99 out of 100 of such instances, will ‘cause no effect’ other than to ‘litter’ the forest floor.  When, on the 100th instance, the result is ‘Y’, the igniting of a forest fire, we say that this act, ‘X’,  of disposing of a stubbed but not totally extinguished cigarette butt ‘caused’ ‘Y’, the forest fire.

 

But was it ‘really’ the action, ‘X’, that ‘caused’ the result, ‘Y’?  In the overall data set, we have 99 ‘false positives’ where X did not cause the result Y, and one positive in which X did cause the result Y.

 

In medical science, we have the situation where exposure to the normally innocuous bacterium ‘clostridium difficile’ or ‘c. difficile’ correlates with the person coming down with acute colitis which can lead to death.  Medical researchers say that c. difficile is responsible for thousands of deaths, every year, in hospitals around the world.  In association with these cases, ‘c. difficile’ has been described as a ‘superbug’ [anti-biotics resistant drug] that is ‘virulent’ and ‘lethal’.   Meanwhile, the ‘false positives’ to exposures to c. difficile abound; i.e. only people who have been on courses of anti-biotics which have ‘unbalanced’ their digestive tract flora [destabilizing the healthy-state balanced spectrum of about 500 different strains of ‘pro-biotic’ bacteria] furnish the conditions in their bodies that facilitate a disproportionate proliferation of c. difficile bacteria.

 

Antoine Béchamp [Iconic French medical researcher, 1816-1908] and Louis Pasteur (on his deathbed) concluded that the proliferation of bacteria that we call a ‘pathogen’ is the ‘result’ or ‘symptom’ of the illness (the unbalancing of the body) rather than ‘the cause’ of the illness.

 

Albert Szent-Györgyi, Nobel laureate in Medicine (1937, Vitamin C), interpreted viral and bacterial infections to be the ‘result’ of imbalances in the body (dietary deficiencies);

 

In one of his last texts Albert Szent-Györgyi mentions a personal experience: “Last year I collected a rather unfortunate personal experience. I broke down with pneumonia which I could not shake off for months, until I discovered that the quantities of ascorbic acid which I took (one gram daily) had become insufficient at my age (84 years). When I went up from one gram to eight, my troubles were over.” [Note: In the 1940s, Dr. Frederick Klenner, a specialist in chest diseases, successfully cured 41 cases of viral pneumonia using high doses of vitamin C. He published his extensive findings in the February 1948 issue of the Journal of Southern Medicine and Surgery.]

 

There continues to be controversy within medical research over this basic issue as to whether to focus on ‘causal pathogenic agents’ and to attack them with pharmaceuticals, or whether to focus on the pre-conditioning of the body that may be making an ‘innocent bacterium’ appear to be a ‘causal pathogen’.  The former approach has overwhelmingly dominated over the latter.

 

The ambiguity as to whether the ‘result’, ‘Y’, derives from the ‘non-X’ (pre-conditioning of the ‘experimental unit’) or ‘is caused by’ ‘X’ (actions that are applied by some operative agent to the experimental unit), has been called ‘the fundamental dilemma of causality’, or Rubin causality;

 

“The fundamental dilemma of causality, according to Rubin, is that, if we use an experimental unit (a bacterium, e.g. ) to show that “X causes Y,” we cannot use that same unit to show that some “non-X does not cause Y.” We solve this dilemma [statistically] by assuming that all units are more or less the same.”

 

Thus, in the case of the ‘epidemic of c. difficile infections’ in hospitals, ‘c. difficile’ is described as the leading superbug in many hospitals, “a virulent and lethal pathogen”;

 

“As many as 2000 patients may have died in Quebec in 2003– 2004 during an outbreak of Clostridium difficile, which the majority of those patients contracted in hospital.” —Dr. Jacques Pépin, Centre Hospitalier Universitaire de Sherbrooke

 

But, wait a minute!   Can we realistically point to ‘c. difficile’ as the CAUSE, X of ‘Y’, the 2000 deaths, in view of all the ‘false positives’; i.e. many people who are exposed to c. difficile and are living in natural symbiosis with it, are not negatively impacted.

 

“Clostridium difficile colitis is a major complication of antibiotic therapy. Antibiotics cause a reduction in bacteria that normally reside in the colon. If an antibiotic-treated patient ingests C. difficile bacteria, this organism may proliferate in the colon because it is resistant to most antibiotics and because it does not have to compete with the normal bacteria for nutrients. If the C. difficile organism has the gene for toxin production, the toxin can produce a colitis.” — John S. Fordtran, M.D., Baylor University Medical Center

 

“This is really an opportunistic infection,” Dr. Karl Kabasele, the CBC’s medical specialist, explains. “When you are healthy and all is going well, you have benign helpful bacteria in your intestines and when you take antibiotics, or when you are sick, that flora gets disrupted, and things like C. difficile can take over and they multiply and create a toxin and that is where the symptoms come from.”

