Quotes About Causality

A small error in the former will produce an enormous error in the latter.

I believe that things just happen in life, and pretty much after the fact, we make up a story to make it all seem rational. We all like simple stories that suggest a causal chain to life's events. Yet randomness is ever present.

Baruch Spinoza, who said, "There is no mind absolute or free will, but the mind is determined for willing this or that by a cause which is determined in its turn by another cause, and this one again by another, and so on to infinity.

Tachyons at first seem to violate causality, but physicists believe that their true purpose was to set off the big bang and hence they are not observable anymore.

Is everything we do determined by the cause-and-effect chain of genes, environment, and the cells that make up our brain, or can we freely form intentions that influence our actions in the world?

Siempre existe una causa para un efecto.

If you time-travel to the past, you can't change it any more than you can change the value of pi. If you travel to the past, you are, will be, and always were part of the past, the very same past that leads to your traveling to it.

The first variation is called the delayed-choice experiment and was suggested in 1980 by the eminent physicist John Wheeler. The experiment brushes up against an eerily odd-sounding question: Does the past depend on the future?

Perhaps if one less dragonfly had drowned in the Carboniferous swamps, the intelligent organisms on our planet today would have feathers and teach their young in rookeries. The pattern of evolutionary causality is a web of astonishing complexity; the incompleteness of our understanding humbles us.

From one point of view the Transcendent Other is nature correctly perceived to be alive and intelligent. From another it is the awesomely unfamiliar union of all the senses with memory of the past and anticipation of the future. The Transcendent Other is what one encounters on powerful hallucinogens. It is the crucible of the Mystery of our being, both as a species and as individuals. The Transcendent Other is Nature without her cheerfully reassuring mask of ordinary space, time, and causality.

Everything happens for a reason, though we might not

The three rules of the Librarians of Time and Space are: 1) Silence; 2) Books must be returned no later than the last date shown; and 3) Do not interfere with the nature of causality.

the proliferation of luminous fungi or iridescent crystals in deep caves where the torchlessly improvident hero needs to see is one of the most obvious intrusions of narrative causality into the physical universe.

This is called the theory of narrative causality and it means that a story, once started, takes a shape. It picks up all the vibrations of all the other workings of that story that have ever been.

This is called the theory of narrative causality and it means that a story, once started, takes a shape. It picks up all the vibrations of all the other workings of that story that have ever been. This is why history keeps on repeating all the time.

A farmer who neglects to sow ordinary seeds only loses the crop, whereas anyone who forgets to sow seeds of a crop that has already been harvested twelve months before risks disturbing the entire fabric of causality, not to mention acute embarrassment.

When conditions are sufficient things manifest. When conditions are no longer sufficient things withdraw. They wait until the moment is right for them to manifest again.

This is, because that is. This is not, because that is not. This is born, because that is born. This dies, because that dies.

This is, because that is. This is not, because that is not.

I would rather find a single causal law than be the king of Persia!

Every cause that has not yet produced its effect is an event that has not yet come to completion.

But had Minkowski and Einstein not recognized it long before us, our schizophrenic children would have taught us that space-time is a unity that precedes any separate understanding of either category; just as grasping this unity is a precondition for understanding causality.

How could anyone presume to know the world through the eyes of an insect? Not everything had a cause, and pretending otherwise was an interference in the workings of the world that was futile, and could even lead to grief. Some things were simply so.

The claim that SpongeBob makes your child dumber is a causal claim. If you do X, Y will happen. To prove that, you'd have to show that if you forced the children in the no-TV households to watch SpongeBob and changed nothing else about their lives, they would do worse in school.