Causes As (Local) Oomph

Causes As (Local) Oomph

R. Tallis

Consider a paradigm example of causation: one billiard ball bumping into another (Cause C) and causing the latter to move (Effect E). There is, in fact, no gap between C and E, and we could redescribe the two events as a single process, except for the fact that two distinct objects are involved, and, what is more, the outgoing effect is composed of more than one event (slowing of the first billiard ball, setting the second one in motion, producing a ‘click’ – and that’s just for starters). The separation between cause and effect seems more decisive where there is an evident temporal gap between them – in the case, for example, of the relationship between a flash of lightning (Cause C) and a peal of thunder (Effect E).

In all cases, however, the impression of a gap is false. There are no gaps in nature. A thunderstorm is a continuous process that encompasses flashes of lightning and claps of thunder. Objects that seem to interact at a distance do so through the intermediaries of forces and fields that transmit energy. This is most clearly evident in contemporary physics where, as philosopher of physics William Simpson recently put it to me, “everything seems delocalized and dissolves into the quantum field of some common substratum.” At any rate, physical reality is seamless and law-governed, (possibly) unfolding over time, not a chain or network of discrete events that have somehow to be connected by causal cement. Causes, far from being a constitutive stuff of the physical world, are things we postulate to re-connect that which has been teased apart.

Whence this teasing apart of the physical world? It is the consequence of the irruption of individual consciousnesses into the world. Conscious beings, especially self-conscious beings such as you and I, are centres of worlds opened up in a universe that in itself has no centres (or peripheries), nor items that are salient or irrelevant; no contrast between causes, conditions and backgrounds, nor causes and effects. Embodied subjects divide the world into localities, and items and events that are localised within those localities. This is the realm of spatio-temporally discrete items – including separate events that have to be cognitively glued together to relieve them of their individual responsibility for occurring; to relieve them of the burden of contingency.

Hume was correct in arguing that causation was not a constitutive property of mindless reality.

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