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I have a question it's best if I give you an example right away.

Our universe has its limits. in terms of the effect or cause e.g. if we kill a human for some reason will also have the effect. I'm getting closer to the question. Could there be an infinite number of causes or effects? As I said, they are finished.

I'm sorry about the broken English.

user38342
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  • Sure. When arrow flies its position at any moment causes its position in the subsequent ones. There are infinitely many moments. – Conifold May 22 '19 at 14:14
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    @Conifold 1) You assume an arrow has a well-defined position at any moment. That's contradicted by QM. 2) You claim the position at any moment "causes" its position in all subsequent moments. How does that work, exactly? Only its position at a given time "causes" its position at subsequent times? So any two paths that intersect must necessarily coincide forever after? – user4894 May 22 '19 at 19:00
  • What "causes" in your post means is a question for you. The old language of causes and effects is not really supported by modern physics, even classical, we just have evolutions unfolding according to laws. Nothing "causes" anything individually, killing a human included: something else has to get both of them there, produce the bullet or the knife, etc. Theoretically, the state of the entire universe is involved. But if you want to use that language, QM evolutions unfold in time with infinitely many moments, and its wave functions can serve just as well as the arrow's position. – Conifold May 22 '19 at 21:56
  • @Conifold That's an interesting perspective. Can an accused murderer use the Schrödinger equation as a defense in a court of law? What do the philosophers say? – user4894 May 22 '19 at 22:44
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    Physical and legal meanings of "causing" are two different things. The latter depends on conventional apportionment of "blame", and has little to do with ontology. Philosophers call this the problem causal responsibility, see Is it a logical flaw to blame someone for an event if they were simply its causal factor? – Conifold May 22 '19 at 22:58
  • Or from our dimension. You can build something else. I mean, can our space as we see it, i.e. 3 dimensions. can they arrange themselves differently and look different?
    e.g. square world. Can a piece of paper in our universe have any greater depth. something that we can't see something. that is more material.     – user38342 May 23 '19 at 08:57
  • @Conifold "The old language of causes and effects is not really supported by modern physics, even classical" ...I'm a bit confused by this. Is there some reason causality as discussed in relativity doesn't count? – H Walters May 24 '19 at 06:03
  • @HWalters Causality as discussed in relativity, and physics generally, has to do with how changing initial conditions can affect the evolution (the effect is restricted to a light cone), not with individual events "causing" other events, as used colloquially. – Conifold May 24 '19 at 07:15
  • Nothing of this question we could adress honestly, not without a great many deals of assumptions, all of which are unbacked : infinity, causality, limited nature of the Univers (with regards to the quantity of the energy, which, even if admited finite, does not grant limited numbers of state due to its possible continuous nature), etc.

    This question seems however "intuitive" in a sense, but it's only intuitive in as far as it keep some ground to the extent of what we call "Univers", which is defined about in a psychological manner rather than physical (and how the two could interact).

     – Gloserio May 24 '19 at 08:29
  • You can quite frankly go as far as stating that the "Univers" is non-temporal, meaning that time is only a purely human definition of observation of change. From the point of view of the "Univers" itself (admitting it can self-observe), time is probably not. Hence, one could imagine that all causation is irrelevant on that scale, since all event are compact, much like every frame of a movie is alerady on your DVD when you buy it, rolling it out in any combination (time-linear in a direction or another, time-non-linear, etc.) is more a question of your program and how it reads the frames. – Gloserio May 24 '19 at 08:32
  • @Conifold Doesn't help; still confused. I'm fine with evolution of states by functions, or discretely as with a Turing Machine; let's use that as a model. I can use either to picture Newtonian, relativistic, or quantum evolution. I can relate to Aristotlean causes and some legal concepts of causation. But you draw a disconnect between these and "the old concept", which you've now promoted to "colloquial"; it's that that I'm choking on. I'm picturing a lay explanation of dominoes falling, but all I come up with is something like TM evolution again. – H Walters May 24 '19 at 11:43
  • @HWalters The "old" concept is the colloquial one, from which Aristotle's "efficient" cause of old metaphysics, and legal one derive. We single out some "important" event (like a killer shooting the bullet, or a domino hitting the next one) from the rest of the background (say, the bullet maker, or the table dominoes are on), and call it "the cause". Its "importance", however, is of human relevance only. Physically, it is no different than all the other "causes" in either Newtonian, relativistic, or quantum evolution. Hence the old language of causes and effects is of little use there. – Conifold May 24 '19 at 12:10
  • @conifold- Heard an interesting and incredibly pointed resolution to your version of Zeno's paradox. It went like this; Dear Zeno, a distance is not a segment. Go it? CMS –  May 25 '19 at 16:30
  • @conifold- Spinoza made a distinction between two types of 'ideas'. One involved quantity, time, space, distance, etc. These constitute 'finite' impressions and serve as aids to the imagination, they have no 'reality' ascribable to them and are only useful as we attempt to understand the world of extension [perception]. The other type of 'idea' comes to us as 'intuitional understanding' or 'under an aspect of eternity. These ideas cannot be pictured, like an apple tree or sun. But are real.Your mention of the arrow and its passage as through an 'infinity' falls under this 'eternity' aspect. CS –  May 26 '19 at 23:35

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This is an ill-posed question. When you refer to infinity ("an infinite number of causes or effects"), you are implying accountability, and that's not a physical fact, but a fact related with our human subjectivity.

If you touch a rock pebble with your finger, the pebble moves. But the pebble is not moving due to a single physical action (for example, one atom in your brain would be the simple final cause). There is an unaccountable portion of the universe that could be subjectively related to the action, and it only depends on a subjective definition of thresholds (for example, the number of "related" neurons that "apply more than X micro amperes" to produce the movement).

If you assume that the universe can be divided into a precise quantity of objects and a precise number of events, perhaps you can count the objects and events involved in the action, evidently, implying subjective thresholds. But that's not a physical reality.

The question is equivalent to asking how many arcs a circle has (a friend at the university failed a test when he answered "a hundred" to our calculus teacher).

RodolfoAP
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