Miscellaneous fortune-cookies on the subject of Causality

For our essays touching upon Causality, click here:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/search/label/causality

Herewith  some random quotes  from recent reading;  there is no time (no time!  the Reaper  knocking at the door) to integrate these into their proper places in the proper posts.

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A welcome bridge between the notion of ‘cause’ (which many of us will associate with homework from physics class) and that of ‘explanation’ (philosophy):

When an explanation is successful, we ‘feel the key  turn in the lock’, in the happy phrase of C.S. Peirce.  There are many different kinds of explanations, and each one involves a different sense of ‘cause’.

-- Jim Holt, Why does the World Exist? (2012), p. 9

~~~~~~

Not only does unpredictability  not entail  inexplicability,  but its presence is compatible with the truth of determinism in a strong version.

-- Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (1981; ²1984), p.  100

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Ultimate cause:

This book cannot contribute to the discussion concerning whether the roots of this individualism are to be found in ideological or social and economic factors.  Wherever the prime mover may be found, what is indisputable is that, when a more individualist society does not eventually emerge, it manifests itself at all these levels.

-- Ernest Gellner, Language and Solitude (posthum. 1998), p. 14

Re Wittgenstein’s philosophical change of heart after the Tractatus:

Precisely why he reached this conclusion  remains something of a mystery.  I feel I can guess his motives, but not his reasons.

-- Ernest Gellner, Language and Solitude (posthum. 1998), p. 14

This isn’t really a por qué/para qué distinction:  the motives Gellner has in mind  could well be partly unconscious.    He is rather talking about psychology versus philosophy, emotion versus cognition.

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Proximate cause:

Ich will zugeben, daß es eine ganze Klasse von Träumen gibt, zu denen die Anregung vorwiegend aus den Resten des Tageslebens stammt.

-- Sigmund Freud, Die Traumdeutung (1900)

Here, the notion ‘trigger’ is closely tied to a broader causal-background.

Where there are weak bonds  and an alarming danger appears, such as a fire in a theatre, the danger itself is the provocative cause of the disorderly and selfish turmoil.

-- Ernest Jones, Freud: The Last Phase (1957), p. 339

In Fallujah, the tripwire for the cascade of resentments  had been a killing.  Many killings.

-- Anthony Shadid, Night Draws Near (2005)

His plural afterthought ruins the choice of word: a tripwire is instantaneous, not incremental.

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This domination of Moscow over the Comintern is much more the result than the cause of the evolution of commnism outside Russia.

-- Franz Borkenau, World Communism [a re-issue of The Communist International (1938)], p. 416

Religion is primarily a theory of causes, and only incidentally a scheme of conduct.

-- H. L. Mencken

The accuracy of this becomes plain in cases of primitive superstition, where supernatural causes abound, but without moral implications.  (Cf. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger.)

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Re WWI:

The European system was the main cause of the war.

-- Kurt Reinhardt, Germany: 2000 Years (1950, 2^nd edn. 1961).

This is as far as possible from any Anregung/trigger sense of ‘cause’.

In dem Drama “Der Blaue Boll”  kommt es Barlach darauf an, » das Werden als dunkle Gewalt, schaltend und gestaltend  im Hintergrund der Vorgänge  « sichtbar zu machen.

-- P. Pörtner, Vorwort zu: Deutsches Theater des Expressionismus (ca. 1961), p. 21

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Look carefully at what it can ever mean to speak of genes exerting an influence on a nervous system.  All that genes can really influence directly  is protein synthesis.

-- Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (1976; 2^nd edn. 1989), p. 240

Point taken, you concede, bored.  But two pages later, this piquant conclusion:  “We can legitimately speak of fluke genes as influencing snail bodies, in just the same sense as snail genes influence snail bodies.”   The general perspective here is in line with the stepping-back involved in Dawkins’ notion of the “extended phenotype”:   here we have a kind of extended genotype.

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With an overtone of the deliberate or Providential, especially odd in this case:

The introduction of the mongoose  saw to the extermination of the flightless birds.

-- Richard Fortey, Earth (2004), p. 37

A Simple Explanation

Q:  Why do bunnies have long ears?

A:  So they’ll be easy for children to draw.

Bunny, hearkening to the Music of the Spheres (too high for you to hear)

[For further fascinating totally-true fact-checked and verified Natural History revelations,
click here:
When Penguins Ruled the Earth .

For more wonderful bunnyfun, here. ]

Causality: an appendix from Depth Psychology

Our principle series of essays on causality  may be consulted here:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/search/label/causality

As a follow-up, just a couple of footnotes.  Rather than work them into the essays where they might be most relevant, we publish them apart, since the philosophical and scientific interests  are cross-cutting.

Freud was deeply imbued with the principles of causality and determinism, so pronounced in the Helmholtz school that had dominated his early scientific discipline.  Instead of dismissing the wandering associations  as accidental, unconected, and meaningless … he felt intuitively that there must be some definite agency … guiding and degtermining the course of these thoughts.

