Quotes About Causality

In the beginning, there were no reasons; there were only causes. Nothing had a purpose, nothing has so much as a function; there was no teleology in the world at all.

Methodological individualism is the doctrine that psychological states are individuated with respect to their causal powers.

What is the difference between describing 'how' and explaining 'why'? To describe 'how' means to reconstruct the series of specific events that led from one point to another. To explain 'why' means to find causal connections that account for the occurrence of this particular series of events to the exclusion of all others.

The whole what-goes-around-comes-around thing is simply our way of trying to make sense out of things that make no sense. Great stuff happens to bad people. Bad shit happens to good people. This is just the way it is.

If guns kill people," Ivy moved next to her uncle and stared down Kip, "Then pens misspell words, cars cause accidents, and forks make people gain weight.

Time, space, and causality are only metaphors of knowledge, with which we explain things to ourselves.

In a world described by quantum physics, an insistence on causal closure of the physical world amounts to a quasi-religious faith in the absolute powers of matter, a belief that is no more than a commitment to brute, and outmoded, materialism.

Did the crows' bill shape and specialized vision predispose them to tool crafting and use? Or did their tool-use behavior in response to unusual ecological opportunity—those delicious hidden grubs—gradually shape their visual system and bills? This is the sort of mysterious causal relationship biologists both love and hate.

I think of Josie's theory that it's all interrelated, that it all goes back to that night in December, all of our decisions and dreams and mistakes from the past inextricably linked.

Jenny wouldn't be dead if she'd never crashed into Blanche on Kearny Street. P'tit wouldn't exist if Blanche had never met Arthur. Facts as hard as rocks, and Blanche has to pick her way among them, find her balance, with an acrobat's cocky smile.

The tendency to look for all causes outside ourselves persists even when it is clear that our state of being is the product of personal qualities such as ability, character, appearance, health and so on.

I'm a scientist, I should never have used the word coincidence. There's less synchronicity and more causality than we often think. Things happen. Sometimes in ways we couldn't even start to imagine.

Disease, in the Gandhian view, results from impurity and must be allowed to do its cleansing work, and the same goes for extreme weather and earthquakes: with unusual consistency, the mahatma preached that victims of such events had it coming.

The weird thing about the arrow of time is that it's not to be found in the underlying laws of physics. It's not there. So it's a feature of the universe we see, but not a feature of the laws of the individual particles. So the arrow of time is built on top of whatever local laws of physics apply.

In physics, all can you do is predict the consequences of physical laws.

In economics, it is easier to agree on the data than to agree on causality.

So the ideology was that: use sounds as instruments, as sounds on tape, without the causality. It was no longer a clarinet or a spring or a piano, but a sound with a form, a development, a life of its own.

In teaching man, experimental science results in lessening his pride more and more by proving to him every day that primary causes, like the objective reality of things, will be hidden from him forever and that he can only know relations.

It is not that hard to understand why most of us believe strongly in things that are palpably not true. We have a natural propensity to see causal connections where there are none and our beliefs are constantly reinforced by people we like and trust. For many people, one vivid and emotionally salient experience validated by a single neighbor or shopkeeper trumps a thousand randomized, double-blind, controlled scientific experiments.

Our natural way of thinking, of making judgments, of identifying causal connections is to jump to conclusions on flimsy evidence.

No somos conscientes de nuestra divinidad; de que somos parte del gran principio de causalidad del universo. No sabemos cuál es nuestra fuerza y sin saberlo no podemos usarla.

If you give a mouse a cookie, he is sure to want a glass of milk.

It is presumed that there exists a great unity in nature, in respect of the adequacy of a single cause to account for many different kinds of consequences.

The man who cannot occasionally imagine events and conditions of existence that are contrary to the causal principle as he knows it will never enrich his science by the addition of a new idea.