Cure for curiosity By Prof Dr Sohail Ansari & Probabilistic Causation
If one is to be called a liar, one may as well make an effort to deserve the name. ~ A. A. Milne
Cure for curiosity means no more work
that is bearer of all creativity
· One has exhausted all his creativity
if he says he has got the cure for his curiosity
The Cure for
Boredom Is Curiosity. There Is No Cure for Curiosity
Ellen Parr
A child is born with its mouth in position to utter the word “Why?” and
when, at some later date, it is punished for asking too many questions, it
thinks up enough additional questions during its punishment to make the
Encyclopedia Britannica look sick.
We’ve
all got talents: creativity in Islam
Creativity is the
ability to fantasize or to make up something new, a willingness to play with
ideas and possibilities. Many people think that this can’t be combined with
Islam, but it can. Because there are different intelligences of it. There is
creativity in logic and analytic thinking and creativity with space, colours
and design. There is
creativity in rhythms like being able to recite the Quran beautifully. Creativity in spoken language, in
contact with people and creativity in understanding nature. In this, you see
many aspects that a Muslim should have: having insights (tabassur), thinking (tadabbur), having a full
understanding (tafaqquh), keeping in mind or including in your heart
(tadhakkur), using your
spirit in the right way (ta’aqqul), considering or reflecting (tawassum) and
reflection (tafakkur). These are the names as written in the Quran.
As you can see,
the meaning of creativity was already acknowledged by Islam. Our biggest example of this is Prophet Muhammed. He had many qualities, like the qualities to be a big leader,
not only a religious one but also
a political one. Politics can be defined as the ‘art of the ruling human
societies’. It demands tolerance and wisdom. Qualities for both sorts of
leadership, can rarely be found in one person. But the Prophet came from a religious leader, a political
leader and especially a leader of humanity. It’s interesting to see how much creativity and innovation he had.
One of the most important principles of the creativity of the Prophet is his practice of ‘idjtihad’. It refers to the intellectual and
critical battle to search
for answers on new problems. This element is something he expressed his whole life to make his messages
clearer for his followers and to be able to educate them better. He also made
many social changes possible by reacting with his action, to religious and
intellectual aspects of life. This led to social security, familial structure,
and the improvement of slavery and women rights, not only in the Arabic society
but also across the whole world. This wouldn’t have happened if Prophet
Muhammed didn’t handle his life creatively and innovatively.
So creativity is
part of the Islam. In fact it should be seen as an important skill that Muslims
should have. Be a leader or a speaker who spreads the Islam and provides a better society. Be a
scientist or an architect who
builds mosques because of Allah. Be an artist who is inspired by nature and the
creatures of Allah. We all have our talents, qualities and ambitions. The trick is to get more out of it by
opening your mind. Dozens
of doors will open for you if you look wider at life and when you use your talents
to do something good. Because Allah gave you this gift for a reason.
Written
by Sumeyye Copoglu
Sumeyye
Copoglu is 23 years old and studies Islamic theology at the Islamic University
of Rotterdam. She is an artist, with a passion for culture and travel.
Probabilistic
Causation
Probabilistic causation
designates a group of philosophical theories that aim to characterize the relationship between
cause and effect using the tools of probability theory. The central idea behind these theories is that causes raise
the probabilities of their effects, all else being equal. Cause and effect is one of the most commonly
misunderstood concepts in science and is often misused by lawyers, the media,
politicians and even scientists themselves, in an attempt to add legitimacy to research.
The
basic principle of
causality is determining
whether the results and trends seen in an experiment are
actually caused by the manipulation or whether some other factor may underlie
the process.
Unfortunately,
the media and politicians often jump upon scientific results and proclaim that it conveniently fits their beliefs and
policies. Some scientists,
fixated upon 'proving' that their view of the world is correct, leak their
results to the press before allowing the peer review process to check and validate their
work.
Some
examples of this are rife in alternative therapy, when a group of scientists
announces that they have found the next healthy superfood or that a certain
treatment cured swine flu. Many of these claims deviate from the scientific
process and pay little heed to cause and effect, diluting the claims of genuine researchers in the field.
What is Cause and Effect? - The
Temporal Issue
The
key principle of establishing cause and effect is proving that the effects seen in the experiment happened after the cause.
This
seems to be an extremely obvious statement, but that is not always the case. Natural phenomena are complicated and
intertwined, often overlapping and making it difficult to establish a natural order. Think about it this way: in an experiment to study the effects of depression upon alcohol consumption,
researchers find that people who suffer from higher levels of depression drink
more, and announce that this correlation shows
that depression drives people to drink.
