Quotes About Causality

There are no inevitabilities in history

There are no random events, nor are there events or things that exist by and for themselves, in isolation.

It is true that in quantum theory we cannot rely on strict causality. But by repeating the experiments many times, we can finally derive from the observations statistical distributions, and by repeating such series of experiments, we can arrive at objective statements concerning these distributions.

Coincidence is logical.

One advantage of arguing that causality is aesthetic is that it allows us to consider what we call consciousness alongside what we call things.

What men call chance is simply their ignorance of causes; if the statement that something had happened by chance were to mean that it had no cause, it would be a contradiction in terms.

All that we send into the lives of others comes back into our own.

The day would come when the last clean cause and effect would disappear into thickets of tangled networks.

He'll build a career on that theme: cuing, priming, framing, confirmation bias, and the conflation of correlation with causality—all these faults, built into the brain of the most problematic of large mammals.

Adam will preach the point to undergrad psych majors, when he's even older than his father is on the night they pick a tree for unborn Charles. He'll build a career on that theme: cuing, priming, framing, confirmation bias, and the conflation of correlation with causality—all these faults, built into the brain of the most problematic of large mammals.

Everything is connected to everything else, and nothing is without consequence

We live in a universe driven by chance," his father had said once, "but the bullshit artists all want causality.

The flapping of a butterfly's wings in the rain forest can alter a hurricane hundreds of miles in the distance. Isn't it amazing that something so small can change the outcome of another thing so far away?

There is an interesting interplay between power corrupting and corruption empowering. The causality does not go one way.

It is crazy to postulate a trillion (causally unconnected) universes to explain the features of one universe, when postulating one entity (God) will do the job.

The Snake That Eats Its Own Tail, Forever and Ever . . . I know where I came from—but where did all you zombies come from?

It's not that easy. You can make omelet from eggs, but not eggs from omelet.

Most Terran primates did not understand the multiplex nature of causality. They tended to think everything had a single cause. This simple philosophic error was so widespread on that planet that the primates were all in the habit of giving themselves, and other primates, more credit than was deserved when things went well. This made them all inordinately conceited.

Dr. Herbert sensibly asks how taking a measurement can have this magic power. I don't think it can. I think we need a model with backward causality, at this point, until we find a better model, because otherwise we contradict the facts of quantum experiments. But I do not think the model is the universe. When the model gets this peculiar, we need to build a better model.

Well, as explained in the last section, non-local correlations transcend causality and also subvert our traditional notions of space and time. If two particles — or events, or Whatnots — have a non-local correlation, in modern quantum theory, this means that they will remain correlated even when no signal, no field, no mechanical push-or-pull, no energy, no cause of any sort can travel from one to the other.

I have come to hold that Causality is not composed exclusively of determinist, individualist, or random elements, but from a combination of all three.

Rynn Cormel had run the world during the Turn, his living charisma somehow crossing the boundaries of death to give his undead existence an uncanny mimicry of life. Every move was a careful study of causality. It was highly unusual for so young an undead vampire to be so good at mimicking having a soul. I figured it was because he was a politician and had had practice way before he died.

no one knows why things happen, you see? Anything could follow from anything. Even real history tells us nothing.

One can't logically argue that because something highly improbable happens, some occult force had to make it happen that way.