 

“It’s about antibiotic use and how we help keep antibiotic use as low as we can while still giving the patients who need antibiotics the right antibiotics. — Dr. Allison McGeer, director of infection control at Toronto’s Mount Sinai Hospital.

 

In a general population of experimental units (people), the X (c. difficile exposure) is most often NOT the cause of Y (colitis and death); i.e. there are many ‘false positives’ associated with the exposure to (ingestion of) c. difficile.   Evidently, the non-X that is causing ‘Y’ is the historical pre-conditioning of the experimental unit.

 

As a researcher equipped with the standard scientific investigation tools charged with discovering the cause of colitis, you would be likely to identify ‘c. difficile’ as the ‘pathogen’ holding the smoking gun, and not as an innocent family of bears demolishing the contents of your larder because you inadvertently left it open for them.

 

There is a problem here, as Albert Szent-Györgyi point out;

 

“Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen, and thinking what nobody has thought.”“…What kills science in this country now, (is) that you must tell in advance what you will find, and what you will do exactly, and what you will spend your money on. And if you knew it all, then you wouldn’t need to do it. … And so you cannot have (any) new discoveries.” – Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, Nobel Prize in Medicine for his discovery of Vitamin C and its effects.

 

That is, if the researcher starts out from a ‘negative effect’, Y, such as colitis in search of the causal agent, X, that is responsible for it, this implies the assumption that ‘all experimental units are the same’.  [i.e. it implies that all larders are the same and thus the injury (Y) to the larder must be due to the pathogenic bears (X), except that all larders are not the same, some are continually occupied by natural household members and thus closed to entry by bears.]

 

If one gathers data starting from X, rather than starting from Y, one would find that ‘c. difficile’ is most often innocent/innocuous.  Similarly the cold virus is most often innocuous, as Szent-Györgyi observes;

 

“Mr X has a lack of vitamin C and contracts a cold. The cold leads to pneumonia. Mr X dies and his body is taken to the mortuary…not with the diagnosis “lack of vitamin C”, but with the diagnosis “pneumonia”. This does not matter for him any more, but matters for the rest of mankind, which is mislead in its thinking and judgement about vitamins.”—Dr Albert Szent-Györgyi  [Note: there are roughly 200 different bacterial and viral exposures that can ‘cause pneumonia’ and ‘death by pneumonia.]

 

And, of course, the ‘X’ of disposing of a stubbed cigarette butt is most often innocuous (a ‘false positive’).

 

If one starts with the ‘X’ actions such as ‘personal exposure to c. difficile’, ‘personal exposure to a cold virus’, ‘forest exposure to a stubbed cigarette butt’, there are many ‘false positives’, perhaps 1000 to 1, in regard to those ‘X’ actions NOT CAUSING ‘Y’.

 

However, if we start our investigations from the ‘Y’ side, asking “what has caused these negative outcomes, ‘Y’, we eliminate all of the false positives from such a data set and we come up with close to 100% consistency that ‘X causes Y’.

 

Had we started from ‘X’, we would have concluded that the instances of ‘Y’ were the result of ‘non-X’; i.e. the historical conditioning of the experimental units (the unbalancing, by antibiotics of the digestive tract flora), (the acidic condition of the blood-based cell processes due to lack of ascorbic acid that makes the blood alkaline), and the sun, wind and lack of groundwater induced transforming of the forest into a hair trigger incendiary device).

 

Thus, the ‘cause’ is not the actions, ‘X’, but the ‘non-X’ pre-conditioning of the experimental units.  In other words, the test for causality that “all experimental units are more or less the same” does not hold, although IT APPEARS TO HOLD if we start our investigations from the ‘Y’ side of the ‘cause-effect relation’.

 

The problem that arises with starting one’s investigation ‘from the Y – side’ has shown up in two more contentious examples that will be briefly mentioned here; disputes over whether HIV ‘causes’ AIDS and whether anthropogenic CO2 ‘causes’ global warming (AGW).

 

In the case of HIV and AIDS, the suggestion is that there is a historical preconditioning in the ‘experimental unit’ that can produce both Y (HIV+) and Y (AIDS); i.e. where both of these Ys are due to a non-X that associates with the historical preconditioning of the experimental units.

 

“In 2008, Professor Luc Montagnier, after having been awarded the Nobel Prize, stated: “We can be exposed to HIV many times without being chronically infected. Our immune system will get rid of the virus within a few weeks, if you have a good immune system, thus reversing the long-assumed cause-effect relationship between HIV and AIDS whereby HIV inevitably brings on AIDS. Therefore, HIV infection itself reflects an already deficient immune system; it is the immunodeficiency that causes chronic HIV infection and not vice versa, as commonly believed. Finally, a review in 2009 demonstrated that HIV has been present in humans since at least the early 19OOs, thus definitely ruling out the possibility that it could have been responsible for a syndrome that appeared only at the beginning of the 1980s.  Quite obviously, if HIV caused AIDS, then AIDS should have been observed in earlier periods, when the hygienic and nutritional

conditions of human populations were much worse than in the 1980s (i.e. during the two world wars and the depression in between). The very fact that AIDS was never described before the 1980s despite the persistent presence of HIV in  humans, clearly demonstrates that HIV cannot be the cause of AIDS.”