-- Ernest Jones, Freud: the Formative Years (1953), p. 45

Terminology: Here we see a number of causation-related terms used rather kunterbunt:

Für die Wissenschaft  erhob sich alsbald  die Frage, ob der Anreiz zum Träumen  stets der nämliche sei, oder ein vielfacher sein könne, und damit die Erwägung, ob sie ursächliche Erklärung des Traumes  der Psychologie  oder vielmehr der Physiologie  anheimfalle.  Die meisten Autoren scheinen anzunehmen, daß die Ursachen der Schlafstörung, also die Quellen des Träumens, mannigfaltiger Art sein können, und daß Leibreize  ebenso wie seelische Erregungen  zur Rolle von Traumerregern gelangen.

-- Sigmund Freud, Die Traumdeutung (1899)

For his part, Freud’s wayward onetime-disciple Jung  is well known for his notion of “synchronicity, an acausal connecting principle”.

Brücke would have been astonished  had he known that one of his favorite pupils, [Freud], was later … to bring back into science  the ideas of “purpose”, “intention”, and “aim” , which had just been abolished from the universe. [Nevertheless, Freud] never abandoned determinism for teleology.

-- Ernest Jones, Freud: the Formative Years (1953), p. 45

Jung greatly de-emphasized determinism, both in theory and in therapy.

Anaetiology

[a continuation of this]

The antonym of determinism would be indeterminism, I suppose;  but there are a couple of things that might mean.   (This is because, in natural language, the negation of a composite or quantified predicate is not well-regimented regarding the scope of the negator.)

One variety would be complete randomness -- everything just happens, for no reason.   Less drastic would be cases of (what we may call) anaetiology (from an- 'not' plus aetiology 'causation'), considered as an epistemic state.  Matt Ridley, in Genome (1999), illustrates a related medical term, concerning the aetiology of Creutzfeld-Jakob Disease:

CJD  has killed lifelong vegetarians who had never had surgery, never left Britain, and never worked on a farm… The … greatest mystery of the prion is that even today -- when forms of CJD have been caught by all sorts of known means, including cannibalism,  surgery, hormone injections and possibly beef-eating -- eighty-five per cent of all CJD cases are ‘sporadic’, meaning that they cannot at the moment be explained by anything other than random chance.

This sporadic is thus something of a euphemism or weasel-word, and is characteristic of the medical profession, which is loath to put “we have no idea” as a diagnosis (and insurance companies might be squirrely about paying for such a Dx).   Similarly used is non-specific, as in non-specific urethritis, where there  is nothing ‘non-specific’ about the symptoms themselves, their cause is in such cases unspecified.

Similarly, I was recently informed that I had essential hypertension, which sounds like the very worst kind.  But all it really means is (in the words of Wiki), “the form of hypertension that by definition, has no identifiable cause”.  Primary hypertension is used in the same way.  (Naturally the physician can charge more for coolly confronting essential hypertension, than if it were just "high blood-pressure -- Lord knows how you got it".)  But since sporadic, essential, and primary already have important unrelated pre-existing meanings, medicine needed a special word all its own that means “we don’t know”, and that word is:  idiopathic.   

Or -- should the cat get out of the bag about that one -- agnogenic.  (“ ‘Agnogenic Systems Failure’.  It was military doubletalk for crash of unknown cause.” -- Michael Crichton, The Andromeda Strain (1969), p. 217.)

With these fine words, you can admit your ignorance and still sound smart.

Note:  There is a curious compatibility between this term idiopathic,  and that of emergent phenomenon -- that is, one that resists the program of Reductionism.   Just a thought.

Thus:  anaetiological means ‘acausal’ or 'uncaused'.  Similarly, Colin McGinn (“Truth and use”) speaks of “the causal inertness of abstract objects”.

~

In the field of linguistics, compare further:

The main problem of phonetic change  arises from ‘spontaneous’ (isolative) changes, in which a phoneme changes  in all, or nearly all, of its occurences, irrespective of environment.

-- M. L. Samuels, Linguistic Evolution, with special reference to English (1972), p. 18

The contrasting term here is conditioned change.  --  This does not mean that the phenomenon is conceived as being as mechanically inexplicable as spontaneous beta-decay of the nucleon, say;  on the next page he speaks of the “principal mechanism” of isolative change.

Hi!  I'm a hamster.  (eom)

[Update 8 May 2012]  And now this:

http://www.nature.com/nphys/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/nphys2300.html

Are there fundamentally random processes in nature? Theoretical predictions, confirmed experimentally, such as the violation of Bell inequalities^, point to an affirmative answer. However, these results are based on the assumption that measurement settings can be chosen freely at random, so assume the existence of perfectly free random processes from the outset. Here we consider a scenario in which this assumption is weakened and show that partially free random bits can be amplified to make arbitrarily free ones. More precisely, given a source of random bits whose correlation with other variables is below a certain threshold, we propose a procedure for generating fresh random bits that are virtually uncorrelated with all other variables. We also conjecture that such procedures exist for any non-trivial threshold. Our result is based solely on the no-signalling principle, which is necessary for the existence of free randomness.

