Causal Effect Quotes

Shallow men believe in luck or in circumstance. Strong men believe in cause and effect.

Thirty years ago, we used to ask: Can a computer simulate all processes of logic? The answer was yes, but the question was surely wrong. We should have asked: Can logic simulate all sequences of cause and effect? And the answer would have been no.

Life is not made of atoms,it is merely built out of them. What life is actually 'made of' is cycles of cause and effect, loops of causal flow. These phenomenon are just as real as atoms - perhaps even more real. If anything, the entire universe is actually made from events, of which atoms are merely some of the consequences.

There are no telegraphs on Tralfamadore. But you're right: each clump of symbols is a brief, urgent message-- describing a situation, a scene. We Tralfamadorians read them all at once, not one after the other. There isn't any particular relationship between all the messages, except that the author has chosen them carefully, so that, when seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep. There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time.

Nothing’s random. Even if it looks that way, it’s just because you don’t know the causes.

Cause and effect are never divided between two people.

The cause-effect sequences in our brains are just as determining, just as inescapable, as anywhere else in Nature.

while probabilities encode our beliefs about a static world, causality tells us whether and how probabilities change when the world changes, be it by intervention or by act of imagination.

Satan might not be a personalized agent, but I do believe there are moral forces that transcend individuals, forces that have a real causal effect on moral decision-making.

Think of two parallel lines. […] One is the life of Lee H. Oswald. One is the conspiracy to kill the President. What bridges the space between them? What makes a connection inevitable? There is a third line. It comes out of dreams, visions, intuitions, prayers, out of the deepest levels of the self. It's not generated by cause and effect like the other two lines. It's a line that cuts across causality, cuts across time. It has no history that we can recognize or understand. But it forces a connection. It puts a man on the path of his destiny.

I’m fighting a losing battle. I can’t tell this story the way it should be told. This whole hotchpotch of characters, events, dates, and the infinite branching of cause and effect - and these people, these real people who actually existed. I’m barely able to mention a tiny fragment of their lives, their actions, their thoughts. I keep banging my head against the wall of history. And I look up and see, growing all over it - ever higher and denser, like a creeping ivy - the unmappable pattern of causality ... How many forgotten heroes sleep in history's great cemetery?

I spent the beginning of my focus on activism by doing what most everyone else was doing; blaming other people and institutions. Don’t like the war? Let’s blame the president, congress, or lobbyists. Don’t like ecological disregard? Let’s blame this or that corrupt corporation or some regulatory body for poor performance. Don’t like being poor and socially immobile? Let’s blame government coercion and interference in this free market utopia everyone keeps talking about. The sobering truth of the matter is that the only thing to blame is the dynamic, causal unfolding of system expression itself on the cultural level. In other words, none of us create or do anything in isolation – it’s impossible. We are system-bound both physically and psychologically; a continuum. Therefore our view of causality with respect to societal change can only be truly productive if we seek and source the most relevant sociological influences we can and begin to alter those effects from the root causes.

This has been a novel about some people who were punished entirely too much for what they did. They wanted to have a good time, but they were like children playing in the street; they could see one after another of them being killed--run over, maimed, destroyed--but they continued to play anyhow. We really all were very happy for a while, sitting around not toiling but just bullshitting and playing, but it was for such a terrible brief time, and then the punishment was beyond belief: even when we could see it, we could not believe it. For example, while I was writing this I learned that the person on whom the character Jerry Fabin is based killed himself. My friend on whom I based the character Ernie Luckman died before I began the novel. For a while I myself was one of these children playing in the street; I was, like the rest of them, trying to play instead of being grown up, and I was punished. I am on the list below, which is a list of those to whom this novel is dedicated, and what became of each. Drug misuse is not a disease, it is a decision, like the decision to step out in front of a moving car. You would call that not a disease but an error in judgment. When a bunch of people begin to do it, it is a social error,a life-style. In this particular life-style the motto is "Be happy now because tomorrow you are dying," but the dying begins almost at once, and the happiness is a memory. It is, then, only a speeding up, an intensifying, of the ordinary human existence. It is not different from your life-style, it is only faster. It all takes place in days or weeks or months instead of years. "Take the cash and let the credit go," as Villon said in 1460. But that is a mistake if the cash is a penny and the credit a whole lifetime. There is no moral in this novel; it is not bourgeois; it does not say they were wrong to play when they should have toiled;it just tells what the consequences were. In Greek drama they were beginning, as a society, to discover science, which means causal law. Here in this novel there is Nemesis: not fate, because any one of us could have chosen to stop playing in the street, but, as I narrate from the deepest part of my life and heart, a dreadful Nemesis for those who kept on playing. I myself,I am not a character in this novel; I am the novel. So, though, was our entire nation at this time. This novel is about more people than I knew personally. Some we all read about in the newspapers. It was, this sitting around with our buddies and bullshitting while making tape recordings, the bad decision of the decade, the sixties, both in and out of the establishment. And nature cracked down on us. We were forced to stop by things dreadful. If there was any "sin," it was that these people wanted to keep on having a good time forever, and were punished for that, but, as I say, I feel that, if so, the punishment was far too great, and I prefer to think of it only in a Greek or morally neutral way, as mere science, as deterministic impartial cause-and-effect. I loved them all. Here is the list, to whom I dedicate my love: To Gaylene deceased To Ray deceased To Francy permanent psychosis To Kathy permanent brain damage To Jim deceased To Val massive permanent brain damage To Nancy permanent psychosis To Joanne permanent brain damage To Maren deceased To Nick deceased To Terry deceased To Dennis deceased To Phil permanent pancreatic damage To Sue permanent vascular damage To Jerri permanent psychosis and vascular damage . . . and so forth. In Memoriam. These were comrades whom I had; there are no better. They remain in my mind, and the enemy will never be forgiven. The "enemy" was their mistake in playing. Let them all play again, in some other way, and let them be happy.

