Quotes About Causality

Development of Western science is based on two great achievements: the invention of the formal logical system (in Euclidean geometry) by the Greek philosophers, and the discovery of the possibility to find out causal relationships by systematic experiment (during the Renaissance). In my opinion, one has not to be astonished that the Chinese sages have not made these steps. The astonishing thing is that these discoveries were made at all.

For any one who is pervaded with the sense of causal law in all that happens, who accepts in real earnest the assumption of causality, the idea of a Being who interferes with the sequence of events in the world is absolutely impossible. Neither the religion of fear nor the social-moral religion can have any hold on him.

Podía suceder cualquier cosa en aquel instante. La verdad es que hay momentos en los que la omnipresente y lógica red de las secuencias causales se rinde, cogida por sorpresa por la vida, y baja al patio de butacas, mezclándose con el público, para dejar que en el escenario, bajo las luces de una libertad vertiginosa y repentina, una mano invisible pesque en el infinito regazo de lo posible y, entre millones de cosas, sólo permita que ocurra una.

You must not think that because one thing happens after another thing, then it is the first thing that causes the second thing. You must not think that, because it might not be true.

stop looking for who's to blame; instead you'll start asking, "What's the system?" The concept of feedback opens up the idea that a system can cause its own behavior.

Here we meet a very important feature. It would seem as if this were circular reasoning; profits fell because investment fell, and investment fell because profits fell. —Jan Tinbergen,5 Jan Tinbergen,

Perhaps the public would be better served by reframing the issue of media violence in terms of public health, where we seldom speak of causality (even with smoking and lung cancer) because of the variability among individuals and the nature of their exposures, but rather of alterations in "relative risk.

But the bottom line is this, once a timeline affects its own past, even though it erases itself in the process, the effect it had still remains.

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.

Creeping determinism means that we pay less attention than we should to the things that don't happen.

In order to be able to infer that "A causes B," we need to be able to run the experiment many times.

The result is that we are tempted to infer a cause-and-effect relationship when all we have witnessed is a sequence of events. This is the post-hoc fallacy.

Hysteria, epilepsy, tuberculosis, and cancer were all found to result from the erratic propensities of a past life.

And all I'd done a few weeks ago was mention Trickster Night, so everything that happened afterward really wasn't my fault.

Protection, as we use the word in Buddhism, is actually wisdom, it's insight. Protection is seeing and knowing deeply that all things in our experience arise due to causes, due to conditions coming together in a certain way.

Yo creo, y permítaseme este inciso, que la vida está cargada de cosas enigmáticas, pequeños acontecimientos que sólo están esperando el contacto epidérmico, nuestra mirada, para desencadenarse en una serie de hechos causales que luego, vistos a través del prisma del tiempo, no pueden sino producirnos asombro o espanto.

but no, ends must not be permitted to precede beginnings and middles, even if recent scientific experiments have shown us that within certain types of closed systems, under intense pressure, time can be persuaded to run backwards, so that effects precede their causes.

How can we be "free" as conscious agents if everything that we consciously intend is caused by events in our brain that we do not intend and of which we are entirely unaware?

How can we be "free" as conscious agents if everything that we consciously intend is caused by events in our brain that we do not intend and of which we are entirely unaware? We can't.

Decisions, intentions, efforts, goals, willpower, etc., are causal states of the brain, leading to specific behaviors, and behaviors lead to outcomes in the world. Human choice, therefore, is as important as fanciers of free will believe. But the next choice you make will come out of the darkness of prior causes that you, the conscious witness of your experience, did not bring into being.

We are not self-caused little gods.

Free will is actually more than an illusion (or less), in that it cannot be made conceptually coherent. Either our wills are determined by prior causes and we are not responsible for them, or they are the product of chance and we are not responsible for them.

Free will is an illusion. Our wills are simply not of our own making. Thoughts and intentions emerge from background causes of which we are unaware and over which we have exert no conscious control. We do not have the freedom we think we have.

Je hais, pour ma part, ces systèmes absolus, qui font dépendre tous les événements de l'histoire de quelques causes premières se liant les unes aux autres par une chaîne fatale, et qui suppriment, pour ainsi dire, les hommes de l'histoire du genre humain. Je les trouve étroits dans leur prétendue grandeur, et faux sous leurs airs de vérités mathématiques.