 — M. Ruggiero, T. Punzi, G. Morucci, S. Pacini, University of Firenze, Italy

 

In the case of anthropogenic global warming, we make the usual scientific assumption that ‘the present depends only on the immediate past’, and on this basis investigators look for correlations between rising global surface temperatures and contemporaneous fluctuations in other measured physical parameters such as the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.  The conclusion of AGW investigators is that X (rising CO2 concentrations due to human sourced internal combustion engine etc. emissions) ‘causes’ Y (rising global temperatures).

 

The possibility of a non-X associated with the historical preconditioning of the experimental unit (the earth) is not considered in AGW.

 

Imagine the case of a local system or a system in which outside influences are known and/or hold constant, such as an apartment building in a region of constant temperature such as in the tropics.  Investigators are charged with monitoring the temperature in the circulating air in the building along with all manner of other physical measurements such as the component gases in the air, the humidity, the pollution, the hours sunshine, the precipitation, the wind velocities and temperatures etc. etc., … all the while looking for correlations across the measured influences so that any deviation in the temperature can be correlated with the various measured influences.   If ice rinks were installed on the unused 3rd, 5th and 7th floors of the building, each with a thickness of ice in feet matching the floor number, as each rink finally melted, its cooling effect would cease and an upward deviation would register on the monitored temperature curve.  Three such increases will appear on the temperature curve [many more in the case of the earth].

 

The standard scientific assumption, a convenient, simplifying assumption, is that the present depends only on the immediate past, … will in this case be violated, since the present, in this case, is being directly influenced from the remote past.  If a correlation ‘is’ found between one of the contemporaneous monitored influences that suggests a ‘cause-and-effect’ explanation of the deviation in the temperature curve, it must necessarily be spurious since X causes Y does not apply in this case, the Y being due to a non-X; i.e. the historical preconditioning of the experimental unit.  This standard scientific ‘simplification of convenience’ that obscures the role of a ‘non-X’ historical conditioning of the experimental unit is discussed by Henri Poincaré as follows;

Origin of Mathematical Physics. Let us go further and study more closely the conditions which have assisted the development of mathematical physics. We recognise at the outset the efforts of men of science have always tended to resolve the complex phenomenon given directly by experiment into a very large number of elementary phenomena, and that in three different ways.

First, with respect to time. Instead of embracing in its entirety the progressive development of a phenomenon, we simply try to connect each moment with the one immediately preceding. We admit that the present state of the world only depends on the immediate past, without being directly influenced, so to speak, by the recollection of a more distant past. Thanks to this postulate, instead of studying directly the whole succession of phenomena, we may confine ourselves to writing down its differential equation; for the laws of Kepler we substitute the law of Newton.

Next, we try to decompose the phenomena in space. What experiment gives us is a confused aggregate of facts spread over a scene of considerable extent. We must try to deduce the elementary phenomenon, which will still be localised in a very small region of space.

 — Henri Poincaré, Extract from ‘Science and Hypothesis, Chapter IX, Hypotheses in Physics’

 

 

To given an example, in the field of social dynamics, of how an investigation that, by starting from the Y (effect) side, can bias an investigative dataset, consider the case of an old-folks home where some of the residents suffer from periodic bouts of confusion and depression, possibly due to some ‘X’ dynamics going on in the home.  The families of the residents pressure for an investigation and start from ‘the Y side’ to learn more about all those who are having these bouts of negative experience.

 

They find that all of the troubled patients have in common the same male nurse (amongst several) that is giving them physical checks (blood pressure etc.) and giving them their doctor prescribed pills and injections etc.  The conjecture as to how this nurse is causing their confusion includes his being a different race, his poor command of English which may be confusing the aging residents who see him, and a general feeling of distrust on important topics such as whether he is giving them the right pills etc.   While the ‘cause’ cannot be unambiguously determined, it is clear that it derives from the male nurse in some way or other, since there is a 100% correlation between the Y effected patients and that particular male nurse.  He is therefore deemed culpable for their distress and is about to be dismissed.

 

Another investigator starts his investigation ‘from the ‘X’ side’ and notices that the same actions of the male nurse cause no problems at all with the others (the majority) of people who he is attending to [i.e. the ‘false positives’ outnumber the ‘positives’].   One of the ‘false positives’ offers that the male nurse does have an annoying, but playful, habit of ‘blowing up and popping his paper lunch bags’.  The investigator reviews the medical records of all of the residents that are being attended to by this particular male nurse and finds that all of those who are suffering the negative ‘Y’ experience being attributed to him are war veterans that have the condition known as ‘shell-shock’ (PTSD).