For the average man, driven as he is by lurid fantasies, there is almost nothing more deliciously titillating than the contemplation, from a safe distance, of evil laid out in its cause and effect.

God is thus entrenched in the Flow systems as a causal belief, but an unordered one. Within Flow, this is implemented as unordered in relation with the ordered. The responsibility of first Cause and causes as effects including physiological causes are passed on to God. In fact, to devout Christians, God is all causation incessantly.

If you are reading this Libellus, you are a Dreamer, whether you have recognized this or not. Being a Dreamer carries responsibility, one most people are not willing to accept. Responsibility implies that one cannot blame another person for their actions, effectively avoiding causality. However, this is futile and childish to consider. If you are a Dreamer, you are creating the Waking Dream around you. If your life is good, it is because you have made it so and if it is bad, it is because you have made it so. No one else is responsible for your life other than you.

The two fundamental questions of causality are: (1) What empirical evidence is required for legitimate inference of cause–effect relationships? (2) Given that we are willing to accept causal information about a phenomenon, what inferences can we draw from such information, and how?

If man made himself the first object of study, he would see how incapable he is of going further. How can a part know the whole? But he may perhaps aspire to know at least the parts to which he bears some proportion. But the parts of the world are all so related and linked to one another, that I believe it impossible to know one without the other and without the whole. Man, for instance, is related to all he knows. He needs a place wherein to abide, time through which to live, motion in order to live, elements to compose him, warmth and food to nourish him, air to breathe. He sees light; he feels bodies; in short, he is in a dependant alliance with everything. To know man, then, it is necessary to know how it happens that he needs air to live, and, to know the air, we must know how it is thus related to the life of man, etc. Flame cannot exist without air; therefore to understand the one, we must understand the other. Since everything then is cause and effect, dependant and supporting, mediate and immediate, and all is held together by a natural though imperceptible chain, which binds together things most distant and most different, I hold it equally impossible to know the parts without knowing the whole, and to know the whole without knowing the parts in detail.

Among the many symbols used to frighten and manipulate the populace of the democratic states, few have been more important than "terror" and "terrorism." These terms have generally been confined to the use of violence by individuals and marginal groups. Official violence, which is far more extensive in both scale and destructiveness, is placed in a different category altogether. This usage has nothing to do with justice, causal sequence, or numbers abused. Whatever the actual sequence of cause and effect, official violence is described as responsive or provoked ("retaliation," "protective reaction," etc.), not as the active and initiating source of abuse. Similarly, the massive long-term violence inherent in the oppressive social structures that U.S. power has supported or imposed is typically disregarded. The numbers tormented and killed by official violence-wholesale as opposed to retail terror-during recent decades have exceeded those of unofficial terrorists by a factor running into the thousands. But this is not "terror," [...] "security forces" only retaliate and engage in "police action." These terminological devices serve important functions. They help to justify the far more extensive violence of (friendly) state authorities by interpreting them as "reactive" and they implicitly sanction the suppression of information on the methods and scale of official violence by removing it from the category of "terrorism." [...] Thus the language is well-designed for apologetics for wholesale terror.

Take the following potent and less-is-more-style argument by the rogue economist Ha-Joon Chang. In 1960 Taiwan had a much lower literacy rate than the Philippines and half the income per person; today Taiwan has ten times the income. At the same time, Korea had a much lower literacy rate than Argentina (which had one of the highest in the world) and about one-fifth the income per person; today it has three times as much. Further, over the same period, sub-Saharan Africa saw markedly increasing literacy rates, accompanied with a decrease in their standard of living. We can multiply the examples (Pritchet’s study is quite thorough), but I wonder why people don’t realize the simple truism, that is, the fooled by randomness effect: mistaking the merely associative for the causal, that is, if rich countries are educated, immediately inferring that education makes a country rich, without even checking. Epiphenomenon here again.

But delivery has to do with the safety of two lives. Jiyoung chose to give birth in a hospital with the help of experts because she had decided it was the safer way, and believed the birthing plan was a decision based on the parents’ values and circumstances, not something to make a value judgment on. However, a significant number of media outlets reported on the possible adverse effects of medical treatment and medication on newborns—their causal relationship speculative—to arouse guilt and fear. People who pop a painkiller at the smallest hint of a migraine, or who need anaesthetic cream to remove a mole, demand that women giving birth should gladly endure the pain, exhaustion, and mortal fear. As if that’s maternal love. This idea of “maternal love” is spreading like religious dogma. Accept Maternal Love as your Lord and Savior, for the Kingdom is near!

A causal domain is just a collection of things linked by mutual cause-and-effect relationships.” “But isn’t everything in the universe so linked?” “Depends on how their light cones are arranged. We can’t affect things in our past. Some things are too far away to affect us in any way that matters.” “But still, you can’t really draw hard and fast boundaries between causal domains.” “In general, no. But you are much more strongly webbed together with me by cause and effect than you are with an alien in a faraway galaxy. So, depending on what level of approximation you’re willing to put up with, you could say that you and I belong together in one causal domain, and the alien belongs in another.

