To lead or not to lead, is that causation?
Causation is one of the fundamental forces that forms the very bedrock of reality and how we experience the world. Without causation, knowledge would be impossible as we would have no way to link any one thing with another – every object and event would have had a separate existence independent of other objects and events; inference, logic, reason – every scientific edifice would crumble. It’s hard to imagine how we could have even existed then – eating food, reproducing, saving oneself from physical and mental harm, nothing would have mattered.
Wrapping one’s head around such concepts is especially difficult as they are never directly observed. This is what Hume said, that our sense of causation is nothing but an intuitively developed concept formed by seeing a given combination of events multiple times – causation has no metaphysical existence, but is only a psychological artefact of expectation within us. Causation, he said, is an illusion.
With this background, Mumford and Anjum begin their book on causation.
In the chapters that follow, some of the common ideas associated with causation are taken up – that causes precede effects, that they are near in space and time, that they always occur together and the like. At a first glance, all these are indeed the kinds of properties and relationships we expect between causes and effects.
But lo and behold! It turns out each and every one of these properties that we relate with causation is flawed as, one by one, the authors start dismantling our notions regarding this concept.
But perhaps the more difficult part was to come up with replacements to form the new foundations of the crumpled and crumbled edifice. In the past few decades, some new theories of causation have entered into the scene and the authors then go on to expound the positives and negatives of those. Some theories, like pluralism which says that causation comprises of a combination of different things which depend on the specific event, or primitivism which says causation is an un-analysable event, a sort of metaphysical atom, tantamount to accepting defeat in the quest to understand causation, whereas others, like dispositionalism which talks about the “tendency” of one thing to lead to another, stand on relatively stronger grounds. Yet, at present, there is not a single theory that manages to explain causation in its various forms.
Does causation imply necessity? But then not every match strike leads to a spark as there are extra factors like wind and wetness of the match head that we forget to take into account. Does causation imply a change from what could have been (an elk on the railway track causes the train to stop and get late; but its presence wouldn’t matter if there was also a red signal), or can causation also exist in things that don’t happen (a medicine stops the onset of a disease, so did it cause nothing?) – questions like these keep the readers occupied, and by the end of the book, short thought experiments such as these help to extract the main components of the concept of causation that one might have.
A statement like “causes precede effects” is seen as being axiomatic. And yet, it is incorrect. Causes and effects exist simultaneously. Let’s take a sugar cube dissolving in water, for instance. If the cause is “sugar coming into contact with water” and the effect is “sugar dissolving in water”, then, the authors say, all the considerations of how the sugar cube and glass of water came to be together, and how someone picked up the sugar cube and put it in the water, are irrelevant from a causation point of view. The sugar cube will only dissolve when it is in contact with water. The effect can only simultaneously exist with the cause.
Causes do not precede effects. This was one of the results that really surprised me. And that is the beauty of reading such books. You realise that there are cracks in the very foundations of your knowledge. It is one thing to not know what causes X, but an entirely different thing to not even know what causation itself really is. It opens up one’s mind to the possibility of other such cracks in one’s conception of the world, and that is enlightening.
If reading the previous nine paragraphs makes you have a re-look at your concept of causation, I wouldn’t think twice before saying it may as well have caused it.