 

The investigative data set of the second investigator who started from the ‘X’ side included the ‘false positives’ while the investigative data set of the first investigator who started from the ‘Y’ side excluded the false positives.  If we review, once again, ‘Rubin causality’;

 

“The fundamental dilemma of causality, according to Rubin, is that, if we use an experimental unit (a bacterium, e.g. ) to show that “X causes Y,” we cannot use that same unit to show that some “non-X does not cause Y.” We solve this dilemma [statistically] by assuming that all units are more or less the same.”

 

… we see that there is an unresolvable ambiguity as to X causing Y if we investigate only those experimental units who have the negative Y experience.  Using Albert Szent-Györgyi’s argument, if we examine all those who have died of respiratory system failure (pneumonia), we will identify the presence of a pathogen ‘holding the smoking gun’ but the false positives, those people who were exposed to the same pathogens which caused them no negative ‘Y’ results, will be missing from the data set.  Thus 1,000 cases investigated starting from the ‘Y’ side will furnish a data set in which, in all 1,000 case, a bacterial or viral ‘pathogen’ can be identified as ‘the cause of respiratory system failure’ and ‘death’.

 

Had the investigation commenced on the X side, it would have generated a data set in which the ‘false positives’ far outnumbers the ‘positives’; i.e. many more people, when exposed to those same bacteria and viruses held to be the pathogenic agents that caused the negative results ‘Y’, would be unaffected by them.  The conclusion would then have to be that ‘not all experimental units are the same’, therefore the hypothesis that ‘X causes Y’ cannot be confirmed.

 

Criminal Justice Use of the ‘X causes Y’ Investigative Approach

 

While an astute scientific investigator such as and Albert Szent-Györgyi will commence his investigation from the ‘X’ side, the criminal justice agencies typically start their investigations from the ‘Y’ side; i.e. they investigate ‘negative results’, ‘Y’, and, starting from these, attempt to discover the causal agency, ‘X’.

 

In the case of the aging residents of the home for the elderly, where a number of residents were suffering negative ‘Y’ results, the common approach in a criminal justice type investigation would be to gather together these ‘cases’ and search for an ‘X’ that was causally responsible.   By definition, the data set developed in this fashion would necessarily be excluding ‘false positives’ since ‘false positives’ are those cases where the ‘experimental units’ do not suffer the negative ‘Y’ effects when exposed to the ‘X’ actions.

 

For example, if a physiotherapist were accused of ‘inappropriate touching’ [which qualifies as the criminal offence of sexual assault] and the criminal justice investigation commenced with a police appeal to the public for anyone experiencing the negative ‘Y’ effect to come forward and lay sexual assault charges, the data set developed in this manner would exclude ‘false positives’ and so present a consistent 100% correlation between X and Y.   The possibility that a ‘non-X’ was responsible for ‘Y’ such as arises when all experimental units are not the same; e.g. where an action that is innocuous to most experimental units ‘ignites’ a preconditioning within a subset of the experimental units will not show up in a data set that is developed from the ‘Y-side’ investigation, which includes only those experimental units that share the common ‘preconditioning’.

 

Y-side investigation of forest fires (the ‘Y’ result ‘is’ the forest fire) may show a 100% correlation between disposal of stubbed out [but unextinguished] cigarette butts and the forest fires, and would lead a criminal investigation to conclude that the ‘cause’ of the forest fire (Y) was the action of disposing of unextinguished cigarette butts, in all cases.  The false positives would not show up in such an investigation and responsibility for causing the fire would be attributed to the action X and to the author of that action.

 

Y-side investigation of avalanches (the ‘Y’ result ‘is’ the avalanche) may show a 100% correlation between skier or snowmobile traversing on a heavily snow-laden mountain slope, and the avalanche, and could lead [but likely would not] to a criminal investigation to conclude that the ‘cause’ of the avalanche (Y) was the action of skier or snowmobile traversing of the heavily snow-laden mountain slope, in all cases.  The false positives would not show up in such an investigation and responsibility for causing the avalanche would be attributed to the action X and thus to the author of that action.

 

The case of the avalanche differs from the forest fire, in that the five other people that disposed of unextinguished cigarettes in the same forest, where no negative ‘Y’ result transpired are never seen and never part of the dataset, whereas if those other five people who traversed the same slope before the negative ‘Y’ result transpired, it is impossible to exclude the ‘false positives’ from the data set, which weaken the progression from a ‘correlation’ between ‘X’ and ‘Y’ to a ‘causal relation’ between ‘X’ and ‘Y’, as is more readily achieved in the case of the cigarette butt disposal ‘X’ and the forest fire ‘Y’ where a large number of cigarette butts could have been disposed of in the same way without any associated negative ‘Y’ result.  The invisibility of these ‘false positives’ and thus their ‘exclusion’ from the investigative data set, sets the stage for the conclusion that the action ‘X’ caused the negative result ‘Y’, and therefore that the result ‘Y’ was not due to a ‘non-X’ such as a preconditioning of the experimental unit.