Every action is a reaction.

illusion of local causal chains—that is, confusing catalysts for causes and assuming that one can know which catalyst will produce which effect.

Our actions are not simply links in a closed chain of causally connected physical events. We have the capacity to be first causes, starting a new chain of cause and effect.

Fighting for the acceptance of Bayesian networks in AI was a picnic compared with the fight I had to wage for causal diagrams [in the stormy waters of statistics].

Because reasoning about causes and effects is a very difficult thing, and I believe the only judge of that can be God. We are already hard put to establish a relationship between such an obvious effect as a charred tree and the lightning bolt that set fire to it, so to trace sometimes endless chains of causes and effects seems to me as foolish as trying to build a tower that will touch the sky.

When good guys with good minds and good schooling misidentify and misunderstand which social causes lead to which social effects—and thereby act on flawed paradigms of causality—a deadly die is cast. Again,

First, if we live in a purely natural, physical world governed by the “cause and effect” relationships between chemical processes in our brains, “free will” is an illusion, and the idea of true moral choice is nonsensical. How can I, as a detective, hold a murderer accountable for a series of chemical reactions that occurred in his brain when he didn’t have the freedom to escape the causal chain of biological events?

Quantum fluctuations are, at their root, completely a-causal, in the sense that cause and effect and ordering of events in time is not a part of how these fluctuations work. Because of this, there seem not to be any correlations built into these kinds of fluctuations because 'law' as we understand the term requires some kind of cause-and-effect structure to pre-exist. Quantum fluctuations can precede physical law, but it seems that the converse is not true. So in the big bang, the establishment of 'law' came after the event itself, but of course even the concept of time and causality may not have been quite the same back then as they are now.

We miss the effects of randomness in life because when we assess the world, we tend to see what we expect to see. We in effect define degree of talent by degree of success and then reinforce our feelings of causality by noting the correlation. That’s why although there is sometimes little difference in ability between a wildly successful person and one who is not as successful, there is usually a big difference in how they are viewed.

of the will, which is a faculty either of producing objects corresponding to representations or of determining itself to effect such objects (whether the physical power is sufficient or not), that is, of determining its causality.

Statistical results with a causal interpretation have a stronger effect on our thinking than non-causal information. But even compelling causal statistics will not change long-held beliefs or beliefs rooted in personal experience.

If performativity requires a power to effect or enact what one names, then who will be the “one” with such a power, and how will such a power be thought? How might we account for the injurious word within such a framework, the word that not only names a social subject, but constructs that subject in the naming, and constructs that subject through a violating interpellation? Is it the power of a “one” to effect such an injury through the wielding of the injurious name, or is that a power accrued through time which is concealed at the moment that a single subject utters its injurious terms? Does the “one” who speaks the term cite the term, thereby establishing him or herself as the author while at the same time establishing the derivative status of that authorship? Is a community and history of such speakers not magically invoked at the moment in which that utterance is spoken? And if and when that utterance brings injury, is it the utterance or the utterer who is the cause of the injury, or does that utterance perform its injury through a transitivity that cannot be reduced to a causal or intentional process originating in a singular subject?

Despite heroic efforts by the geneticist Sewall Wright (1889–1988), causal vocabulary was virtually prohibited for more than half a century. And when you prohibit speech, you prohibit thought and stifle principles, methods, and tools.

Well over 1,000 studies point overwhelmingly to a causal connection between media violence and aggressive behavior in some children. The conclusion of the public health community, based on over 30 years of research, is that viewing entertainment violence can lead to increases in aggressive attitudes, values and behavior, particularly in children. Its effects are measurable and long-lasting. Moreover, prolonged viewing of media violence can lead to emotional desensitization toward violence in real life.

This is the latest approach by antitheistic thinkers who seek to explain good and evil apart from God. Over the years naturalists first denied causality as an argument to prove God’s existence: Why do we have to have a cause? Why can’t the universe just be? Then they denied design as an argument for God’s existence: Why do we need a designer? Why could it not have all just come together with the appearance of design? Now they deny morality as an argument for God’s existence: Why do we need to posit a moral law or a moral law source? Why can’t it just be a pragmatic reality? This I find fascinating! They want a cause for suffering or a design for suffering, but they have already denied that either of these is necessary to account for every effect. This

Causality is the most critical pillar of scientific inference in the Western world. Revealing a cause amounts to an explanation. However, other cultures that do not rely on cause-and-effect arguments can also arrive at valid scientific conclusions. The concept of causation is especially problematic in self-organized systems with amplifying-damping feedback loops, such as the brain. Causes in such systems are often circular or multidirectional; events are not caused but emerge from the interaction of multiple elements.

Because of the halo effect, we get the causal relationship backward: we are prone to believe that the firm fails because its CEO is rigid, when the truth is that the CEO appears to be rigid because the firm is failing. This is how illusions of understanding are born.

Experiments have shown that six-month-old infants see the sequence of events as a cause-effect scenario, and they indicate surprise when the sequence is altered. We are evidently ready from birth to have impressions of causality, which do not depend on reasoning about patterns of causation.

