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Topic: Causality

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Dualistic interactionism

Information

Correlation

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Brain event

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Phenomenalism

Mental event

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Decoherence

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Ventricular tachycardia

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Post meridiem

	Causality (physics) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		Causality describes the relationship between causes and effects, and is fundamental to all natural science, especially physics.
		This is equivalent to the statement that the cause and its effect are separated by a timelike interval, and the effect belongs to the future light cone of its cause.
		A careful analysis of the phenomena is needed, and the outcome slightly depends on the chosen interpretation of quantum mechanics: this is especially the case of the experiments involving quantum entanglement that require Bell's Theorem for their implications to be fully understood.
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Causality_(physics) (641 words)

	Causality - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		Causality is the centerpiece of the universe and so the main subject of ontology; for comprehending the nature, meaning, kinds, varieties, and ordering of cause and effect amounts to knowing the beginnings and endings of things, to uncovering the implicit mechanisms of world dynamics, or to having the fundamental scientific knowledge.
		Representing the current understanding of causality as the relation of cause and effect, this covers the modern definitions of "cause" as either the agent or agency or particular events or states of affairs.
		Destiny might be considered reverse causality in that a cause is predated by an effect, i.e.
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Causality (4509 words)

	CAUSALITY
		If a person deficient in Causality be placed in charge of any establishment, comprehending a variety of duties which arise the one out of the other, and all of which cannot be anticipated and specified a priori he will be prone to neglect part of what he ought to attend to.
		When Causality is well developed in an observer, and several decided instances of concomitance between particular forms of head and particular powers of mind are presented to him, the feeling of connexion between them is irresistible ; he is struck with it, and declares that there is something here which ought to be followed out.
		Causality is also, to a certain extent, the fountain of abstract ideas, namely, those of the relation of cause and effect ; and bears, in this respect, an analogy to the power named abstraction by the old philosophers.
	pages.britishlibrary.net /phrenology/system/causality.htm (5490 words)

	interdisciplines : Causality
		Causality is also the cognitive basis for the acquisition and the use of categories and concepts in the child.
		Whereas causal attribution is a cognitive process that involves referring an event to its source, whether it be a painting to its author, or an event to its origin, explanation is a three-place predicate describing a social interaction whereby someone explains something to someone else.
		Hume noted that causality was inductively inferred by humans on the basis of three factors: spatio-temporal contiguity of cause and effect, contingency of the effect to the cause and precedence of the cause.
	www.interdisciplines.org /causality (1752 words)

	Causal Processes
		The problem with thinking about causal laws as the underpinning of scientific inference is that the world is a complex place, and while causal laws might hold true, they often do not obtain because of preventing circumstances, and it is impractical to bring in innumerable ‘unless’ clauses.
		Russell's 1948 view is that causal lines replace the primitive notion of causation in the scientific view of the world, and not only replace but also explain the extent to which the primitive notion, causation, is correct.
		The second objection is that Russell's theory of a causal line does not enable the distinction between pseudo and causal processes to be made, yet to delineate causal from pseudo processes is a key issue which needs to be addressed by any theory of causal processes.
	plato.stanford.edu /entries/causation-process (5477 words)

	Causality
		Causality is the Law of Identity applied over time.
		Causality is the term used to describe this dependence of an action on the identities of the entities involved.
		Causality is the law that states that each cause has a specific effect, and that this effect is dependent on the identities of the agents involved.
	www.importanceofphilosophy.com /Metaphysics_Causality.html (283 words)

	Freeman: Consciousness, Intentionality, and Causality
		Causality then becomes a basis for agreement among scientists regarding the validation of relationships between events, and the prediction of actions to be taken for control of events in the world.
		Causality is properly attributed to intentional systems, whose mechanisms of exploring, learning, choosing, deciding, and acting constitute the actualization of the feeling of necessary connection, and of the cognitive metaphor of agency.
		On the other hand, the "causal chain" by which tobacco tars are connected to the unbridled proliferation of pulmonary epithelial tissue is still being explored, and a continuing weakness of evidence for the complete linear causal chain is being used by tobacco companies to claim that there is no proof that smoking causes cancer.
	sulcus.berkeley.edu /FreemanWWW/manuscripts/IF8/99.html (13710 words)