 

Logically, there is no difference between investigating the result ‘Y’ where the bodies of children are being pulled out of the snow pile moraine of the avalanche, that leads back to the smoking gun holder, the skier under who’s skis the avalanche commence, and holding the skier to be responsible for the actions ‘X’ which caused the result ‘Y’, … and investigating the result ‘Y’ where the bodies of children are being pulled out of burning homes caught up in the forest fire, that leads back to the smoking gun holder, the smoker around whose unextinguished cigarette butt the forest fire commenced, and holding the smoker responsible for the actions ‘X’ which caused the result ‘Y’.

 

In both cases, the same normally innocuous actions ‘X’ had unfortunate encounters with atypical preconditioned ‘experimental units’, and rather than the ‘X’ actions ending up as ‘false positives’, their encounter with different-than-usual ‘experimental units’ [the ‘non-X’ source of ‘Y’] produced the negative ‘Y’ results.

 

It is the exclusion of the false positives that results from investigations that commence from the ‘Y’ side, that open the door to the psychological impression that ‘X’ causes ‘Y’.

 

Criminal Intent

 

Because of the ‘fundamental dilemma’ of causality (Rubin), establishing ‘cause’ is ambiguous because of the problem of establishing that ‘all experimental units are the same’.  Clearly, the act of giving a child a peanut-nut butter sandwich is innocuous enough, but such an innocuous can nevertheless be lethal to some ‘experimental units’.  If the author of the action knew that he was causing harm to the experimental unit, this would be very different from the case where his action proceeded in his unawareness of the harm it could do.  The male nurse’s action of popping his paper lunch bags also falls into this category.

 

In a criminal justice investigation, then, in those cases where the negative result ‘Y’ cannot be said to be the result of the actions ‘X’ due to the large number of ‘false positives’ associated with these same actions, and where the result ‘Y’ derives from the ‘non-X’ of the precondition of the experimental unit, … the causal relation of the actions ‘X’ to the result ‘Y’ do not stand up.  That is, the action of supplying the peanut-butter sandwich, ‘X’, is not the ‘cause’ of the result ‘Y’, the death of the person who consumes it, per Rubin’s principle.  Therefore, the criminal justice process would have to establish ‘intent’ on the part of the person to ‘do harm’, rather than to rely on the now-defunct cause-effect relation between the actions ‘X’ and the result ‘Y’ due to the abundance of ‘false positives’.

 

As already mentioned, criminal justice investigative processes typically commence from the ‘Y-side’ and thus tend to produce investigative data sets that exclude potential ‘false positives’ and thus exclude the possibility that a precondition in the experimental unit may be a ‘non-X’ that sources the result ‘Y’, rather than the actions ‘X’ in themselves.

 

For example, if a physiotherapist ‘didn’t worry too much’ or ‘didn’t take sufficient care’ to give a wide enough margin to female genitalia [i.e. his hands might go anywhere they needed to go to get the job done in the case of a practice dummy], there might be no negative result ‘Y’ in most cases (e.g. 99,950 such sessions), while in a very small minority of those sessions (e.g. 50 sessions involving 23 experimental units/persons), the negative ‘Y’ experiences may have turned up in a criminal justice investigation that commenced from the ‘Y-side’.  The investigative data set developed by the criminal justice system would typically exclude the ‘false positives’, however, an investigative data set starting from the ‘X-side’ could include an abundance or predominance of ‘false positives’.

 

In such a case, the proposition of ‘X’ causes ‘Y’ does not hold up; e.g. giving children peanut-butter sandwiches, in most cases, does not cause sickness and/or death.  In administering ‘justice’ then, one would have to establish ‘intent’ to proceed with actions ‘X’, knowing them to be harmful to the experimental unit because of the particular constitution or precondition of the experimental unit and not due to the actions ‘X’ in themselves.  If the experimental unit has a pre-condition or ‘non-X’ that ignites the negative result ‘Y’ in them, that the author of the actions ‘X’ is unaware of, since the simple ‘causal relation’ of ‘X’ causes ‘Y’ does not hold water due to ‘false positives’, an injustice would result from going ahead, using a ‘Y-side’ investigative dataset that excluded false positives, and assuming a causal relation between the actions ‘X’ and the result ‘Y’.

 

Only in the case where the author of the non-causal actions ‘X’ INTENTIONALLY/ AWARELY ignited the negative result ‘Y’ due to the ‘non-X’ of a precondition in the ‘atypical’ experimental unit, would there be reasonable cause to hold the author of the non-causal actions ‘X’ responsible for negative result ‘Y’.