Causality and its Discontents

(Das Unbehagen in der Kausalität)

The profoundly unenquiring mind, if such there be, does not wonder what causes what, but simply takes life as it comes.  One senses such a temper among the ducks.

The human mind, by contrast, has a weakness for overascription (thus including misascription) of causality:   and this, along two basically opposite lines.

(1) The unphilosophical

            We are subject to the fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc -- which owes its longevity in part to the fact that, survival-wise, it is mostly a pretty decent rule of thumb.

            A special case of misascription, what we might call the “premature ejaculation in ascription of causation” -- mistaking the immediate trigger for an underlying cause -- is treated here.

(2) The philosophical

            The above are instances of an amiable intellectual laziness.  Swimming quite in the other direction is the well-known observation of (pre-P.C.) anthropology, summarized here by the philosopher Mario Bunge (in Causality, 1963):

It seems … characteristic of primitive mentality … to assign a cause to everything that is, begins to be, or passes away, and, particularly, to invent myths for explaining causally  the origin of what we now regard as self-existent, unengendered, uncaused:  namely, the universe as a whole;  thus many cosmogonies … satisfy the urge for causal explanation.

Bunge then cites the locus classicus of this and related views, the 1910 volume of Lévy-Bruhl (no longer salonfähig), with the no-longer-salesworthy title of Les fonctions mentales dans les sociétés inférieures.   But my point here is that, in this particular respect, the inquiring primitive is more like the scientist than is the modern Western consumer zoned-out in his barcalounger.

Steven Weinberg begins his classic 1977 best-seller The First Three Minutes  by citing such a creation-myth:

The origin of the universe is explained in the Younger Edda, a collection of Norse myths compiled around 1220… In the beginning, says the Edda, there was nothing at all.  [Later] there grew a giant, Ymer.  What did Ymer eat?  It seems there was also a cow.  And what did she eat?  Well, there as also some salt. And so on.

I must not offend religious sensibilities, even Viking religious sensibilities, but I think it is fair to say that this is not a very satisfying picture of the origins of the universe.

Very true indeed.  Yet no more satisfying are the origin-myths for consciousness, free will, morality, art, and so forth, offered up by the neuroscientists and sociobiologists, who  beneath their lab-coats  seem to be clad in animal-skins.   Indeed, in one respect we must prefer the Edda, in that Snorri Sturleson -- unlike his latter-day intellectual siblings who try, not to explain what makes us human, but to explain it away -- was not attempting, in his pleasant fable, to deny that the universe exists.

            Thus, in both cases -- the primitive cosmogonist, and the modern reductionist -- people began with excellent intentions but were satisfied to stop short with an account devoid of explanatory value.   And again in this case, I’d say the folk-mind wins on points, in that its creation-stories tend to be good-humored and not to take themselves too seriously -- things like “How the Leopard Got His Spots”.

(For an origin-myth of the Urysohn Metrization Theorem, unearthed from an ancient M.I.T. manuscript, click here.)

Any Ideas ? (III)

[We continue with our inventory of Leading Ideas.]

(5) The world as law-driven

            We each have an innate sense of causality – indeed, rather too robust a one, as it frequently reaches beyond the facts (post hoc ergo propter hoc).  Thus  observed regularities are already partway along towards being conceived as laws, which Nature tends, by nature, to observe. Any one of us could write a pretty extensive lay, after the manner of De rerum naturâ, setting down all the laws we know.  Mine begins:

            Ducks like to quack;

            Cows like to moo.

            Frogs often jump;

            Worms never do.

The ancients made astounding progress along these lines, predicting eclipses and minutely analyzing the wheeling of the stars.

So, if it does qualify as an Idea, it is still a generalization of something we grow up taking for granted.  The question is, does this basic instinctive-cum-observational idea at some point pass into something qualitatively different – so that the laws are no longer parasitic on the phenomena, rather if anything the latter are dependent on them.  And I think it does.

            For many a philosopher and scientist, the laws we in time arrive at seem more real – nay, are more real – than any one of their apparent instantiations.  So that, in many cases, such savants are led to defy the very face of phenomena, something the plain man seldom or never does.   Thus, the plain man notes, as a regularity of nature, that objects put in motion soon slow down, like a tossed ball, unless continually impelled, like a running deer.  He leaves it at that; Aristotle furrows his brow and comes up with little curling  air-currents impelling the ball until, as it were, the wind goes out of its sails.  But Newton bids defiance to the mere evidence of our senses (insert well-known story here).  Someone struck by law-drivenness to the point of monomania may thus attempt to explain away some things more certain than the existence of ducks: to wit, free will.  Still, the principle is sound, though in excess it may lead to fever.

            I cannot develop this Idea/idea further, since it is one of which I myself have but a feeble grasp.  To me (and to my friends the ducks), the world appears to work by magic. 