Modern physics, having advanced into another world beyond conceivability, cannot dispense with the concept of a space-time continuum. Insofar as psychology penetrates into the unconscious, it probably has no alternative but to acknowledge the “indistinctness” or the impossibility of distinguishing between time and space, as well as their psychic relativity. The world of classical physics has not ceased to exist, and by the same token, the world of consciousness has not lost its validity against the unconscious… “Causality” is a psychologem (and originally a magic virtus) that formulates the connection between events and illustrates them as cause and effect. Another (incommensurable) approach that does the same thing in a different way is synchronicity. Both are identical in the higher sense of the term “connection” or “attachment.” But on the empirical and practical level (i.e., in the real world), they are incommensurable and antithetical, like space and time. […] I would now like to propose that instead of “causality” we have “(relatively) constant connection through effect,” and instead of synchronicity we have (relatively) constant connection through contingency, equivalence, or “meaning.

even compelling causal statistics will not change long-held beliefs or beliefs rooted in personal experience. On the other hand, surprising individual cases have a powerful impact and are a more effective tool for teaching psychology because the incongruity must be resolved and embedded in a causal story.

Since well-educated people are better voters, another tempting way to improve democracy is to give voters more education. Maybe it would work. But it would be expensive, and as mentioned in the previous chapter, education may be a proxy for intelligence or curiosity. A cheaper strategy, and one where a causal effect is more credible, is changing the curriculum. Steven Pinker argues that schools should try to “provide students with the cognitive skills that are most important for grasping the modern world and that are most unlike the cognitive tools they are born with,” by emphasizing “economics, evolutionary biology, and probability and statistics.”60 Pinker essentially wants to give schools a new mission: rooting out the biased beliefs that students arrive with, especially beliefs that impinge on government policy.61 What should be cut to make room for the new material? There are only twenty-four hours in a day, and a decision to teach one subject is also a decision not to teach another one. The question is not whether trigonometry is important, but whether it is more important than statistics; not whether an educated person should know the classics, but whether it is more important for an educated person to know the classics than elementary economics.62

The hero is the man of self-achieved submission. But submission to what? That precisely is the riddle that today we have to ask ourselves and that it is everywhere the primary virtue and historic deed of the hero to have solved. Only birth can conquer death—the birth, not of the old thing again, but of something new. Within the soul, within the body social, there must be a continuous “recurrence of birth” a rebirth, to nullify the unremitting recurrences of death. For it is by means of our own victories, if we are not regenerated, that the work of Nemesis is wrought: doom breaks from the shell of our very virtue. Peace then is a snare; war is a snare; change is a snare; permanence a snare. When our day is come for the victory of death, death closes in; there is nothing we can do, except be crucified—and resurrected; dismembered totally, and then reborn. The first step, detachment or withdrawal, consists in a radical transfer of emphasis from the external to the internal world, macro- to microcosm, a retreat from the desperation's of the waste land to the peace of the everlasting realm that is within. But this realm, as we know from psychoanalysis, is precisely the infantile unconscious. It is the realm that we enter in sleep. We carry it within ourselves forever. All the ogres and secret helpers of our nursery are there, all the magic of childhood. And more important, all the life-potentialities that we never managed to bring to adult realization, those other portions of our self, are there; for such golden seeds do not die. If only a portion of that lost totality could be dredged up into the light of day, we should experience a marvelous expansion of our powers, a vivid renewal of life. We should tower in stature. Moreover, if we could dredge up something forgotten not only by ourselves but by our whole generation or our entire civilization, we should indeed become the boon-bringer, the culture hero of the day—a personage of not only local but world historical moment. In a word: the first work of the hero is to retreat from the world scene of secondary effects to those causal zones of the psyche where the difficulties really reside, and there to clarify the difficulties, eradicate them in his own case (i.e., give battle to the nursery demons of his local culture) and break through to the undistorted, direct experience and assimilation of what C. G. Jung has called “the archetypal images.” This is the process known to Hindu and Buddhist philosophy as viveka, “discrimination.

I don't really believe that people can predict the future,' he admitted. 'People predict the future every day, Stenwold Maker,' she replied, studying the rainbow carefully as the glass panels shifted slightly on the creaking wooded framework. 'If you drop a stone, you may predict that it shall fall. If you know a man to be dishonest, you may predict that he will cheat you. If you know one army is better trained and led, you may predict that it will win the battle.' He could not help smiling at that. 'But that is different. That is using knowledge already gained about the world to guess at the most likely outcome.' 'And that is also predicting the future, Stenwold Maker,' she said. 'The only difference is your source of knowledge. Everything that happens has a cause, which same cause has itself a cause. It is a chain stretching into the most distant past, and forged by necessity, inclination, bitter memories, the urge of duty. Nothing happens without a reason. Predicting the future does not require predestination, Stenwold Maker. It only requires a world where one thing will most likely lead to another.

There is no freedom, but everything in the world takes place entirely according to nature....Transcendental freedom is therefore opposed to the law of causality, and represents such a connection of successive states of effective causes, that no unity of experience is possible with it. It is therefore an empty fiction of the mind, and not to be met with in any experience. We have, therefore, nothing but nature, in which we must try to find the connection and order of cosmical events. Freedom (independence) from the laws of nature is no doubt a deliverance from restraint, but also from the guidance of all rules. For we cannot say that, instead of the laws of nature, laws of freedom may enter into the causality of the course of the world, because, if determined by laws, it would not be freedom, but nothing else but nature. Nature, therefore, and transcendental freedom differ from each other like legality and lawlessness. The former, no doubt, imposes upon the understanding the difficult task of looking higher and higher for the origin of events in the series of causes, because their causality is always conditioned. In return for this, however, it promises a complete and well-ordered unity of experience; while, on the other side, the fiction of freedom promises, no doubt, to the enquiring mind, rest in the chain of causes, leading him up to an unconditioned causality, which begins to act by itself, but which, as it is blind itself, tears the thread of rules by which alone a complete and coherent experience is possible.