However,
is this necessarily the case? Depression could be the cause that makes people drink more but it is equally possible
that heavy consumption of alcohol, a depressant, makes people more depressed. This type of classic 'chicken and egg' argument makes establishing causality one of the most difficult
aspects of scientific research. It is also one of the most important factors,
because it can misdirect scientists. It also leaves the research open to manipulation by interest groups, who will take the results and
proclaim them as a truth.
With the above example, an
alcoholic drink manufacturer
could use the second interpretation to claim that alcohol is not a factor in
depression and that the responsibility is upon
society to ensure that people do not
become depressed. An anti-alcohol group, on the
other hand, could claim that alcohol is
harmful and use the results to lobby for harsher drinking laws. The same
research leads to two different interpretations and, the answer given to the
media can depend upon who funds the
work.
Unfortunately, most of the
general public are not scientists and cannot be expected to filter every single news item that they read for quality or delve into which group funded research. Even respected and trusted
newspapers, journals and internet resources can fall into the causality trap, so marketing groups can influence perceptions.
Probabilistic
Causation
First published Fri Jul 11, 1997;
substantive revision Sun Mar 21, 2010
“Probabilistic
Causation” designates a group of theories that aim to characterize the
relationship between cause and effect using the tools of probability theory.
The central idea behind these theories is that causes change the probabilities
of their effects. This article traces
developments in probabilistic causation, including recent developments in causal modeling. A variety of
issues within, and objections to, probabilistic theories of causation will also
be discussed.
1. Motivation and Preliminaries
1.1 Problems for Regularity Theories
According to
David Hume, causes are invariably followed by their effects: “We may define a cause to be an
object, followed by another, and where all the objects similar to the first,
are followed by objects similar to the second.” (1748, section VII.) Attempts to analyze
causation in terms of invariable
patterns of succession are referred to as “regularity theories” of causation. There are a number of well-known difficulties with regularity theories, and these may be used to motivate probabilistic approaches to causation. Moreover, an
overview of these difficulties will help to give a sense of the kinds of
problem that any adequate
theory of causation would
have to solve.
(i)
Imperfect Regularities. The first difficulty is that most
causes are not invariably
followed by their effects. For example, smoking is a cause of lung cancer, even
though some smokers do not develop lung cancer. Imperfect regularities may arise for two different reasons.
First,
they may arise because of the heterogeneity of circumstances in which the cause arises. For example, some smokers
may have a genetic susceptibility to lung cancer, while others do not; some
non-smokers may be exposed to other carcinogens (such as asbestos), while others are
not.
Second,
imperfect regularities may
also arise because of a failure of physical determinism. If an event is not determined to occur, then no other
event can be (or be a part of) a sufficient condition for that event. The recent success of quantum mechanics—and to a lesser extent, other theories
employing probability—has shaken our faith in determinism. Thus it has struck
many philosophers as desirable to develop a theory of causation that does not presuppose
determinism.
The central
idea behind probabilistic
theories of causation is
that causes change
the probability of
their effects; an effect may still occur in the absence of a cause or fail to occur in its
presence. Thus smoking
is a cause of lung cancer, not because all smokers develop lung cancer, but
because smokers are more likely to develop lung cancer than
non-smokers. This is
entirely consistent with there being some smokers who avoid lung cancer, and some non-smokers who succumb to it.
(ii) Irrelevance. A condition that is invariably followed
by some outcome may
nonetheless be irrelevant to that outcome. Salt that has been hexed by a
sorceror invariably dissolves when placed in water (Kyburg 1965), but hexing does not cause the salt to
dissolve. Hexing does
not make a difference for dissolution. Probabilistic theories of causation
capture this notion of making a difference by requiring that a cause make a difference for the
probability of its effect.
(iii) Asymmetry. If A causes B, then,
typically, B will not also cause A. Smoking
causes lung cancer, but lung cancer does not cause one to smoke. One way of enforcing the asymmetry of causation is to stipulate
that causes precede their effects in time. But it would be
nice if a theory of
causation could provide
some explanation of the
directionality of causation, rather than merely stipulate it. Some proponents of probabilistic
theories of causation have attempted to use the resources of probability theory
to articulate a substantive account of the asymmetry of causation.
(iv) Spurious Regularities. Suppose that a cause is regularly followed by two effects. For instance, suppose that whenever
the barometric pressure in a certain region drops below a certain level, two things happen. First, the height of the column of
mercury in a particular barometer drops below a certain level. Shortly
afterwards, a storm occurs. This situation is shown schematically
in Figure 1. Then, it may well also be the case that whenever the column of mercury drops, there will be a storm. If so, a regularity theory would have to rule that the drop of the
mercury column causes the storm. In fact, however, the
regularity relating these two events is spurious. The ability to
handle such spurious correlations is probably the greatest source of attraction
for probabilistic theories of causation.
Definition of regularity
theory
A view held by Humeans: an
event may be the cause of another event without there being a necessary
connection between the two
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