Consul wrote: ↑June 29th, 2022, 2:56 pmQUOTE>
"The void is deadly. If you were cast into a void, it would cause you to die in just a few minutes. It would suck the air from your lungs. It would boil your blood. It would drain the warmth from your body. And it would inflate enclosures in your body until they burst.
What I’ve said is literally true, yet it may be misleading. When the void sucks away the air, it does not exert an attractive force on the air. It is not like a magnet sucking up iron filings. Rather, the air molecules collide and exert repulsive forces on one another; these forces constitute a pressure that, if unresisted, causes the air to expand and disperse; the void exerts no force to resist the pressure; and that is why the air departs from the lungs.
Likewise, when the void boils the blood, there is no flow of energy from the void into the blood. It isn’t like a stove boiling a kettle of water. The blood is already warm enough to boil, if its vapor pressure is unresisted; the void exerts no counterpressure; and so the boiling goes unprevented.
Likewise, when the void drains your warmth, what happens is that your thermal energy, left to itself, tends to dissipate; and the void provides no influx of energy to replace the departing heat.
And when the void inflates enclosures, again what happens is that the enclosed fluids exert pressure and the void exerts no counterpressure. So nothing prevents the outward pressure from doing damage.
In short, you are kept alive by forces and flows of energy that come from the objects that surround you. If, instead of objects, you were surrounded by a void, these life-sustaining forces and flows would cease. Without them, you would soon die. That is how the void causes death. It is deadly not because it exerts forces and supplies energy, but because it doesn’t."
(p. 277)
"[W]henever any effect is caused by an absence of anything, we have the problem of the missing relatum. (And likewise whenever anything causes an absence.) A void, being the absence of any objects at all, is just the most extreme case of an absence.
Faced with the problem of the missing relatum, we have four possible lines of response.
(1) We could deny, in the face of compelling examples to the contrary, that absences ever cause anything. We could deny, for instance, that the void is deadly. (Likewise, we could deny that anything ever causes an absence. In other words, we could deny that there is any such thing as prevention.) Simply to state this response is to complete the reductio against it.
(2) We could reify absences nonreductively. A void, so we might say, is a sui generis entity, but it is none the worse for that. It is eligible to serve as a causal relatum. It springs up automatically and necessarily whenever, and only whenever, all else goes away; it is conceptually impossible not to have a void between the walls and not to have anything else there either. So much the worse, says the reifier, for the combinatorial principle, which claims that existential statements about distinct things are independent.
(3) We could reify absences reductively. We could identify absences with comparatively uncontroversial objects that, as others would say, are somehow associated with those absences. For instance, we could identify a hole with the hole-lining that, as we’d normally say, immediately surrounds the hole. (Strange to say, some holes are made of cheese and some of limestone! Strange to say, no holes are exactly where we would have thought they were!) Or we could identify an absence with a bit of unoccupied spacetime, if we were not such uncompromising combinatorialists as to countenance an absence of spacetime itself. One way or another, we can cook up ersatz absences to serve as relata of the causal relation—though surely they will seem to be the wrong relata, since we don’t really think of these ersatz absences as having the same effects (or causes) as the absences they stand in for. We might, for instance, imitate the identification of holes and hole-linings on a grander scale. Take the most inclusive void of all; and take the mereological fusion of all objects of whatever kind. On the principle of identifying hole with hole-lining, and void with surrounding objects, we might identify this greatest void with the greatest object.
(4) The best response is to concede that a void is nothing at all, and that a lesser absence is nothing relevant at all and therefore cannot furnish causal relata. Yet absences can be causes and e.ects. So I insist,
contra Menzies, that causation cannot always be the bearing of a causal relation. No theory of the causal relation, neither Menzies’s theory nor any other, can be the whole story of causation.
The intrinsic character of causation is not our present problem. I do indeed fear that the intrinsic character of causation is more a hasty generalization than an a priori desideratum. But even if we struck the intrinsic character of causation off our list of folk platitudes, we’d still be trying to characterize the causal relation, so we’d still be in trouble.
Any relation needs relata, whether it is intrinsic or not. So the problem of missing relata hits any relational analysis of causation.
But does any analysis escape the problem of missing relata?—Yes; a counterfactual analysis escapes. We do not have to reify the void in order to ask what would have happened if the void had not been there. The void causes death to one who is cast into it because if, instead, he had been surrounded by suitable objects, he would not have died. (Here we must assume that if the victim had not been surrounded by the void, he would instead have been surrounded by the life-sustaining objects that normally surround us—not by liquid nitrogen, or clouds of nerve gas, or a hail of bullets.) Likewise for lesser absences. If the cause is an absence, then to suppose away the cause counterfactually is not to attend to some remarkable entity and suppose that it does
not exist. Rather, we need only suppose that some unremarkable entity
does exist. Absences are spooky things, and we’d do best not to take them seriously. But absences of absences are no problem.
Note well that in defending a counterfactual analysis, I am not claiming that all causation consists in a relation of counterfactual dependence between (distinct) events. That theory would not escape the problem of missing relata. A relation of counterfactual dependence is still a relation, a relation still needs relata, and absences still fail to provide the needed relata. The counterfactual analysis escapes the problem because, when the relata go missing, it can do without any causal relation at all."
(pp. 281-3)
(Lewis, David. "Void and Object." In
Causation and Counterfactuals, edited by John Collins, Ned Hall, and L. A. Paul, 277-290. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004.)
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