Quotes About Causality

El presente sólo se forma del pasado, y lo que se encuentra en el efecto estaba ya en la causa.

The combination of causes of phenomena is beyond the grasp of the human intellect. But the impulse to seek causes is innate in the soul of man. And the human intellect, with no inkling of the immense variety and complexity of circumstances conditioning a phenomenon, any one of which may be separately conceived of as the cause of it, snatches at the first and most easily understood approximation, and says here is the cause.

Man's mind cannot grasp the causes of events in their completeness, but the desire to find those causes is implanted in man's soul. And without considering the multiplicity and complexity of the conditions any one of which taken separately may seem to be the cause, he snatches at the first approximation to a cause that seems to him intelligible and says: "This is the cause!

Therefore, all these causes-billions of causes-coincided so as to bring about what happened. And consequently none of them was the exclusive cause of the event, but the event had to take place simply because it had to take place.

The deeper we go in search of causes, the more of them we find, and each cause taken singly or whole series of causes present themselves to us as equally correct in themselves, and equally false in their insignificance in comparison with the enormity of the event, and equally false in their incapacity (without the participation of all other coinciding causes) to produce the event that took place.

Man's mind cannot grasp the causes of events in their completeness, but the desire to find those causes is implanted in man's soul. And without considering the multiplicity and complexity of the conditions any one of which taken separately may seem to be the cause, he snatches at the first approximation to a cause that seems to him intelligible, and says:

It is beyond the power of the human intellect to encompass all the causes of any phenomenon. But the impulse to search into causes is inherent in man's very nature.

On any pure theory of causality or statistical probability, organization would be completely improbable without the external aid of a divine organizer.

Causal analysis provides absolutely no value judgment, and a value judgment is absolutely not a causal explanation.

small changes at a lower level of organization can lead to emergent changes at a higher level. A typical example is the effect of that one truck driver's braking response, in Hitler's nearly fatal traffic accident of 1930, on the lives of a hundred million people who were killed or wounded in World War II.

One can't merely content oneself with identifying proximate causes; one also has to ask about ultimate causes.

What appear to us to be causal explanations are in fact just stories—descriptions of what happened that tell us little, if anything, about the mechanisms at work.

The truth is this: There are no exceptions to the law of causality. It is impartial and impersonal, and it comes to us in a particular order—first sow, then reap. This

Buddha teaches that there are many causes and many conditions and always refers to causes and conditions in the plural, never just as cause and effect. We are presented with a very complex picture of how things work.

It's exceedingly difficult to see how we move from a valueless series of causes and effects from the big bang onward, finally arriving at valuable, morally responsible, rights-bearing human beings. If we're just material beings produced by a material universe, then objective value or goodness (not to mention consciousness or reasoning powers or beauty or personhood) can't be accounted for.

According to these teachings, what we experience in the present is the result of the seeds we ve sown for hundreds of years, over the course of many lifetimes.

In fact, something always leads to something else.

Each human act has countless causes. The author works to reveal these causes.

When you track, you're creating causal connections in your mind, because you didn't actually see what the animal did. That's the essence of physics.

History is nothing but a problem of mechanics applied to psychology.

They who assert that a blind fatality produced the various effects we behold in this world talk very absurdly; for can anything be more unreasonable than to pretend that a blind fatality could be productive of intelligent beings?

If there is to be a resolution to the mystery of how mind relates to matter, it will emerge from explaining the data of the human brain in terms of these laws-laws capable of giving rise to a very different view of the causal efficacy of human consciousness. Quantum mechanics makes it feasible to describe a mind capable of exerting effects that neurons alone cannot.

Much of what I do in my job is think about whether relationships we see in data are causal, as opposed to just reflecting correlations. It's exactly these issues which come up in evaluating studies in public health.

The three volumes on infancy focus on different aspects of infants' cognitive development. Whereas OI examines the coordination and differentiation of sensorimotor schemes of practical intelligence, CR studies how practical intelligence constructs the concepts of object, space, causality, and time. PDI, in turn, is mainly devoted to the emergence of symbols in the context of the development of imitation and play.