Quotes About Causality

The atheist says we live in a random universe, he has no right to rely on inductive inference, he has no reason to expect causality, or simply the uniformity of nature. He has no basis for believing in the uniformity of nature, but if he has no basis for the uniformity of nature he has no basis for doing science, it's gone, kaput. Biology, chemistry, astronomy, psychology, history, grammar, all of it is gone, there are no sciences without inductive inference

The world we live in is a world of effects; the realm of true causes is hidden. If we should ever discover it we would be able to perform magic.

Traditionally, when physicists saw complex results, they looked for complex causes. When they saw a random relationship between what goes into a system and what comes out, they assumed that they would have to build randomness into any realistic theory, by artificially adding noise or error.

However complex a given state of the world may be, the difference between that state of the world and some alternative state of the world may be caused by something extremely simple

Physicists like to think that all you have to do is say, these are the conditions, now what happens next? —RICHARD P. FEYNMAN

In science as in life, it is well known that a chain of events can have a point of crisis that could magnify small changes.

But history—a moving, organic network of causally related events—is hard to outwit or outflank. History embodies a logic and momentum of its own with resistances, rewards, and penalties. History soon outwitted the Whigs and left them in its dustbin.

The fourfold root of the principle of sufficient reason

If we knew exactly the laws of nature and the situation of the universe at the initial moment, we could predict exactly the situation of the same universe at a succeeding moment.

The knowledge of anything, since all things have causes, is not acquired or complete unless it is known by its causes.

Any important disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is ineffectual, tends to be awash in significance.

Science is the knowledge of consequences, and dependence of one fact upon another.

Consciousness is a large-scale, unified phenomenon emerging from a myriad of physical micro-events. As long as a sufficiently high degree of internal correlation and causal coupling allows this island of dancing micro-events in your brain to emerge, you live in a single reality. A single, unified world appears to you.

La felicidad, –y también la tristeza–, no se cruzan en nuestro camino por casualidad o accidente, ni se deben a que logremos apaciguar a algún ser superior imaginario. Como todas las cosas, en el universo la felicidad surge debido a causas específicas. Si creamos las causas para la felicidad, la felicidad resultante llegará. Este es un proceso sistemático de causa y efecto que se explicará en capítulos posteriores.

I detest that saying 'Everything happens for a reason'; it's nonsense.

I don't believe in blaming inanimate objects for anything.

I know that you are wise. When you hear a true story, there is a part of you that responds to it regardless of art, regardless of evidence…You believe that the story is true, because you responded to it from that sense of truth deep within you. But that sense of truth does not respond to a story's factuality...[rather] to a story's causality - whether it faithfully shows the way the universe functions.

There are hundreds of possible causes for every effect, and a hundred possible effects for every cause.

Free will doesn't exist. Only the illusion of free will, because the causes of our behavior are so complex that we can't trace them back. If you've got one line of dominoes knocking each other down one by one, then you can always say, Look, this domino fell because that one pushed it. But when you have an infinite number of directions, you can never find where the casual chain begins. So you think, That domino fell because it wanted to.

It was an unbroken network of causality leading back to the first human who wasn't a chimp. And farther back, to the coalescing of the planets around the sun. If you wish to call that God, go ahead.

History, you see, is like the interlocking wheels turning in a ticking-thing. Something unexpected happens, some sort of hiccup ... the wheels are jogged... and then they set off again, beating out the time in a new pattern.

Men believe themselves to have free will because they are conscious of their actions, and unconscious of the causes whereby those actions are determined. —BARUCH SPINOZA

Causality expresses the pattern which the mind imposes on a sequence of events in order to make their appearance comprehensible.

I am the Eschaton. I am not your God. I am descended from you, and exist in your future. Thou shalt not violate causality within my historic light cone. Or else.