Q&A: Regarding the Definition of the Components of Causality
Regarding the Definition of the Components of Causality
Question
A question came to me that I’m not sure is entirely on point. You say that the third component in the concept of causality is the physical component, and you explain there that A has to be the factor that brings about the effect B.
I don’t understand how this criterion alone doesn’t basically amount to the entire definition of causality.
Or in other words: could you see something as a “cause” of something else without assuming the previous two criteria? It feels to me as though you’re not saying much more than something like: yes, what is implied by the concept of causality, and is an integral part of it, is that the same reason must also be causal.
I think this criterion doesn’t add anything new beyond what it rules out—namely, the exclusivity of the previous two criteria—and by that you show that those two alone are not enough to establish the concept of a cause.
Answer
You’re right about almost all of it. That is exactly what I wrote. Just one reservation: physical causation does not entail temporal forward direction. One could theoretically think of causality running from the future to the past. It is the temporal component that determines that this is impossible.
Discussion on Answer
In my view, the connection between time and causality is a priori, not analytic.
A person at the first moment would see event A even though it was caused by B. That is exactly the meaning of backward causality. There is no analytic-conceptual problem with that.
I understand what you’re saying. Basically, I had assumed that in order for B to be a cause of A, B has to happen already (which is not so).
And who knows, Rabbi—maybe that’s how you’ve solved quantum theory. It only seems to us that the wave function collapses randomly; maybe there is some future cause responsible for it, and we have no way of checking it right now.
In other words, it’s not that the researchers looked in the wrong place when they tried to find a cause for the event—when they asked themselves where the trick happens in this magic called quantum mechanics—but that they looked at the wrong time. There really is nothing to check now. A cause for the event *does* exist; it just hasn’t *happened* yet.
That is a suggestion that comes up quite often, and physicists and philosophers play around with it a lot. In my view it is very problematic.
I don’t understand. Are you claiming that it is a synthetic claim that we hold that backward causation in time is impossible? Isn’t it simply because you get a loop? Meaning, isn’t it necessary to the very concept of time that backward causation not occur, because then in what sense is it “really” before what it caused? It sounds like nonsense to me.
So then I ask myself: if that is the case, and the cause of event A is cause B in the future, then what would a person see before event A occurs? If you say he would see event A, that can’t be, because cause B hasn’t happened yet. And if you say he wouldn’t see it, then in what sense did cause B cause event A at that time? Maybe one could say that when I visited that time, it simply wasn’t noticeable; all that is noticeable to us in such a situation is the side effects of such a change. For example, if I sent a plant backward in time, I would see it a moment later older than it was when I sent it back. But does that solve the problem? Maybe I’m missing something.