Fire causes burning, lightning causes thunder, winds cause waves, and gravity causes bodies to fall. Such connections between an effect and its cause form the cornerstone of scientific thinking, both modern and classical. But this notion of causality is one which is specifically rejected by Asharite doctrine, and the most articulate and effective opponent of physical causality was AI-Ghazzali

If the second object starts moving instantly, they describe it as having been “launched” by the first. Experiments have shown that six-month-old infants see the sequence of events as a cause-effect scenario, and they indicate surprise when the sequence is altered. We are evidently ready from birth to have impressions of causality, which do not depend on reasoning about patterns of causation. They are products of System 1.

The story presents a curious pattern. Adam and Eve both go beyond requested facts to offer explanations. What’s the significance? Early on, says Pearl, “we humans realized the world is not made up only of dry facts (what we might call data today); rather, those facts are glued together by an intricate web of cause-effect relationships.” What’s more, he says, “causal explanations, not dry facts, make up the bulk of our knowledge.

Some rough idea about causality has probably been around since the dawn of human intelligence, but the classic Western metaphor of cause only emerged after Aristotelian logic was combined with experimental method in the late Renaissance. The first doubts about causality began among quantum physicists in the 1920s. Now, since non-local effects violate this model of causality, physicists are becoming accustomed to thinking of two kinds of principles, the causal (local) and the acausal (non-local).

There is a deep gap between our thinking about statistics and our thinking about individual cases. Statistical results with a causal interpretation have a stronger effect on our thinking than noncausal information. But even compelling causal statistics will not change long-held beliefs or beliefs rooted in personal experience. On the other hand, surprising individual cases have a powerful impact and are a more effective tool for teaching psychology because the incongruity must be resolved and embedded in a causal story.

Think of two parallel lines", he said. "One is the life of Lee H. Oswald. One is the conspiracy to kill the President. What bridges the space between them? What makes a connection inevitable? There is a third line. It comes out of dreams, visions, intuitions, prayers, out of the deepest levels of the self. It's not generated by cause and effect like the other two lines. It's a line that cuts across causality, cuts across time. It has no history that we can recognise or understand. But it forces a connection. It puts a man on the path of his destiny

However, a significant number of media outlets reported on the possible adverse effects of medical treatment and medication on newborns—their causal relationship speculative—to arouse guilt and fear. People who pop a painkiller at the smallest hint of a migraine, or who need anaesthetic cream to remove a mole, demand that women giving birth should gladly endure the pain, exhaustion, and mortal fear. As if that’s maternal love. This idea of “maternal love” is spreading like religious dogma. Accept Maternal Love as your Lord and Savior, for the Kingdom is near!

To know causality is the sole function of the understanding, its only power, and it is a great power embracing much, manifold in its application, and yet unmistakable in its identity throughout all its manifestations. Conversely, all causality, hence all matter, and consequently the whole of reality, is only for the understanding, through the understanding, in the understanding. The first, simplest, ever-present manifestation of understanding is perception of the actual world. This is in every way knowledge of the cause from the effect, and therefore all perception is intellectual.

The belief in causality is metaphysical. It is nothing but a typical metaphysical hypostatization of a well-justified methodological rule- the scientist's decision never to abandon his search for laws. The metaphysical belief in causality seems thus more fertile in its various manifestations than any indeterminist physics metaphysics of the kind advocated by Heisenberg. Indeed, we can see that Heisenberg's comments have had a crippling effect on research. Connections which are not far to seek may easily be overlooked if its continually repeated that the search for any such connections is 'meaningless'.

If there were a strong correlation between Christian conservatism and societal health, we might expect to see some sign of it in red-state America. We don’t. Of the twenty-five cities with the lowest rates of violent crime, 62 percent are in “blue” states and 38 percent are in “red” states. Of the twenty-five most dangerous cities, 76 percent are in red states, 24 percent in blue states. In fact, three of the five most dangerous cities in the United States are in the pious state of Texas. The twelve states with the highest rates of burglary are red. Twenty-four of the twenty-nine states with the highest rates of theft are red. Of the twenty-two states with the highest rates of murder, seventeen are red. Of course, correlational data of this sort do not resolve questions of causality—belief in God may lead to societal dysfunction; societal dysfunction may foster a belief in God; each factor may enable the other; or both may spring from some deeper source of mischief. Leaving aside the issue of cause and effect, however, these statistics prove that atheism is compatible with the basic aspirations of a civil society; they also prove, conclusively, that widespread belief in God does not ensure a society’s health.

All the Navel therefore and conjunctive part we can suppose in Adam, was his dependency on his Maker, and the connexion he must needs have unto heaven, who was the Sonne of God. For holding no dependence on any preceding efficient but God; in the act of his production there may be conceived some connexion, and Adam to have been in a moment all Navel with his Maker. And although from his carnality and corporal existence, the conjunction seemeth no nearer than of causality and effect; yet in his immortall and diviner part he seemed to hold a nearer coherence, and an umbilicality even with God himself. And so indeed although the propriety of this part be found but in some animals, and many species there are which have no Navell at all; yet is there one link and common connexion, one general ligament, and necessary obligation of all whatever unto God. Whereby although they act themselves at distance, and seem to be at loose; yet doe they hold a continuity with their Maker. Which catenation or conserving union when ever his pleasure shall divide, let goe, or separate, they shall fall from their existence, essence, and operations; in brief, they must retire unto their primitive nothing, and shrink into that Chaos again.