Causality: a footnote on temporal abnormalities

[continued from this]

I bracket off this sub-subtopic from the main trunk, since it differs in that it seems to lack a scientific or a moral dimension, but rather plays with paradox  in a sandbox of its own making.  Accordingly, parting momentarily from my usual Victorian-gentleman courtliness, I shall treat of these subtopics in a rollicking spirit of satire and abuse.

(Thus, to begin: for "sandbox", read:  kitty-litter box.)

(1)  Michael Dummett,  in “Can an Effect Precede its Cause?” (1954) calls causality into question, not in the sort of detailed empirical way that quantum or chaos theorists did, but in the sort of I-wonder-do-I-actually-have-hands style of philosophers.  He begins:

On the ordinary Humean view of cause, a cause is simply a sufficient condition:  it is merely that we have observed that, whenever A happens, B follows. 

I think he means “follows” in a logical or empirical, rather than a temporal sense; though if so, then, given the context, it’s an unfortunate choice of words.  Anyhow, he goes on:

But obviously we can also observe that an event of a certain kind  is a sufficient condition for an event of another kind; and why should we not then call the later event the ‘cause’ of the earlier?

Aristotle actually did go some ways towards covering the case, with his notion of ‘final cause’ (Τέλος -- basically, purpose conceived as one of several types of enabling conditions);  but that seems not to be what Dummett has in mind;  in any case the matter of ‘final cause’ is not addressed.

Why should we lay down temporal precedence as a defining property of a cause?

Why indeed, so long as we are doubting the existence of our own hands. -- Somehow I am reminded of such other latitudinarian grand gestures as “Why, after all should marriage be defined as between a woman and a man -- rather than, say, between a gentleman-pig and a baby boy?”  -- To both these questions, we reply as did Mr. Bingly, to the question whether it would not be more rational for balls to feature conversation to the exclusion of dancing: "Much more rational, but much less like a ball."   -- Or, less delphically:    Whenever you meet an integer that is an even prime, you will invariably discover that that same integer is twice unity;  and vice versa.  These are invariable concomitants, but we don’t call the one the cause of the other.  And why not?   Because that is just not the way we talk, and if you stretch the term to cover such cases, you have modified the language, nay the very ‘speech community’, much as you have done when two grooms exchange rings.

Finally he settles down with:

Causes are simultaneous with their immediate effects, but precede their remote effects.

In other words:  “Never mind.”

(2)  Cosmology itself is not exempt from what can be considered a causal paradox, ever since Gödel discovered temporal-loop solutions to the equations of general relativity.  Now, Gödel himself (one of the heroes of this blog) did not draw any meretricious philosophical or televisable conclusions from this calculational oddity;  he just said, “Tiens!  A loop solution to the Einstein equations,” and went back to his real work.

The reason I resist including this case among the more substantive, is that, whenever time itself is held to differ either topologically or algebraically from a directed linear segment, it would seem you have worse problems on your hands than niceties of causality -- as though worrying whether falling into a black hole might muss your hair.   The point at which physics-porn purveyors start jabbering of time-travel and wondering whether we might just jolly pop round and strangle our infant great-grandfather in the crib, is the point at which I bail, and go read something more level-headed and believable, like Father Brown or the Gospels.

Anyhow, let’s listen in on a passage from a distinguished contemporary mathematician, Roger Penrose (in The Road to Reality, 2004).  We learn that “the null cones are more fundamental than the metric;  in particular, they determine the causality properties of spacetime.”  Then (p.  408):

The null-cone structure defined by this [metric] g  specifies E’s [Einsteinian spacetime] causality structure, must as was the case for Minkowski space.  Locally, the differences are slight, but things can get decidedly more elaborate when we examine the global causality structure of a complicated Einsteinian spacetime.  An extreme situation arises when we have … causality violation, in which ‘closed timelike curves’ can occur, and it becomes possible for a signal to be sent from some event into the past …!

Disturbing, doubtless.  Still, don’t lie awake worrying about it.

(3)  There also exists a proposal for backwards-causation that does not depend on any hypothetical cosmological exotica, put forward by two quite celebrated physicists:  Wheeler and Feynman’s “Classical Electrodynamics in Terms of Direct Interparticle Action” (1949) -- “direct”, that is, as opposed to the usual retarded forces of electrodynamics.  Mario Bunge (Causality 1963) comments thus:

The chain of action and reaction can be completed so as to satisfy functionalism, if advanced forces are introduced alongside retarded ones.  Such advanced forces behave in a ‘premonitory’ way … they represent the action of a still unborn future on the present.

In the face of such dizzying ideas, I can only retreat to my simple peasant faith.

Notes towards an eventual essay on Causality (concluded)

"The law of causation  is the guiding rule of science;  but the categorical imperative -- the dictate of duty -- is the guiding rule of life."

-- Max Planck, The New Science.

“Che sera sera” is a truth of logic, not a version of determinism.

-- E. J. Lemmon, “Sentences, Statements, and Propositions” (1966)

Finally we turn to the matter of determinism.