	Processes and Causality
		A general theory of causality must be able to accommodate the full range of approximations, ranging from sophisticated theories of physics to informal, often unconscious habits that enable an organism to survive and reproduce.
		Causal influences on the values of physical functions at any point p are limited by c to a region of the past with respect to p called the cone of causal influence.
		A causal structure of a set of variables V is a directed acyclic graph in which each node corresponds to a distinct element of V, and each link represents a direct functional relationship among the corresponding variables.
	users.bestweb.net /~sowa/ontology/causal.htm (15616 words)

	20th WCP: The Formality of Reality: Xavier Zubiri's Critique of Hume's Analysis of Causality
		Causal chains in general cannot be adequately known, and therefore are not and cannot be the basis of our knowledge of the external world.
		Functional relations may or may not involve causality in the traditional, deterministic sense, or Hume's version, constant conjunction; functionality is a much broader concept, capable of supporting inferences such as counterfactual conditionals which are beyond the range of constant conjunction.
		But Hume's analysis of causality and the skeptical conclusions he draws from it are both defective because he does not recognize the three stages involved in knowledge of the world, and the unique characteristics of the first, primordial apprehension of reality.
	www.bu.edu /wcp/Papers/Comp/CompFow1.htm (3070 words)

	Causality
		Causality, or causation, is the relationship between causes and effects.
		According to law and jurisprudence, legal cause must be demonstrated in order to hold a defendant liable for a crime.
		It must be proven that causality relates the defendant's actions to the criminal event in question.
	www.teachersparadise.com /ency/en/wikipedia/c/ca/causality.html (570 words)

	Time, Clocks and Causality
		Notice that the appeal to causality is implicit in the methods of time measurement actually employed; it is not some novelty foisted upon physics by philosophy.
		From causality, we conclude that the moving clocks are different in some respect from Earth-bound clocks, that something makes a difference in their actions.
		This illustrates the principle that causality and absolute time are tools of discovery; theorists who have abandoned them are unable to interpret the evidence of those clocks.
	www.quackgrass.com /time.html (4803 words)

	Heisenberg - Quantum Mechanics, 1925-1927: Implications of Uncertainty
		In the sharp formulation of the law of causality-- "if we know the present exactly, we can calculate the future"-it is not the conclusion that is wrong but the premise.
		he challenged the notion of simple causality in nature, that every determinate cause in nature is followed by the resulting effect.
		Translated into "classical physics," this had meant that the future motion of a particle could be exactly predicted, or "determined," from a knowledge of its present position and momentum and all of the forces acting upon it.
	www.aip.org /history/heisenberg/p08c.htm (599 words)

	Phrenology - Causality (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-22)
		Causality is the faculty which houses the ability to abstract, think logically, and to trace cause and effect.
		A strongly developed Causality is the hallmark of thinkers, scientists and philosophers.
		Causality is located in the protuberances located halfway on the forehead.
	www.phrenology.org /causality.html (140 words)

	20th WCP: Al-Ghazâlî, Causality, and Knowledge
		In this paper I show that al-Ghazâlî's and Ibn Rushd's theories of causality are closely related to their epistemologies.
		As others have noted, his critique here imputes a very strong notion of causality to the philosophers: namely that given the existence of a cause, the existence of its effect is necessary.
		This is of course a basic tenet of medieval epistemology: elsewhere in Arabic philosophy, it is used to argue for the impossibility of positive theology in the Liber de Causis, and it is the basis for St. Thomas Aquinas' notion of a propter quid demonstration.
	www.bu.edu /wcp/Papers/Medi/MediAdam.htm (3391 words)

	Aristotle on Causality
		Since Aristotle obviously conceives of a causal investigation as the search for an answer to the question “why?”, and a why-question is a request for an explanation, it can be useful to think of a cause as a certain type of explanation.
		Either there is a real causal connection between the formation of the teeth and the needs of the animal, or there is no real causal connection and it just so happens that the way the teeth grow is good for the animal.
		Aristotle offers final causality as his explanation for this regular connection: the teeth grow in the way they do for biting and chewing food and this is good for the animal.
	plato.stanford.edu /entries/aristotle-causality (5569 words)

