The nature of causation

What is required for an event or object to be a cause of another event or object? Does the mere fact that we always associate a previous event to an antecedent event necessarily equate to there being causation involved? Does causation imply an unviolable law of nature? How then can there be anomalous causation? Here's what David Hume concluded about causes:


"Contiguity in time and place is therefore a requisite circumstance to the operation of all causes...Priority in time is...another requisite circumstance in every case....[A] third circumstance [is] that of constant conjunction betwixt the cause and the effect. Every object like the cause produces always some object like the effect. Beyond these three circumstances of contiguity, priority, and constant conjunction I can discover nothing in this cause."--David Hume

 

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Like the word coincidence, no such thing, we just do not know all the variables.

I think thats where your going, and my answer must surely answer your question. There is no such thing as coincidence.

Can maths prove they exist, no, and there is no way.

 

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That definitely answers my question. So then there's no really logical or mathematical rule dictating that a certain event "caused" another event. That we just sort of get used to two events following each over and over again but can't really say they are any more logically linked than any other two events? I think that's what Hume was getting at.

 

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Nothing happens unless something causes it to happen. Even the big bang had a cause. We don't know what the cause actually was, so we attribute it to an act of God.

 

Cause is given by many different thing. In Love there invokes cause. Faith is intriguing, cause that. Pacifism.

The nature of cause is that of a parent, certainly.

 

The big bang is stars and sunshine. Get into it man. Love did it.

 

OK.

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Interaction.

 

One word that says everything. Excellent answer.

 

What interaction? In Love, with Perfect.

 

What is an event?

I think it is the flow of energy which causes this effect of "cause and effect".

 

An event is a happening. Yes, this is an event.

Love-verse.

 

They require the ability to affect each other (which as much applies to any attractive / repulsive fields associated with them having the capacity to respond to each other). Or they require an agency mediating between them that accomplishes the appearance of their interactions; for instance, consider a portable rocket launcher destroying a house in a computer game -- the fired rocket looks like the cause in the "phenomenal world" of the video screen, but it is the "noumenal" workings in the electronics behind the scenes which actually brings the effects about. Or seemingly "brute law" regulates the illusion of entities affecting each other, with such reliable "magic" possibly yet explainable by the past/future always existing similar to the pre-determined "history" of events in a recorded movie, or even a pre-synchronized circumstance akin to Leibniz's pre-Established Harmony.

The concept of causality projected (before Hume) as being totally independent of thought evokes the possibility of it being more fundamental than "existence", when people stray into quasi-ludicrous questions like "Why is there something rather than nothing?". Because this posited "why" (reason) then becomes prior or crucial to idea of "general being" itself, and simply seems to be the floating abstraction of causation begging for a specific reason to fill itself with.

Kant, of course, tried to eliminate skepticism of causation by making it one of the concepts of the cognitive faculty that regulated experience (thus always "natural" and applicable to the events of the extrospective, interpersonal world). Whereas transcendental realists, as indicated in the quotes below, would have a more difficult time wrestling with a metaphysical reification of causality; that is, taken beyond these mere epistemological or practical concerns. Judea Pearl and company recently formulated causation in a more rigid way, but others doubt its universal applicability to all fields.

Jonathan Schaffer: The main argument for the no-basis view is Mill's argument from caprice: “Nothing can better show the absence of any scientific ground for the distinction between the cause of a phenomena and its conditions, than the capricious manner in which we select from among the conditions that which we choose to denominate the cause.” (1846, p. 198) Mill's argument has won the field, and is echoed by contemporary authors such as Lewis: “We sometimes single out one among all the cause of some event and call it ‘the’ cause, as if there were no others. Or we single out a few as the ‘causes’, calling the rest mere ‘causal factors’ or ‘causal conditions’… We may select the abnormal or extraordinary causes, or those under human control, or those we deem good or bad, or just those we want to talk about. I have nothing to say about these principles of invidious discrimination.” (1986, p. 162) Thus selection is now generally dismissed as groundless, and theorists seek to isolate some pre-selected, egalitarian conception of causation. --The Metaphysics Of Causation; SEP [Mill, J. S.; (1846), A System of Logic]

John F. Sowa: All concepts and theories of causality, even those of modern physics, are only approximations to the still incompletely known principles of causation that govern the universe. For certain applications, the theories proposed by philosophers, physicists, and engineers may be useful approximations. Even "commonsense" theories that have never been formalized can be adequate guides for people to carry on their daily lives. [...] People, animals, and even plants benefit from causal predictions about the universe, independent of any conscious thoughts they might have about causality. [...] The success of these activities does not depend on a theory of physics that is accurate to seven decimal places, but it does imply that the universe is sufficiently regular that even a rough rule of thumb can be a useful guide for one's daily life. A general theory of causality must be able to accommodate the full range of approximations, ranging from sophisticated theories of physics to informal, often unconscious habits that enable an organism to survive and reproduce.

