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Message: <blockquote data-quote="fusangite" data-source="post: 2424075" data-attributes="member: 7240">Yes there are. Whenever I cast X spell, Y effect happens. The relationship between my actions and the outcome are the pattern. The fact that different things connect my actions to the outcome each time does not nullify the pattern's existence. That fact is simply an additional piece of information about the pattern that eliminates certain kinds of explanations thereof. A pattern is simply one thing having a high degree of correlation to another thing. How that correlation is effected informs the nature of the pattern; it does not speak to whether the pattern exists. The existence of the pattern is self-evident.If a model is predictive, it is predictive. It doesn't stop being predictive because of a misapprehension on the part of its designer about the "true" nature of reality. The model remains a viable system of physics as long as it predicts and explains outcomes in the real world. You are getting hung up on the idea of a correlation between a predictive model of reality and some kind of meta true reality. You are arguing that a system of physics is impossible unless these two things are identical. But the history of science shows that this is not the case. No. A system of physics requires a model of shared causation. A pattern requires only correlation. But you are missing my essential point here: changing or different agencies do not nullify cause and effect. The fact that doing X causes Y is cause and effect regardless of the agency connecting these two events. In Aristotelian physics, an object has a telos -- it has a place that it is meant to go, a set of things that are meant to happen to it based on its intrinsic nature. How this telos is effected is not always the same; but the object is nevertheless causally linked to outcome. The same is true in Taoist Chinese physics; change inheres in matter itself. The matter needs/wants to change and this change is predictable even though the agency of the change is unknown. What you are doing here is this: you are saying that present-day, modern physics=physics; whereas other systems of physics=magic. This is why I really recommend you read Yates. The stigma attached to the term "magic" during the enlightenment is creating a false dichotemy in your thinking making you unable to conceptualize teleological models of physics with variable causative agencies (what you are describing) as a kind of physics.No. I am arguing there is a pattern because the correlation coeficient between casting fireball and having a fireball go off is 1.0. Maybe this will go better when we discuss this in person. Truce?</blockquote>

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