For long, the center of mass of this question, lay within science.  Certain credentialled individuals, ignoring their own obvious Free Will, were pleased to assert the thesis that we are all robots, and that everything is completely pre-determined and predictable within this meaningless universe of billiard-balls.   This preposterous proposition ran counter to the evidence of our senses, as well as to the teachings of the Church.  But then, the heretics in question  were insensible to either.

Yet by now -- quite surprisingly -- the thesis of universal determinism has been refuted from within science itself -- und zwar, in two remarkable and unexpected and independent ways.

The better known of these  comes from quantum mechanics -- Heisenberg uncertainty; the collapse of the wave function; all that.  That pretty much comes across to most of us  as magic, and I wouldn’t blame people for not rushing uncritically to embrace something that they do not understand.   It’s probably true enough, I’m not calling it into question;  but one doesn’t enjoy it when something basically alien and only semi-comprehensible (as quantum theory notoriously is, even to its practitioners) is cited as sole proof concerning something fundamental to our lives.  (For similar reasons, it’s a dead-lousy linchpin for explaining the possibility of Free Will, as Penrose wished to do.)

The less well-known, but more easily verifiable, comes from within classical (pre-quantum) physics itself, once the math got hefty enough.   First, it was proved, over a century ago, that something so modest as the three-body problem (three masses orbiting one another in empty space) is analytically unsolvable.  Next, mathematical progress in nonlinear dynamics  sharpened our understanding of just how wildy  Nature can -- and typically will -- go off the radar.  (For details, look up “chaos theory”, plus some relevant remarks here.)

These new perspectives are very welcome, from a scientific and mathematical standpoint, though they just go to prove what no Christian ever doubted for an instant. 

*

In terms of the contemporary sociopolitical scene in America (I do not say: scientifico-philosophical, since that scarcely exists), none of the above is of the least consequence.   The denizens of McWalAmerica know nothing of math or science, and care less.   Yet a sort of dwarfish deformed offspring of (bleak, godless, but bold and parsimonious withal) classical Laplacian determinism, has slithered forth upon our shores, born of Dan White out of Oprah.  The goal of this degenerate tendency (the only defense for the proponents of which, is Diminished Capacity) is to absolve us of responsibility for our own actions -- and, conveniently, our own crimes -- thus reducing the moral stature of mankind to that of the insects -- or, if these be too admirable (get thee to the bee, thou sluggard, and the ant), perhaps the paramecia.

As often, G. K. Chesterton was early on the scene with trenchant comment.  Here he squibs the medical-excuse defense, in his 1912 parable, Manalive:

Perjury is a variety of aphasia, leading a man to say one thing instead of another.  Forgery is a kind of writer’s cramp, forcing a man to write his uncle’s name instead of his own.  Piracy on the high seas is probably a form of sea-sickness.

To see that this parody by no means stretches beyond the facts, compare this actual case -- only the latest of innumerable such things -- documented in this morning’s L.A.Times:

August 5, 2011

An appointee of Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa assigned to oversee dozens of neighborhood councils resigned after FBI agents raided his home looking for evidence that he or others downloaded child pornography.

Abrams, 63, submitted his resignation Wednesday and said he did not know whether he was a target of the investigation. Asked about the search warrant, Abrams said he had surgery earlier this year to address a tumor on his spine. That growth, he said, ultimately affected his brain and caused "behaviors that were completely out of character."

Asked if those behaviors included the downloading of child pornography, he responded: "That's a legal question. You'd have to talk to my attorney."

In a separate interview with CBS2, Abrams said a "split personality" caused him to go by the name Boywonderusa — the account that the FBI contends was used to download pornographic images of children.

Villaraigosa said Thursday he was appalled by the news and said Abrams told him he was "sorry for everything that has happened." The mayor also said Abrams' explanation wasn't something he had heard before as "a reason for this type of thing."

*

Oh -- I almost forgot.  The miscellaneous quotations that were to form the nucleus of an eventual essay.  Well, here they are anyway, mostly for vocabulary purposes (determinism/necessity/necessitarianism).

C.S. Peirce, "The Doctrine of Necessity Examined": "Its first advocate appears to have been Democritus."

"a strict necessitarianism" "The usual and most logical form of necessitarianism is called the mechanical philosophy."

Robert Lindsay & Henry Margenau, Foundations of Physics (1936), p. 189, contrasts “dynamical” (rigidly deterministic) vs. “statistical” theories:

Thermodynamics and radioactivity  refused to be completely understood in terms of the familiar dynamical concepts. … Ordinary dynamics, or its bolder offspring, the general mechanistic theory, not only becomes inapplicable or useless [in these domains], but leads definitely to results  contradictory to observation.

Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen,  The Entropy Law and the Economic Process (1971), p. 174:

Heisenberg’s [Uncertainty] Principle  offers no logical basis  for either determinism  or indeterminism.  On the contrary, its philosophical implication  is that neither thesis is experimentally testable.

Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen,  The Entropy Law and the Economic Process (1971), p. 175:

For a determinist, the withdrawing of the Red Sea for the Passover, the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, the genesis of life,  all are mythological miracles  until he can find a causal explanationfor them.  For an indeterminist, they are just possible results of the play of chance. … Indeterminism of the hard type  has no recourse against Broglie’s verdict that, with it, physics runs “the danger of remaining stuck in purely statistical interpretations, and thus becoming  completely sterile.”

Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen,  The Entropy Law and the Economic Process (1971), p. 183:

If one narrows down science … to a dynamical matrix, then one must swear by determinism. … And the same is true for … full-fledged indeterminism, which claims that everything consists of jumping electrons.

Mario Bunge, preface (1979) to third edition of Causality and Modern Science (1959; 1963):

Instead of becoming indeterminists, we have enlarged determinism  to include noncausal categories.

(Sounds like moving the goalposts, but it could well be justified in detail.)

Abraham Pais, Subtle is the Lord (1982), p. 442:

Born’s observation in 1926 that the absolute square of a Schroedinger wave function is to be interpreted as a probability density … goes to the heart of the problem of determinism. .. He wrote: “I myself am inclined to renounce determinism in the atomic world, but that is a philosophical question  for which physical arguments alone do not set standards.”

Gerd Gigerenzer et al, The Empire of Chance (1989), p. 276f, distinguishes five varieties of determinism: metaphysical determinism, epistemological determinism, etc.

Gerd Gigerenzer et al, The Empire of Chance (1989), p. 279: "Macroevolution may be random, regardless of the complete microdetermination of each mutation." 

This rather reverses an earlier view, according to which overall evolution proceded broadly by the laws of natural selection, the microscopiic source of selected variety being mysterious (prior to Mendel) or random.

Gerd Gigerenzer et al, The Empire of Chance (1989), p. 280: "necessitated by antecedent conditions"

"the Laplacian archdeterminist, Claude Bernard"

~

Matt Ridley, Genome (1999), p.  307:

The equation of determinism with fatalism  is a fallacy.  … Determinism looks backwards to the causes… not forward to the consequences.

In politically-correct circles, biological determinism (hereditarianism) was a no-no, while cultural determinism (environmentalism) was okay.   Ridley quotes a novel perspective on this:

Rich Harris lays bare just how much more alarming social determinism is thqn genetic.  It is brainwashing.  Far from leaving room for free will, it rather diminishes it.  A child who expresses her own (partly genetic) personality  in defiance of her parents’ or her siblings’ pressures, is at least obeying endogenous causality, not someone else’s.

A thought-provoking passage, especially as we shall ponder further upon the matter of Free Will.

Steven Pinker, in The Blank Slate (2002), notices a loose polemical use:

The radical scientists’ case against Wilson and Dawkins  can be summed up in two words:  “determinism” and “reductionism”.  Their writings are peppered with these words,  used  not in any technical sense  but as vague terms of abuse.

(Compare the snarling use of “liberal” by the populist Right in the U.S.)

Notes towards an eventual essay on Causality (ctd.)

 Of especial importance is the ability to distinguish  various sorts of structural or underlying or predisposing causes, from the immediate trigger of an event.  The former are important, and subject to systematic investigation;  the latter can be just about anything, yet it is this which fascinates the public, with unfortunate consequences.   A man bites down on a bad bagel, goes berseerk, slays six;  a flutter of Twitter swirls around the Bagel Problem, the National Association of Bagel Bakers weighs in;  eventually recipes are exchanged and everyone forgets the whole thing.   Or, a pupil violently allergic to peanuts breathes in a single molecule that may have floated in through an open window, and dies;  the grieving/thieving family sues the school, the town, the state, the USDA, with Mr. Peanut named as co-defendant;  and legislation is introduced (“Kaitlin’s Law”) requiring that all windows be closed at all times. 

The whole idea of the straw that broke the camel’s back, is that it was just a straw;  a bird alighting would have had the same effect; and neither would have had any effect at all had the camel not already been overloaded.   Yet it is this final straw that appeals to the concrete-particularity and sentimentality of a scientifically illiterate electorate.

Terms for this easily visualizable yet aetiologically secondary cause: trigger, tripwire, proximal cause, proximate cause… (more below); French détente, German Anlass.

Citations:

David Hume, Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751):
Taste, as it gives pleasure or pain, and thereby constitutes happiness or misery, becomes a motive to action, and is the first spring or impulse to desire and volition.

William James, The Will to Believe and other essays (1897), p. 224:
In physiology…almost all causes… are forces of detent, which operate by simply unlocking energy already stored up.  …which "touches off" a train already laid.

Ward & Waller, eds. The Cambridge History of English Literature, vol. I:  From the Beginnings to the Cycles of Romance (1907):

The occasion of the institution of the Round Table [was] a quarrel for precedence among Arthur’s knights.

Mark Sullivan, Our Times V (1939), p. 59:

Louvain was the climax of Belgium, and Belgium the precipitant of American opinion."

Mario Bunge, Causality (1963):
In the case of the conditioned reflex ... the sound (stimulus or efficient cause) initiates or triggers, but does not produce, the entire process.