 

The ‘misuse’ of the concept of ‘cause-and-effect’ seems to be not ‘uncommon’ in our society, as in the testimony of Albert Szent-Györgyi and others.  It crops up in physics in the reconciling of relativity and quantum physics with Newtonian physics.  The general form of the issue is; ‘in considering the result of the action of an operator on an operand or ‘recipient’ of an action, should one attribute the result entirely to the operator or allow that the result derives in some part from the recipient of the action?’  This is not as easily resolved at it appears that it might be at first glance, as it bottoms out in the long-standing split between philosophical ‘dualism’ versus ‘non-dualism’.  In the biological sciences, the organism was long seen as being genetically determined, but modern biologically sees outside-inward shaping influence of ‘epigenesis’ as working in conjugate relation with inside-outward acting ‘genesis’.  The biological cell, rather being seen as a local, material ‘machine-like’ system [a ‘unit of being’] is being seen, instead, as the conjugation of outside-inward orchestrating ‘signals from the environment’ acting through cell ‘receptors’ and inside-outward assertive reproductive actions managed by cell ‘effectors’, re-casting the cell as a ‘unit of perception’ of the transforming relational space it is included in.

 

* * *  End * * *

 

 

Summarizing Scholium:

 

In the above essay, the point is brought forth that we run into the ambiguity that, when an operator X acts upon something or someone [an ‘experimental unit’] and this action is followed by some event Y, although we are inclined to say that ‘X causes Y’, it may be that the experimental unit that X acts upon has undergone ‘historical conditioning’ so that it is not the operator’s action X that is responsible for the result Y, but the ‘historical conditioning’ in the experimental unit.

 

The ambiguity arises from the fact that our science-conditioned thinking has us reduce everything to the ‘here and now’ and to assume that the ‘here and now’ is ‘reality’.

 

The ‘here and now’ IS NOT PHYSICAL REALITY, it is an abstract psychical reality.  The world and everything in it is continually undergoing ‘historical conditioning’ [as in Mach’s principle] which I refer to as ‘historical PRE-conditioning’ simply to reference this conditioning, which is part of the continually transforming relational space we all share inclusion in, to the ‘here and now’ staging ground which we say is where cause-effect events jumpstart out of.

 

Imagine for a moment that we are all whorl-in-the-flow-like ‘organizings’ within the ONE continually transforming relational-spatial ‘Organizing’.  This happens to be the physical phenomenal understanding of the world coming from modern physics.  Now, … there is no place in ‘physical reality’ for ‘local beings’ with their own locally jumpstarting behaviours, in such a worldview, wherein ‘thingless-connectedness’  prevails.  But such a world does accommodate ‘organizings’ within the Unum of the overall Organizing and this is where Mach’s principle comes from; “The dynamics of the organizings/inhabitants are conditioning the dynamics of the Organizing/habitat at the same time as the dynamics of the Organizing/habitat are conditioning the dynamics of the ‘organizings’”.

 

Now, we already have a physical model for this and its called ‘fluid-flow’ and/or ‘wave dynamics’, the stuff that Schrödinger worked on that led to his development of ‘quantum wave dynamics’, which is our prevailing ‘model’ of the physical universe, and suggests that there is no such thing as ‘matter’ per se, but only resonances in the wavefield or whorls in the flow.  Since these whorls are visible and tangible as ‘local forms’, it is very tempting, from the point of view of ‘economy of thought’ [to Mach, science IS economy of thought], to anoint these forms as ‘local, independently-existing beings’ or ‘things-in-themselves’.  This forces us, at the same time, to give them a ‘place to live’ and the place we come up with is ‘absolute space and absolute time’; i.e. a notional box of infinite x,y,z, t dimensions that we can use as a grid to reference their changing shapes [as these things-in-themselves form and develop] and their movements.  While our unilaterally declaring these forms to be ‘things-in-themselves’ does away with the ‘thinglessness’ of quantum relational space, our imposing of a notional absolute space and absolute time reference framing does away with the ‘connectedness’ property of relational space.

 

Psychologically, we use these conventions of absolute space and absolute time to reduce the Organizing, which our experience informs us is going on ‘everywhere at the same time’, in the sense of a gravity field or electromagnetic or thermal field, to the ‘here and now’ where dynamic events ‘locally jumpstart’’ [we think of events as originating from a ‘local point/source’ in space and in time].

 

We formalize this using ‘science’ and ‘mathematics’ as Poincaré describes in this excerpt from ‘Science and Hypothesis’;

Origin of Mathematical Physics. Let us go further and study more closely the conditions which have assisted the development of mathematical physics. We recognise at the outset the efforts of men of science have always tended to resolve the complex phenomenon given directly by experiment into a very large number of elementary phenomena, and that in three different ways.

First, with respect to time. Instead of embracing in its entirety the progressive development of a phenomenon, we simply try to connect each moment with the one immediately preceding. We admit that the present state of the world only depends on the immediate past, without being directly influenced, so to speak, by the recollection of a more distant past. Thanks to this postulate, instead of studying directly the whole succession of phenomena, we may confine ourselves to writing down its differential equation; for the laws of Kepler we substitute the law of Newton.