	Weber - The Work - Causality (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-22)
		It is sometimes argued that, in tune with the German idealistic tradition, Weber rejected the notion of causality in human affairs.
		Weber firmly believed in both historical and sociological causality, but--and this may have given rise to misunderstandings--he expressed causality in terms of probability.
		When we ask whether the Battle of Marathon was a major causal event for the subsequent history of Hellenic civilization, we must perform the mental experiment of envisaging Greece dominated by the Persians.
	www2.pfeiffer.edu /~lridener/DSS/Weber/WEBERW4.HTML (793 words)

	Chronos: Destiny, Causality, and Temporal Divergence
		While it seems there is a near-infinite number of forces acting on the coin, and while the outcome of the coin toss may actually be unpredictable to any kind of human perception, in fact the outcome of the coin toss was destined to happen in only one way since the birth of the Universe.
		Temporal divergence results when the natural chain of causal events is broken by a spontaneous event arising from another causal continuum -- e.g., a time gate being opened from a future timeline.
		A time traveller on a long-term incursion into a past timeline should be highly trained in the principles of chaos theory, causality, and temporal divergence in order to prepare for and adapt to unpredictable instances of temporal divergence.
	chronos.ws /causality.html (1635 words)

	Causality: Cause & Effect
		In a workshop on causality that I attended, a historian stated that many outrageous claims were made because people often do not have the proper foundations in logic (as well as in the subject matter) for making defensible claims of causality.
		Some approaches to causality are so elaborate that basic assumptions about the subject matter may be hidden to all but those intimately familiar with the underlying mathematics, but this is NEVER a valid excuse for assuming that what we don't understand is unimportant.
		Despite all of the statistical evidence, the causal relationship between smoking and disease will not be nailed down by the numbers but by the identification of the substance in tobacco that trigger the diseases.
	www.tufts.edu /~gdallal/cause.htm (1425 words)

	Causality
		The validity of causality is not a provable proposition.
		Implicit in the idea of causality is the necessity of a time buffer between cause and effect.
		Another timing aspect of causality concerns the probability or likelihood of a specific cause resulting in a particular effect at what amounts to a coincidental moment of time.
	halexandria.org /dward127.htm (682 words)

	CATHOLIC ENCYCLOPEDIA: Cause
		The causality of the substantial formal cause is shown in the same manner as that of the material.
		The problems of causality are referred to the idealistic standpoint, or else are treated in terms of matter and motion, with no reference to the essences of the effects.
		His criticism was aimed at the possibility of a knowledge of causal efficiency; and without an adequate theory of cognition, as well as a proper grasp of the relationships between efficient cause and effect in the process of becoming, the idea of efficiency, or power, is indeed inexplicable.
	www.newadvent.org /cathen/03459a.htm (8941 words)

	CAUSALITY (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-22)
		Causality in the social sciences therefore tends to be multi-causal and probabilistic (see probability, information theory).
		The theoretical importance of causal EXPLANATIONs is that one can apply them to explain what happened and predict what will happen.
		Their practical importance is that they lead one to produce or to prevent causally related events by direct or indirect intervention.
	pespmc1.vub.ac.be /ASC/CAUSALITY.html (194 words)

	Elizabeth Anscombe
		In Part I of the paper Miss Anscombe attacks the notion that causality must involve necessity and argues to the contrary that the central element in the notion of causality is the derivativeness of the effect from the cause; any necessity or universality is a further element and may be entirely absent.
		In the second part of the paper she argues that it is not mere ignorance of full causes that warrants the separation of causality from necessity, universality, and determinism.
		The idea of causality is an abstraction from countless active and passive verbs and natural kind terms and could not be introduced if we did not already have a large number of such words in our active vocabulary.
	www.nd.edu /~afreddos/courses/655/anscombe.htm (1050 words)

	NOTES - UCLA 81st FACULTY RESEARCH LECTURE SERIES
		Though it is basic to human thought, Causality is a notion shrouded in mystery, controversy, and caution, because scientists and philosophers have had difficulties defining when one event TRULY CAUSES another.
		In summary, the agents of causal forces in the ancient world were either deities, who cause things to happen for a purpose, or human beings and animals, who possess free will, for which they are punished and rewarded.
		From that point on, causality served a dual role: CAUSES were the targets of credit and blame on one hand, and the carriers of physical flow of control on the other.
	singapore.cs.ucla.edu /LECTURE/lecture_sec1.htm (1623 words)

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