Wilfred Thesiger, The Marsh Arabs (1964), p.  194:

The low water of 1955 precipitated this mass migration to the towns, but did not cause it.

 (Reuters, 11 I 02) 

Auslöser der gegenwärtigen Spannungen war ein Anschlag auf das indische Parlament im Dezember, für den Indien extremistische Rebellen aus dem pakistanischen Teil Kaschmirs verantwortlich macht.

Washington Post, 8 V 10, re the recent glitch on Wall St:

The Dow Jones industrial average  plunger nearly 1,000 points in less than an hour … Federal officials [have] yet to pinpoint what tipped the first domino.  “You can’t trade that fast … without algorithmic trading… It wasn’t the cause, but it was the enabler.”

Vs.

Gerd Gigerenzer et al, The Empire of Chance (1989), p. 279: "influenced only at one or two removes."

[Update 7 VIII 11], Re the night's rioting in Tottenham:
When you talk to the people here about what actually happened, they believe there was a simmering situation.
People are angry towards the police over the shooting of Mark Duggan on Thursday.
They believe it was unjustified and they don't believe the police story.
That was the touchpaper and what kicked off last night was, in their words, inevitable.

*

An antonym of trigger might be seed or germ.  It does not exactly 'cause' some result; it 'prepares the way' for it, or 'gives rise' to it.  Thus the embryo, and the man.

A remarkable case of very distant causal connection (if any) nevertheless results in manslaughter charges against scientists. (The victims victimize.)

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Notes towards an eventual essay on Causality

The word “cause”    is an altar

to an unknown god

-- Wm. James

 

[Over the years, I have built up a file of many hundreds of pages, consisting of juicy quotes on various topics, raw materials for many a book and essay.  However, the publishing landscape being what it is, these have long lain fallow.  In all likelihood, the Reaper will be requiring an audience before all this grist can be milled.   A shame for it all simply to lie there, where the worm doth bore and the mice do gnaw.  So herewith a tiny sampling, as hostages to fortune, and a goad to the Muse.]

Let’s start things off with a quotation that sets matters in the perspective of a mystery.

Abraham Pais, a physicist and friend of Einstein, on the very first page of his technically-dense biography of Einstein (Subtle is the Lord), mentions a poser that motivated him to write the book:

I wondered once again about the question, Why does this man, who contributed so incomparably much to the creation of modern physics, remain so attached to the nineteenth-century view of causality.

We shan’t answer this here, but for now we'll merely offer a bouquet of quotes illustrating thoughts about causality, down the ages.

(1) Causality in general

Chaucer, Tale of Melibeus (following Aristotle):
"The wrong that thou hast received  hath certain causes, which that clerks clepen Oriens and Efficiens, and Causa longinqua and Causa propinqua; this is to seyn, the fer cause and the ny cause.  The fer cause is almighty God, that is cause of all things.  The neer cause is thy three enemies.  The cause accidental was hate.  The cause material been the five wounds of thy daughter. The cause formal is the manner of their working, that broughten ladders for to slay thy daughter …"

David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), p.75: "He could not pronounce that the one event was connected: but only that it was conjoined with the other."   (cf., later, “synchronicity”)

David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748, 1777), p. 76:
"We may define a cause to be an object, followed by another, and where all the objects similar to the first  are followed by objects similar to the second.  Or in other words where, if the first object had not been, the second never had existed." 

These are not in fact equivalent formulations.  The first is too broad, and would apply to prefaces and books.  The second would not apply to these, as there exist books without prefaces.

Hermann Paul, Prinzipien der Sprachgeschichte (1880, 5^th edn. 1920), p. 24: "Denn zwischen Abstraktionen gibt es überhaupt keinen Kausalnexus, sondern nur zwischen realen Objekten und Tatsachen."

Ward & Waller, eds. The Cambridge History of English Literature, vol. I:  From the Beginnings to the Cycles of Romance (1907), emphasizing intralingual change rather than French influence:

The differences between the grammar of Old English  and that of the English of Chaucer’s day must be ascribed to internal agencies.

"The law of causality, like much that passes muster among philosophers, is a relic of a bygone age, surviving, like the monarchy, only because it is erroneously supposed to do no harm."
Bertrand Russell, "On the Notion of Cause" (1912).

P.A.M. Dirac, The Principles of Quantum Mechanics (1930; 4^th edn. 1958), p. 4:

We must revise our ideas of causality.  Causality applies only to a system which is left undisturbed.  If a system is small, we cannot observe it  without producing a serious disturbance  and hence we cannot expect to find any causal connexion between the results of our observations.  Causality will still be assumed to apply to undisturbed systems.

Robert Lindsay & Henry Margenau, Foundations of Physics (1936), p. 522:

That many miracles have allegedly been predicted, is hardly sufficient to reconcile their occurrence with the causality postulate.  We conclude:  The positivistic formulation, with its main emphasis upon human ability to know, does not express the nucleus of what is understood by causality.