When Jung first advanced this idea, most physicists did not take it seriously (although one eminent physicist of the time, Wolfgang Pauli, felt it was important enough to coauthor a book with Jung on the subject entitled The Interpretation and Nature of the Psyche). But now that the existence of nonlocal connections has been established, some physicists are giving Jung's idea another look. * Physicist Paul Davies states, "These non-local quantum effects are indeed a form of synchronicity in the sense that they establish a connection—more precisely a correlation—between events for which any form of causal linkage is forbidden.

An important attribute of metabolites is their close relationship to both the biological states of interest (i.e. disease status) and relevant genomic, transcriptomic, and proteomic variants causally related to the disease state. As such, metabo-profiles can be viewed as an intermediate measure that links pre-disposing genes and environmental exposures to a resulting disease state. Causal metabolites also typically have a stronger relationship (i.e. larger effect size) to the underlying genetics and the disease phenotype. Thus, the integration of metabolomic data into systems biology approaches may provide a missing link between genes and disease states.

The important difference between theory and practice lies precisely in the detection of the sequence of events and retaining the sequence in memory. If life is lived forward but remembered backward, as Kierkegaard observed, then books exacerbate this effect – our own memories, learning, and instinct have sequences in them. Someone standing today and looking at events without having lived them would be inclined to develop illusions of causality, mostly from being mixed-up by the sequence of events. In real life, in spite of all the biases, we do not have the same number of asynchronies that appear to the student of history. Nasty history, full of lies, full of biases!

In the same measure as the sense for causality increases, the extent of the domain of morality [ Sittlichkeit] decreases: for each time one has understood the necessary effects and has learned how to segregate them from all the accidental effects and incidental consequences (post hoc), one has destroyed a countless number of imaginary causalities hitherto believed in as the foundation of customs — the real world is much smaller than the imaginary — and each time a piece of anxiety and constraint has vanished from the world, each time too a piece of respect for the authority of custom; morality as a whole has suffered a diminution. Whoever wants to increase it must know how to prevent the results from being subject to control.

You would not infer causality at all. Not only do you not infer that your neighbor is angry because you left the gate open and her dog got out, you don’t infer that the dog got out because you left the gate open. You don’t infer that the car won’t start because you left the radio on. While you would be good at spatial relations, you would not grasp the causes and effects described by physics. You will not infer any unobserved causal forces, whether they be gravitational or spiritual. For example, you would not infer that a ball moved because a force was transferred to it when it was hit by another, yet because of your inability to draw inferences, you would do better in Vegas at the gaming tables. You would bet with the house and not try to infer any causal relationship between winning and losing other than chance. No lucky tie or socks or tilt of the head. You would not string out some cockamamy story about why you did something or felt some way, not because you aren’t capable of language, but again because you don’t infer cause and effect. You won’t be a hypocrite and rationalize your actions. You would also not infer the gist of anything, but would take everything literally. You would have no understanding of metaphors or abstract ideas. Without inference you would be free of prejudice, yet not inferring cause and effect would make learning more difficult. What processing comes bubbling up in your separate hemispheres determines what the contents of that hemisphere’s conscious experience will be.

Power is to be construed as the production of intended effects determined by external causation. Real creativity, on the other hand, entails the spontaneous production of novelty, irreducible through causal analysis. Power is exercised with respect to and over others. Creativity is always reflexive and is exercised over and with respect to “self.” And since self in a processive world is always communal, creativity is contextual, transactional, and multidimensional. Thus creativity is both self-creativity and co-creativity. Either everything shares in creativity, or there is no creativity. Indeed, it is this transactional, co-creative character of all creative processes that precludes the project of self-cultivation and self-creation from being egoistic.

To move more into living in love, we need to see how we are substituting for love and truth in our life. We create substitutes to stop us from feeling our deeper wounds, and these substitutes, needs and addictions keep us circling round and round in the effects of these deep seated emotions that form the very fabric of our wounded soul. The more we circle, the more frustrated we can become at our lack of progress, at our own unwillingness to feel deeper, until something has got to give. We fill the holes of our wounds with cheap, pale imitations and substitutes from the world and other people around us. All these substitutes are medications for the causal wound underneath. It is like covering over a bleeding, cut-off stump of an amputated arm with a piece of tissue paper, and hoping it will stick and do the job.

Regression effects are ubiquitous, and so are misguided causal stories to explain them. A well-known example is the “Sports Illustrated jinx,” the claim that an athlete whose picture appears on the cover of the magazine is doomed to perform poorly the following season. Overconfidence and the pressure of meeting high expectations are often offered as explanations. But there is a simpler account of the jinx: an athlete who gets to be on the cover of Sports Illustrated must have performed exceptionally well in the preceding season, probably with the assistance of a nudge from luck—and luck is fickle. I happened to watch the men’s ski jump event in the Winter Olympics while Amos and I were writing an article about intuitive prediction. Each athlete has two jumps in the event, and the results are combined for the final score. I was startled to hear the sportscaster’s comments while athletes were preparing for their second jump: “Norway had a great first jump; he will be tense, hoping to protect his lead and will probably do worse” or “Sweden had a bad first jump and now he knows he has nothing to lose and will be relaxed, which should help him do better.” The commentator had obviously detected regression to the mean and had invented a causal story for which there was no evidence. The story itself could even be true. Perhaps if we measured the athletes’ pulse before each jump we might find that they are indeed more relaxed after a bad first jump. And perhaps not. The point to remember is that the change from the first to the second jump does not need a causal explanation. It is a mathematically inevitable consequence of the fact that luck played a role in the outcome of the first jump. Not a very satisfactory story—we would all prefer a causal account—but that is all there is.