Three academic disciplines have addressed questions about causality: theoretical physics has the most detailed theories of causation with the most stringent criteria of accuracy and predictive power; philosophy has been proposing and analyzing notions of causality since the time of Aristotle; and artificial intelligence has been developing theories of causality intended to simulate intelligent behavior from the insect level to the human level and perhaps beyond. There is little hope of finding a single theory of causality that can satisfy the criteria of such widely divergent disciplines, each of which has contentious practitioners who seldom agree among themselves. --Processes and Causality

Aaron Swartz: ...in recent years several teams of AI researchers have turned their focus from building robots to building mathematical tools for dealing with causality. At the forefront is Judea Pearl (author of the book Causality, Cambridge University Press) and his group at UCLA and Clark Glymour (author of The Mind’s Arrows, MIT Press), Peter Spirtes, and their colleagues at Carnegie Mellon. The result is a quiet revolution in the field of statistics — one most practicing statisticians are still unaware of.

They started by dismissing Plato’s [and Hume's, Karl Pearson's, etc?] skepticism about the problem. Granted, they say, we may never know for sure whether the button always causes the beep, but that’s too stringent a demand. Science never knows anything for sure — the best we can hope for is extracting the most knowledge from the evidence we have. Or, as William James put it, “To know is one thing, and to know for certain that we know is another.”

Next, they created a new mathematical function to formalize our notion of causality: do(…). do expresses the notion of intervening and actually trying something. [...Pearl...]: "I predict that a quiet revolution will take place in the next decade in the way causality is handled in statistics, epidemiology, social science, economics, and business. While news of this revolution will never make it to DARPA’s newsletter, and even NSF is not equipped to appreciate or support it, it will nevertheless have enormous intellectual and technological impact on our society." --The New Science of Causation; Raw Thoughts blog

Nancy Cartwright, however, counters with causal pluralism -- that there is no single method: There are a variety of different kinds of causal systems; methods for discovering causes differ across different kinds of systems as do the inferences that can be made from causal knowledge once discovered. As to causal models, these must have different forms depending on what they are to be used for and on what kinds of systems are under study. If causal pluralism is right, Pearl’s demand to tell economists how they ought to think about causation is misplaced; and his own are not the methods to use. They work for special kinds of problems and for special kinds of systems -- those whose causal laws can be represented as Pearl represents them. HC&UT argues these are not the only kinds there are, nor uncontroversially the most typical. (journals.cambridge.org)

 

What causes an interaction?

 

If we consider 'cause and effect' as a continuous chain of events progressing in sync with time, then these series of events can be written as:

cause 0 > effect 0, cause 1 > effect 1, cause 2 > effect 2 ....... cause n > effect n, cause n+1 > effect n+1 .... like this infinite series along with time.

Here it can be said that, effect n = cause n+1 where n is 0 or any number.

Here we will find that cause 0 is without any cause.

So, there is something in our universe without any cause and this is causing all the causes. This can be considered as cause of all the causation.

 

Physicist David Bohm's idea of an underlying implicate order seems to imply that causal interaction is illusory. An analogy that comes to mind is that of watching an orchestra playing a symphony and assuming each of the instruments are responding to other instruments in their successive parts. Ofcourse this is not the case at all. The symphony is played out in perfect harmony according to the sheet music each instrument is being played to. Likewise the interactions and co-incidences between objects , the diachronisms and synchronisms of physical eventhood, may be more expressions of an underlying timeless wholeness than the reiteration of action between discrete parts. Not to go all woo-woo here, but my own personal experience with synchronicity between thought and physical events, usually related thru a common word, concept, or symbol, seems to support Bohm's profound thesis:

 

Isn't all mathematics, and in particular your own equation, presumptive of an underlying continuity in time itself? That 1 doesn't "cause " 2, and 2 doesn't "cause" 3, but are merely quantified points in an integral continuum that in reality can be infinitely divided up in any way. I suspect that's where mathematics, as well as logic, gets its extraordinary degree of certitude--by appealing to the raw and intuitively a priori flow of time itself. As certain as 2 follows 1, or 2 + 2= 4, so certain are we that one event necessarily causes another.

 

Many things, how about like?

 

Answer: the presence of two things that are allowed to interact.

 

They don't need to interact. What if they had not a Know.