As to what does express this nucleus (they go on), it is somewhat surprising to the average man on the omnibus:

Consistency of nature, i.e. causality, may be characterized by saying: The differential equations  in terms of which nature is described,  do not contain explicit functions of the time.

This is followed by more technical observations concerning “impressed forces”, and closed vs. open systems.

Mark Sullivan, Our Times VI (1939), p. 74: "I doubt whether a nomination for the Presidency (or anything else) ever merely 'happens', always it must be brought about  and always somebody must play the part of bringer-about."

A. D’Abro, The Rise of the New Physics (1939), vol. II, p. 944:

When Planck advanced his quantum theory of equilibrium radiation, science was confronted with a doctrine in which the succession of events  was not continuous, and in which  causal relations between successive events  were not specifically asserted.  The highly speculative nature of Planck’s ideas  prevented them from receiving immediate acceptance;  but around the year 1907, the remarkable successes of Planck’s theory in other realms of physics  silenced all opposition, and from then on  serious doubts were cast on the validity of rigorous causality in physical science.

Nonlinearity entails noncausality … Causality is a first approximation … a linear approximation to determinism.

Mario Bunge, Causality and Modern Science (1959, 1963).  He traces the ancestry of this insight to Bridgeman, The Logic of Modern Physics (1927).

A.J. Ayer, Scientific American, Oct 1965: "Even in a field in which causal laws are well established, there is often a certain looseness in the way they fit the facts. … These slight deviations are not held to be significant; they are ascribed to errors of observation.
            'Errors of observation', however, is here a term of art.  Apart from the existence of the deviations, there is usually no reason to suppose that any errors have occurred.  Now, I think it possible that this looseness of the fit  cannot be wholely eliminated; in other words, that there are limits to the precision with which the course of nature can be prospectively charted." This margin then is "in the hands of chance."

Resnick & Halliday, Physics (1966), p. 87:
"If one of the two forces involved in the interaction between two bodies is called an 'action' force, the other is called the 'reaction' force.  Either force may be considered the 'action' and the other the 'reaction'.  Cause and effect is not implied here, but a mutual simultaneous interaction is implied."

Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen,  The Entropy Law and the Economic Process (1971), p. 171:

John von Neumann even argued [in Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics (1955)] that this cause-effect link “has certainly no other cause than the ‘law of large numbers’”, the justification being that “the apparent causal order of the world in the large … is completely independent of whether the natural laws governing the elementary processes are causal or not.”

Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen,  The Entropy Law and the Economic Process (1971), p. 175f:

The point shines in Planck’s statement  that the principle of causality “is neither correct nor incorrect;  it is a heuristic principle; … it is the most valuable pointer that we possess … to find a path through the confusion of events.  … [Yet] Planck, after recognizing that causality is only a heuristic principle, let his inner convictions  sweep him away, and, without any ado, proclaimed that causality is “an almighty law  which governs the world”.

Without attempting to proselytize, let us merely here mention the Christian view that, indeed, an almighty law does govern the world, but that the relative ‘causal’ and ‘a-causal’ portions  remain to be determined. -- And notice the scheme of C.S. Lewis, whereby the Natural is wholly given over to the causal, whereas the a-causal (in the Newtonian/Laplacian sense) is confined to the Supernatural and… the Subnatural (the quantum).

Peter Geach, in Reason and Argument (1976, p. 3), urges "a threefold distinction: motives for belief, reasons for belief, causes of belief."

Mario Bunge, preface (1979) to third edition of Causality and Modern Science (1959; 1963):
Positivism had always denounced causality as a myth. … Causalism, the view that all relations among events except the purely spatio-temporal are causal, is surely untenable.

Ralph Grishman, Computational Linguistics (1986), p. 92: "the usual use of 'if A then B', which conveys some causal connections between A and B – so-called strict implication rather than material implication."

Gerd Gigerenzer et al, The Empire of Chance (1989), p. 71: "Such variation could mask the effects of the agencies under investigation." (agency = causal factor)

Gigerenzer et al, The Empire of Chance (1989), p.84: "To be a cause  generally means to make a difference."

Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance (1990), p. 123:
“The element in phrenological theory that mattered to statisticians  was that it created an argument to separate a penchant  from a determining factor.  The old slogan of Leibniz, ‘inclines without necessitating’, was given new application.”

Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance (1990), p. 130:
“Engel had argued: we have statistical regularity, but not law, hence no causes acting on individuals to determine suicides.”

Dagegen Wagner:

“Statistical homogeneity … can result only from causation.  No law can apply to an ensemble   unless there is a set of (deterministic) laws applying to the individuals.”

Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance (1990), p. 188:
“Pearson … testified to the correlation between the taming of chance  and the elimination of ordinary causality.”

17 XI 01 NYTimes: "Since Sept. 11, few phrases have become as familiar as "root causes." Forthright condemnations of the attacks have often been accompanied by assertions that, ultimately, the "root causes" of terror must also be addressed."

Steven Pinker,  The Blank Slate (2002), p. 32:

Behavior appears to have a different kind of trigger than other physical events.  Ordinary events have causes, but human behavior has reasons.

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