In an online conversation with MardyS, he recommended a book, Holt, Jim (2012-07-16). Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story. Liveright. Kindle Edition.
I found the book to be a very interesting and erudite discussion that was focusing on the question “Why is there something instead of nothing?” The author seemed to be quite knowledgeable in physics, discussing Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, The Big Bang Theory, Quantum Gravity, and the like.
The following statement in the book broke the mood completely.
To begin with, nothing in the concept of causation says that a cause must always precede in time its effect. Think of a locomotive pulling a caboose: the motion of the former causes the motion of the latter, yet the two are concurrent in time
To say that “the two are concurrent in time” shows an abysmal lack of understanding of elementary physics. It also shows a lack of knowledge about how to run a train.
I finally found a definition of Slack Action in WikiPedia:
In railroading, slack action is the amount of free movement of one car before it transmits its motion to an adjoining coupled car. This free movement results from the fact that in railroad practice cars are loosely coupled, and the coupling is often combined with a shock-absorbing device, a “draft gear,” which, under stress, substantially increases the free movement as the train is started or stopped. Loose coupling is necessary to enable the train to bend around curves and is an aid in starting heavy trains, since the application of the locomotive power to the train operates on each car in the train successively, and the power is thus utilized to start only one car at a time.
So, clearly, on a macro scale, the motion of the engine and the caboose are not concurrent in time in starting and stopping. This can be generalized to any change in speed. If there is no slack when the train tries to accelerate, then you may have to look to the “draft gear” or look at the microscopic level of stretching of the physical components of the train.
I leave it up to you to think of what The Second Law of Thermodynamics has to say about whether a cause precedes its effect in time.
The quoted selection from the book Why Does The World Exist? is not the first one that casually dismisses an idea with reasons that are unwarranted. So while the book is interesting to read, I stopped looking for a definitive, scientific or philosophical answer to the book’s main question. Sadly, I just stopped reading.
OK, you have convinced me it would be worth my while to read the rest of the book even if I don’t agree with everything he says or everything his interviewees say.
But now it will have to wait until I finish reading Death of the Liberal Class
OK, perhaps it’s a poor example he gave to refute Humes’ first argument. But he gave two other examples too which I didn’t warm up to. But who cares? There’s enough ambiguity in the whole question to leave it unanswerable. But he doesn’t give up there. He goes on to interview quite a few other interesting people. His interviews are worth the price of the book in my opinion. Maybe he should have interviewed you, Steve? You would probably come out in Adolf Grunbaum, the Great Rejectionist, camp. LOL?
I disagree that the question is unanswerable, otherwise, why would I have bothered to start to read the book?
I thought that the book was a serious attempt to look for an answer. That is why I was so disappointed that the author abandoned one avenue of search by using an excuse of a poorly thought out and ultimately untrue assumption about the very physics that he had been proving so expert in understanding.
In steady state, with no friction, and on a flat surface, the current behavior of the locomotive has nothing to do with the current behavior of the caboose. Momentum is enough to explain the continued motion of the caboose at a steady state velocity. Taking away those assumptions I stated at the beginning takes you right back to a situation that separates in time the cause and the effect. The separation may be vanishingly small, but it is enough to refute simultaneity, let alone refuting a reversal of cause and effect.
But, you are right. We have more important things to discuss.
He’s assuming the train is in steady state. He said nothing about stopping and starting the train in his example. This is unimportant, anyway, because David Hume’s first argument doesn’t really apply. And Hume’s second argument seems more intuitive but to me still does not prove that the world, universe, you name it, has always been here. The question is obviously unanswerable, and that’s Holt’s conclusion to the chapter, as far as I can tell. His book is not about his interpretation or mis-interpretation of physics, it’s about the fundamental questions, which, you probably believe don’t exist! hahahahaha? Go, Steve, Go! But you’ve got more important things to talk about, like getting the fast food workers standing up for their rights which I agree totally with!