Questioning the Concept of Causality | Part 1 - Go On, Pick Your Favorite Reason!

There's this very popular notion in our society that seems omnipresent and totally common sense to most people - It stems from the way we are raised, we hear about it every day and it's so fundamental that questioning it seems rather pointless at first.

Namely, the notion of causality. Cause and effect. The idea that anything can make something else happen and - more importantly - that everything has a specific reason for happening, a single important cause.

Desperately wanting to make sense of it all

Allow me to be the smartass for a bit here.

I never had any problems with the notions of causality nor have I fully gone beyond it or regard it as something irrelevant. On the human level, within the Earthly game of life, it seems only reasonable that things happen because something caused them. We push a billard ball and it in turn pushes another.

But especially when we talk about people, their relationships and their interactions, this notion of causality has more relevance and meaning to most people than probably most other ideas we play with on the human level.

This becomes especially apparent in instances where feelings get hurt, where people get hurt in general. Then we feel outright compelled to find the individual "responsible" for it. People's drive for finding scapegoats (whether it seems reasonable or unreasonable in any particular instance) seems as old as humanity itself and I'm still trying to figure out if we have always been this way or whether we have fallen for some bad magicians' trick that somehow sold us that concept as a core notion to live by.

Be that as it may, when I started wondering about causality, when I started exploring philosophies of the far East that approach this idea a totally different way I started to find things I had never considered before that are somewhat ignored whenever we talk about notions of causality in our modern society.

The fundamental issue

First and foremost, there really isn't a cause for something because there is always a cause for that. Meaning there is always a cause before the cause and the more you dive into this idea and stop a moment to consider the chain of causal relationships the more you will see that it's actually quite arbitrary how we make sense of the world, life and its causal relationships.

It's not like we are citing some immutable law of nature, something constant and ultimately dependable, but rather we cite endless factors depending on our own worldview, preferences, hopes, dreams, customs and estimations of what we deem important and what we deem irrelevant.

A never-ending goosechase

It may sound quite reductionist and bland but if we are somewhat stringent and strict in analyzing our causal criteria for judging or explaining any situation we eventually always end up in DNA or the big bang respectively (if you are an atheist of sorts). We end up in god or spirit (if you are at all religious in any way) or we are tempted to leave the human level, the human game altogether leading us to conclusions that there never could have been a beginning nor will there ever be an end because everything always has been - on a subphysical level of existence (what shamans have referred to as hyperspace, and some spiritual types call the ground of being, source, the source field etc.). The "thing" [NOT A THING] that to most non-religious types looks exactly like the same "nonsense" that religious people aspire to who hold a firm belief in a handed-down, fixed tradition of inconcrete mumblings.

Wouldn't this be a good time for an example dude?

The material and physical view seems most accessible to people these days, so why don't we start there?

Why did the neighbor's house burn down?

Well, one might say it burned down because the man forgot to turn off his gas stove. Plain and reasonable right? But any (aware and non-muffled) child with an intact sense of wonder and curiosity would instantly go on to ask: Yes, but why did the man forget to turn off his gas stove?

At this point the causality-chain either is continued or - as in the case with children that ask "too many questions" the pursuit of causality is suddenly stopped because of a minor feeling of annoyance on the part of the parents. "Well he just forgot, now eat your veggies and stop asking those silly questions."

Were we to continue down the path of causality we could however still try to find the actual reason.

He forgot to turn off his gas stove because he didn't sleep well the night before and he wasn't as aware as he usually would have been. Yes but why? Well, because he had this important meeting coming up at work that he felt anxious about. Yes but why? Well because he thinks his boss doesn't like him very much so he wanted to make a good impression putting a lot of additional strain, expectations and tiring pressure on himself. Yes... and why? Well because he has been raised this way and holds on to the level of taught responsibility... Yes but why? Well, because his parents had a belief that...

You see, we can continue this forever but most people so keen on defending notions of causality in light of its shortcomings are often the first ones to bail on pursuing it all that far. Maybe because it shows that citing "reasons" along the chain doesn't really explain anything. I prefer the immediate, going the other way: Why did his house burn down? Because there was a fire. End of story.

To most people it seems redundant or irrelevant to say so but if there ever was a single reason surely it would be that one.

But I already told you I don't believe there is a single reason, so we'll let this go for now.

In the end all we can factually say is that there are countless reasons for his house burning down not just one; depending on how we look at it. Selecting one and discarding the others is like saying a computer is built with transistors. It isn't wrong, it's just not the whole story nor does it do reality much justice to ommit all the other aspects, parts, materials and non-material aspects like the work that came together to make the computer a working item.

In a way citing a single reason for anything is being verbally lazy and comfortable...
and understandably so, as we will explore in the next part of this series.

Read other parts of this series:

Part 2 - Boundless Boundaries & Thingifying the Totality

Part 3 - Blurring of the Inner and Outer

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