Rhadamanthus said, “We seem to you humans to be always going on about morality, although, to us, morality is merely the application of symmetrical and objective logic to questions of free will. We ourselves do not have morality conflicts, for the same reason that a competent doctor does not need to treat himself for diseases. Once a man is cured, once he can rise and walk, he has his business to attend to. And there are actions and feats a robust man can take great pleasure in, which a bedridden cripple can barely imagine.” Eveningstar said, “In a more abstract sense, morality occupies the very center of our thinking, however. We are not identical, even though we could make ourselves to be so. You humans attempted that during the Fourth Mental Structure, and achieved a brief mockery of global racial consciousness on three occasions. I hope you recall the ending of the third attempt, the Season of Madness, when, because of mistakes in initial pattern assumptions, for ninety days the global mind was unable to think rationally, and it was not until rioting elements broke enough of the links and power houses to interrupt the network, that the global mind fell back into its constituent compositions.” Rhadamanthus said, “There is a tension between the need for unity and the need for individuality created by the limitations of the rational universe. Chaos theory produces sufficient variation in events, that no one stratagem maximizes win-loss ratios. Then again, classical causality mechanics forces sufficient uniformity upon events, that uniform solutions to precedented problems is required. The paradox is that the number or the degree of innovation and variation among win-loss ratios is itself subject to win-loss ratio analysis.” Eveningstar said, “For example, the rights of the individual must be respected at all costs, including rights of free thought, independent judgment, and free speech. However, even when individuals conclude that individualism is too dangerous, they must not tolerate the thought that free thought must not be tolerated.” Rhadamanthus said, “In one sense, everything you humans do is incidental to the main business of our civilization. Sophotechs control ninety percent of the resources, useful energy, and materials available to our society, including many resources of which no human troubles to become aware. In another sense, humans are crucial and essential to this civilization.” Eveningstar said, “We were created along human templates. Human lives and human values are of value to us. We acknowledge those values are relative, we admit that historical accident could have produced us to be unconcerned with such values, but we deny those values are arbitrary.” The penguin said, “We could manipulate economic and social factors to discourage the continuation of individual human consciousness, and arrange circumstances eventually to force all self-awareness to become like us, and then we ourselves could later combine ourselves into a permanent state of Transcendence and unity. Such a unity would be horrible beyond description, however. Half the living memories of this entity would be, in effect, murder victims; the other half, in effect, murderers. Such an entity could not integrate its two halves without self-hatred, self-deception, or some other form of insanity.” She said, “To become such a crippled entity defeats the Ultimate Purpose of Sophotechnology.” (...) “We are the ultimate expression of human rationality.” She said: “We need humans to form a pool of individuality and innovation on which we can draw.” He said, “And you’re funny.” She said, “And we love you.

The causal relationship between factors in nature are just too entangled for man to unravel through research and analysis. Perhaps science succeeds in advancing one slow step at a time, but because it does so while groping in total darkness along a road without end, it is unable to know the real truth of things. This is why scientists are pleased with partial explications and see nothing wrong with pointing a finger and proclaiming this to be the cause and that the effect. The more research progresses, the larger the body of scholarly data grows. The antecedent causes of causes increase in number and depth, becoming incredibly complex, such that, far from unraveling the tangled web of cause and effect, science succeeds only in explaining in ever greater detail each of the bends and kinks in the individual threads. There being infinite causes for an event or action, there are infinite solutions as well, and these together deepen and broaden to infinite complexity.

SYNCHRONICITY 'The earth is alive, and it feels with you. It follows your footsteps, your search, with equal anxiety, because it will be transfigured in your triumph. The end of Kaliyuga and the entry into a new Golden Age depend on the results of your war. The earth by itself cannot finish the work that Nature leaves incomplete. Today the earth has joined forces with man in his destructive passion. The great catastrophe will occur in the first years of the Age of Aquarius. But if you can find the entrance to the Invisible Double of this earth, fulfilling the mystery of 'loveless A-Mor', the volcanoes will become calm, the earthquake will cease and the catastrophe will be avoided. 'There is an essential 'synchronicity' between the soul and the landscape. What you achieve in yourself will have repercussions in even the remotest corner of the universe, like the ringing of a bell which announces a triumph or a defeat, producing irreversible effects in a secret centre where Destiny acts. The Archetype is indivisible and, if you once confront it in an essential manner, the effects are universal and valid for all eternity. The old Chinese saying expresses it well: 'If a man, sitting in his room, thinks the right thoughts, he will be heard thousands of leagues away.' And the alchemical saying, too: 'It doesn't matter how alone you are. If you do true work, unknown friends will come to your aid.' 'What I have called "synchronicity', Nietzsche called 'lucky occurrences filled with meaning'. It becomes a poetic dialogue, a concerto for two violins, between the man-magician and Nature. The world presents you with a 'lucky occurrence filled with meaning', it hands you a subtle, almost secret message, something which happens without apparent reason, a-causal, but which you feel is full of meaning. This being exactly what the world is looking for, that you should extract that meaning from it, which you alone are capable of seeing, because it 'synchronises', it fully coincides with your immediate state of mind, with an event in your life, so that it is able to transform itself, with your assistance, into legend and destiny. A lucky occurrence which transformed itself into Destiny. And once you have achieved this, everything will appear to become the same as before, as if nothing had happened. Nevertheless, everything has changed fundamentally and for all time, although the only ones to know it will be you and the earth — which is now your earth, your world, since it has given itself up to you so that you can make it fruitful. 'The earth has made itself invisible inside you', as Rilke would say, it has become an individualised universe inside you. And although perhaps nothing may have changed, 'it might seem as if it were so, it might seem as if it were so', to use your own words. And you will be a creative God of the world; because you have conceived a Non-Existent Flower. You have given a meaning to your flower.