Next, we try to decompose the phenomena in space. What experiment gives us is a confused aggregate of facts spread over a scene of considerable extent. We must try to deduce the elementary phenomenon, which will still be localised in a very small region of space.

 — Henri Poincaré, Extract from ‘Science and Hypothesis, Chapter IX, Hypotheses in Physics’

 

Psychologically, this reduction of dynamics from ‘everywhere-at-the-same-time Organizing’ to ‘here and now local events in terms of what things-in-themselves are doing in absolute space and absolute time’, while it may seem far-fetched, slowly becomes accepted without question, the more that one uses it.    Thus your ‘piece of property’ starts to seem like a ‘real thing’ because it is legally/logically described as such and we all talk about it as if it is such, and we buy and sell properties as if they were ‘things-in-themselves’.  But the physically reality is that they are inextricably included in the everywhere-at-the-same-time Organizing, and we can’t stop volcanic dust from the other side of the world from dusting our property, and we can’t stop atmosphere from delivering water to it, and we can’t stop the sun and clouds in combination from delivering too little or too much solar irradiance to it, because ‘it’ is not physically real.  ‘It’, this notional locally existing ‘thing-in-itself’ is an abstract concept that is radically unlike the physical reality of our experience.  We make the same mistake, of imputing ‘reality’ to ‘logical plots of land’ at the scale of the sovereign state.  This belief in the reality of local things is a religious/theological belief, it does not come from our physical experience;

 

 “All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts, not only because of their historical development … but also because of their systematic structure.” (Bartelson, Jens. A Genealogy of Sovereignty 1995)

“State sovereignty “is a ‘religion’ and a faith.” … “The skillfully drawn borders that cartographers have provided for us are … spiritual and philosophical abstractions representative of a form of quasi-belief. They are … not detached maps of reality as proponents would have us believe. These geographies reflect an ardent desire to make (or impose) sovereignty a physical reality as natural as the mountains, rivers and lakes…. “.” – Lombardi, Mark Owen. “Third-World Problem-Solving and the ‘Religion’ of Sovereignty: Trends and Prospects.”

[quotes cited by Peter D’Errico, law professor emeritus, University of Massachusetts in ‘Native American Sovereignty: Now you see it, now you don’t’

In the body of the essay, we come back time and again, in each of the cases, to the notion that instead of X causing Y, the source of Y was the non-X associated with the ‘historical conditioning of the experimental unit, rather than the actions X perpetrated by a notional local thing-in-itself’, notionally equipped with ‘its own locally originating, internal process driven and directed behaviour.

 

The suggestion that is begging for us to pick up on it, is that ‘dynamics’ in the general case, are NOT coming from cause-and-effect transactions, but are instead coming from ‘historical conditioning’.  Who ‘IS NOT’ undergoing ‘historical conditioning’?  The baby does not mind having its genitals touched, he/she may smile and giggle.   But if you touch the genitals of an adult, whether accidentally or intentionally, while some may still smile and giggle, others may get very angry.  We then say that they are no longer ‘innocent’ or that they have undergone ‘socialization’ [historical conditioning] by being included in a web of social relations.

 

The suggestion arises that the ‘web of social relations’ may be ‘more fundamental’ than the ‘things included in the web’ [i.e. the ‘Organizing’ may be ‘more fundamental’ than the ‘organizings’ in the ‘Organizing’]

 

If we return to the forest fire example, supposing there is continuously smouldering peat-bed in the forest [underground peat-bed fires can go on for years] and its actions, X, go on for months without ‘causing’ any Y (forest fire) but after some months of hot, dry summer, the same actions of the peat-bed, X ‘cause’ Y (forest fire).   If we start from Y and look for X, we will find the peat-bed holding the smoking gun and we will say that ‘the peat-bed did it’.  But since the actions of the peat-bed X associated with a long string of false positives, it does not make sense to say that ‘the peat-bed did it’.  Instead, we can say that Y was due to a non-X, the historical preconditioning of the experimental unit (the forest).  In fact, we can go farther than this and accuse our own logic of deceiving us, since there are no solid grounds for applying the logic of the excluded third to separate the ‘peat-bed’ from the ‘forest-space’ and give them two separate identities.  We could instead use the logic of the ‘included’ third which would have us see the ‘peat-bed’ and the ‘forest/trees’ as different aspects of the same relational space, since Mach’s principle would seem to hold wherein ‘The dynamics of the peat-bed etc. are conditioning the dynamics of the forested space at the same time as the dynamics of the forested space are conditioning the dynamics of the peat-bed etc.’.

 

In other words, our whole ‘X causes Y’ case depends on our using the ‘EITHER/OR’ logic of the excluded third. so that we can consider the causal agent and the experimental unit as mutually exclusive entities.  Or, in still other words, the notion that ‘X causes Y’ is a philosophical ‘dualism’ based notion, whereas the scientific worldview of Mach, Schroedinger etc. wherein space is relational, constitutes philosophical non-dualism, which requires the BOTH/AND logic of the included third.

