Thread

I was listening to Episode 6 of Vervaeke's "Awakening from the Meaning Crisis", in which he talks about the distinction between cause and condition. A billiard ball can move another one by transferring energy through a collision. But in order for that *event* to happen, many conditions have to be true — there has to be space on the other side of the receiving ball, for example. Conditions are not events, they are things that make certain events more or less likely to occur. This is akin to something I often repeat from McLuhan et al, which is that "we shape our tools instrumentally, and our tools shape us formally" by creating a new environment which we inhabit. This maps onto Vervaeke's point in that the use of tools is action, and the conditions that tools create influence subsequent action. He also notes that science is often preoccupied with events at the expense of conditions. This jives with my observation that we think mostly about the ability of tools to implement our will, rather than the conditions that arise from the presence of those tools.