Quotes About Causality

We have to accept the fuzziness of the familiar "because" no matter how queasy it makes us feel (and it does makes us queasy to remove the analgesic illusion of causality).

which condition preceded the other.

The main identifiable reason for our survival of such diseases might simply be inaccessible to us: we are here since, Casanova-style, the "rosy" scenario played out, and if it seems too hard to understand it is because we are too brainwashed by notions of causality and we think that it is smarter to say because than to accept randomness.

Thou shalt not violate causality within my historic light cone. Or else.

Modern "secularization" can be seen from one angle as the rejection of higher times, and the positing of time as purely profane. Events now exist only in this one dimension, in which they stand at greater and lesser temporal distance, and in relations of causality with other events of the same kind. The

The challenge with any "before and after" kind of analysis is that just because one thing follows another does not mean that there is a causal relationship between the two.

The end is built into the beginning.

Logic is a poor model of cause and effect.

Every thinking human is a turbulent little pocket of supernatural freedom-from-causality, working against the constant resistance of an otherwise mathematically determinist world.

If everything from the furthest planet to the smallest atom of our brain acts according to Newton's law of motion, what becomes of free will?

Things don't just happen, they have reasons. And the reasons have reasons. And the reasons for the reasons have reasons. And then the things that happen make other things happen, so they become reasons themselves. Nothing moves forward in a straight line, nothing is straightforward.

There is no preferred direction of time without heat.

The difference between past and future exists only when there is heat. The fundamental phenomenon that distinguishes the future from the past is the fact that heat passes from things that are hotter to things that are colder.

We often say that causes precede effects and yet, in the elementary grammar of things, there is no distinction between "cause" and "effect.

It is the presence of abundant traces of the past that produces the familiar sensation that the past is determined.

We often say that causes precede effects and yet, in the elementary grammar of things, there is no distinction between "cause" and "effect."* There

Things are transformed one into another according to necessity, and render justice to one another according to the order of time. "According to the order of time" (???? ??? ??? ?????? ?????). From

The difference between past and future, between cause and effect, between memory and hope, between regret and intention . . . in the elementary laws that describe the mechanisms of the world, there is no such difference.

Le cose si trasformano l'una nell'altra secondo necessità e si rendono giustizia secondo l'ordine del tempo.

Bertrand Russell noted this in a famous article, writing emphatically that "The law of causality . . . is a relic of a bygone age, surviving, like the monarchy, only because it is erroneously supposed to do no harm.

was Aristotle who said it: "All human actions have one or more of seven causes," and then he named them: chance, nature, compulsion, habit, reason, passion, and desire.

In nature there are neither rewards or punishments-there are consequences.

Misfortunes occur only when a man is false.... Events, circumstances, etc., have their origin in ourselves. They spring from seeds which we have sown.

In nature there are neither rewards nor punishments; there are consequences.