 

Returning to our example of the baby/person being touched, … what is innocence?  If we remove ‘socialization’ it is not as if there is ‘nothing left’ as in ‘nihilism’.  The babies/persons are still ‘organizings’ within the ‘Organizing’.  The same is true for the sovereign state.  If everyone in the world agreed that it was counter-productive to sustain the common belief in the local existence/being of the sovereign states, the relational space of the physical world would remain since ‘states are not real’; … “They are … not detached maps of reality as proponents would have us believe. These geographies reflect an ardent desire to make (or impose) sovereignty a physical reality as natural as the mountains, rivers and lakes….”

 

But how easy it comes to us to speak of states as ‘things-in-themselves’ and ‘what they do’, as if such language defined ‘things-in-themselves’ and ‘what they do’ were ‘real’.  They are no more, no less real than the Atmen-self of hurricane Katrina.  The infra-red detection by satellites, of billions of people in the spherical space that wraps over and around on the surface of the earth will not show ‘nationality’, but within the overall relational spatial flow of these bright dots, we can observe patterns, such as the patterns of flow during early colonization, and the formation of whorls of beehive like activity, a behive we might call the U.S. and another we might call Canada, and Mexico etc.  But as with hurricane Katrina, for us to jump from our observation of patterns in the unbounded physical relational flow to notional ‘things-in-themselves’ and ‘how they are developing’ and ‘what they are doing’, has us leaving the world of physical reality and entering into a new linguistic and logical abstraction based ‘pseudo-reality’.

 

In the physical reality, the diverse multiplicity of ‘organizings’ in the ‘Organizing’ are relationally interdependent via the mediating role of the common relational space they are share inclusion in.  In other words, in this physical reality, Mach’s principle prevails; “The dynamics of the organizings [inhabitants] are conditioning the dynamics of the Organizing [habitat] at the same time as the dynamics of the Organizing [habitat] are conditioning the dynamics of the organizings [inhabitants].”

 

But in the pseudo-reality where dynamics jumpstart out of the ‘here-and-now’ and are understood in the synthetic [language-and-logic-abstracted] terms of ‘what things-in-themselves-do-in-space-and-time’, we ignore the innate physical interdependence of these dynamic forms [organizings in the relational-spatial Organizing] via the mediating role of the relational spatial-plenum or physical ‘web-of-life’ they share inclusion in.

 

Since there is no way to extricate the behaviour of an individual ‘organizing’ aka ‘human’ from the dynamics of the Organizing he/she is included in, the applying of moral laws to individual behaviours makes no sense.  That is, there is no such thing as ‘individual behaviour’ taken out of the context of collective behaviour.  Individual behaviour in-its-own-right is ‘abstraction’.  The physical behaviour  of individual ‘organizings’ is innately interdependent by way of their common inclusion in the relational spatial Organizing, as given by Mach’s principle.

 

‘Culpability’ of an individual collapses with the collapse of ‘causality’.  If the storm cell known as Katrina is guilty of the destruction of New Orleans, so too are all of her brother and sister storm-cells or ‘organizings’ within the common Organizing of the relational space of the atmosphere.  It will not do to pull Katrina out on her own and label her the offender and New Orleans the ‘victim’ as in ‘her X (wild blowing) has caused Y (physical injury to New Orleans).  The logic of the excluded third that is needed by our psyche to do this, violates our understanding that there is just ONE Organizing with many organizings within it; i.e. the logic of the included third, instead, applies.

 

If we want to go with the physical reality of our experience rather than the abstractions that come from reducing ‘everywhere at the same time’ to ‘the local here and now’, we have to rise above morality, architected as it is for application to the abstract notion of ‘the behaviour of an individual in its own right’.  There is no such thing, in our physical experience, as ‘the behaviour of an individual in its own right’ because the individual is an ‘organizing’ that shares, with other ‘organizings’, inclusion in a common mediating medium, the dynamic unitary Organizing of the relational spatial-plenum.

 

Our concept of ‘justice’, if we suspend our belief in the pseudo-reality that forms from imposing ‘the metaphysics of absolute space and absolute time’, then moves toward reconciliation with the physical ‘resonance-based’ ‘architecture’ of relational space, which is where the indigenous aboriginals peoples have taken it.  In this case, the thingless-connectedness or innate interdependence within the relational space continuum is acknowledged, wherein the ‘individual organizings’ are included in the relational-spatial Organizing, as in the ‘strands-in-the-web-of-life’ metaphor of the indigenous beliefs tradition.   In this worldview, we must all assume responsibility for conflicts that emerge.  We can no longer assume that ‘actions arise on their own’ out of the notional ‘here and now’.

 

The ‘peacemaking circles’ of the ancient peoples of Turtle Island/North America precipitate from this understanding.  The circle is based on story-telling rather than debate and orients to the restoring of balance and harmony within an innately interdependent relational space.  It has been producing astonishing results for millennia for those who participate in it.