Quotes About Causality

How, then, does an order of causes which is certain to the foreknowledge of God necessitate that there should be nothing which is dependent on our wills, when our wills themselves have a very important place in the order of causes?

When then things to come are said to be seen, it is not themselves which as yet are not (that is, which are to be), but their causes perchance or signs are seen, which already are.

Because everything is interdependent, there are no simple, single causes and effects. Every action creates not just an equal and opposite reaction, but a web of reverberating consequences.

The truth is that everything causes everything else. We do not speak therefore of one thing causing another. There are no secrets. It's just we thought they said dead when they said bread.

I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.

Let's just say that in the ordinary world, we have beliefs about cause and effect. Causes occur first, effects second. But that order of events does not always occur in the quantum world. Effects can be simultaneous with causes, and effects can precede causes. This is one minor example of that.

We need to work hard to fend off our natural tendency to view what happened as having been inevitable. Our minds simply want to explain what happened and close the case, but the world followed but one path among many possible ones. If we do the Rain Dance and it rains, then to the human brain, it looks like the dance caused the rain. In the more rational part of our brain, we know it's not true. Yet we dance on.

The exercise was meant to illustrate the powerful instinct people have for finding causes for any effect, and also for creating narratives. "The

The experimental psychologist "rarely attributes a deviation of results from expectations to sampling variability because he finds a causal 'explanation' for any discrepancy

God instituted prayer to communicate to creatures the dignity of causality.

According to the modern man, both causes and effects are relegated to the physical plane, framed within time and space. According to the traditional man the physical plane merely contains effects; nothing takes place in this world that did not originate first in the next world or in the invisible dimension.

Ich gebe nur zu bedenken, daß die meisten Dinge von Wichtigkeit, die jemals geschehen sind, mehr als nur einen Grund hatten.

We are pattern seekers, believers in a coherent world, in which regularities appear not by accident but as a result of mechanical causality or of someone´s intention. We do not expect to see regularity produced by a random process, and when we detect what appears to be a rule, we quickly reject the idea that the process is truly random. Random processes produce many sequences that convince people that the process is not random after all.

The root of all superstition is that men observe when a thing hits, but not when it misses.

A lot of historical writing has been characterized as ODTAA—"one damn thing after another"—without an effort to extract general rules or causal theories that can be applied in other circumstances.

Or in the words of the famous British historian Arnold Toynbee, "History is just one damn thing after another.

Things are the way they are because they were the way they were.

With regret, we believe the outcome was caused by our decisions or actions.

Tennyson said that if we could but understand a single flower we might know who we are and what the world is. Perhaps he was trying to say that there is nothing, however humble, that does not imply the history of the world and its infinite concatenation of causes and effects. —JORGE LUIS BORGES, "The Zahir

By definition, big data cannot yield complicated descriptions of causality. Especially in healthcare. Almost all of our diseases occur in the intersections of systems in the body.

I'm trying to understand cosmology, why the Big Bang had the properties it did. And it's interesting to think that connects directly to our kitchens and how we can make eggs, how we can remember one direction of time, why causes precede effects, why we are born young and grow older. It's all because of entropy increasing.

If time travel were possible, you still wouldn't be able to change the past - it's already happened!

Actions have consequences. Ignorance about the nature of those actions does not free a person from responsibility for the consequences. (28)

cause and effect act in webs, not chains.