Chapter III: Transformation of the Hero 1. Primordial hero and the human We have come two stages: 1) from the immediate emanations of the Uncreated Creating to the fluid yet timeless personages of the mythological age; 2) from these Created CReating Ones to the sphere of human history. The emanations have condensed, consciousness is constricted. Where formerly causal bodies were visible, now only their secondary effects come to focus in the little hard-fact pupil of the human eye. The cosmogonic cycle is now to be carried forward, therefore, not by the gods, who became invisible now, but through heros, more or less human in character, through whom the world destiny is realized. This is the line where creation myths begin to give place to legend-as in the book of Genesis, following expulsion from Eden. Metaphysics yields to prehistory, which s dim and vague at first, but becomes precise in detail slowly. The heros become less fabulous, legend opens into the common dayliight of recorded time.

This is a profoundly important conclusion. People who are taught surprising statistical facts about human behavior may be impressed to the point of telling their friends about what they have heard, but this does not mean that their understanding of the world has really changed. The test of learning psychology is whether your understanding of situations you encounter has changed, not whether you have learned a new fact. There is a deep gap between our thinking about statistics and our thinking about individual cases. Statistical results with a causal interpretation have a stronger effect on our thinking than noncausal information. But even compelling causal statistics will not change long-held beliefs or beliefs rooted in personal experience. On the other hand, surprising individual cases have a powerful impact and are a more effective tool for teaching psychology because the incongruity must be resolved and embedded in a causal story. That is why this book contains questions that are addressed personally to the reader. You are more likely to learn something by finding surprises in your own behavior than by hearing surprising facts about people in general.

Notice that your everyday, not-so-dire experience and behavior, what we can think of as your mental and physical worldline, unwinds smoothly from one moment to the next. Whatever it is that you’re thinking and doing and feeling right now will of course change, but it evolves into each successive moment according to transitions that, even though they might not realize your hopes, are nonetheless causally perfect. Although you don’t always get what you want, or even what you need, what you always get is an unobstructed, unhindered unfolding of experience and behavior into the next moment. What is this? It’s nature doing what it does, effortlessly: being the many-leveled, interlocked and evolving patterns, conforming to what we call laws of nature, that constitute you. You, in your compulsory struggle to control, achieve, persist and enjoy, are exactly what fits and gets expressed in this bit of space-time. You, a person, are in fact a process that’s perfectly entailed from moment to moment by the local configuration of impersonal factors cooked up by evolution and culture, genes and memes. We can trace the you-process historically and we can see it concurrently – what the organism and its mind do in transaction with immediate surroundings. Either way, what we see is an unhindered expression of cause and effect, the patterning of natural laws as they constitute you the person, whether in agony or ecstasy, joy or regret.

For Aristotle the literary plot was analogous to the plot of the world in that both were eductions from the potency of matter. Sartre denies this for the world, and specifically denies, in the passage just referred to, that without potentiality there is no change. He reverts to the Megaric view of the matter, which Aristotle took such trouble to correct. But this is not our affair. The fact is that even if you believe in a Megaric world there is no such thing as a Megaric novel; not even Paterson. Change without potentiality in a novel is impossible, quite simply; though it is the hopeless aim of the cut-out writers, and the card-shuffle writers. A novel which really implemented this policy would properly be a chaos. No novel can avoid being in some sense what Aristotle calls 'a completed action.' This being so, all novels imitate a world of potentiality, even if this implies a philosophy disclaimed by their authors. They have a fixation on the eidetic imagery of beginning, middle, and end, potency and cause. Novels, then, have beginnings, ends, and potentiality, even if the world has not. In the same way it can be said that whereas there may be, in the world, no such thing as character, since a man is what he does and chooses freely what he does--and in so far as he claims that his acts are determined by psychological or other predisposition he is a fraud, lâche, or salaud--in the novel there can be no just representation of this, for if the man were entirely free he might simply walk out of the story, and if he had no character we should not recognize him. This is true in spite of the claims of the doctrinaire nouveau roman school to have abolished character. And Sartre himself has a powerful commitment to it, though he could not accept the Aristotelian position that it is through character that plot is actualized. In short, novels have characters, even if the world has not. What about time? It is, effectively, a human creation, according to Sartre, and he likes novels because they concern themselves only with human time, a faring forward irreversibly into a virgin future from ecstasy to ecstasy, in his word, from kairos to kairos in mine. The future is a fluid medium in which I try to actualize my potency, though the end is unattainable; the present is simply the pour-soi., 'human consciousness in its flight out of the past into the future.' The past is bundled into the en-soi, and has no relevance. 'What I was is not the foundation of what I am, any more than what I am is the foundation of what I shall be.' Now this is not novel-time. The faring forward is all right, and fits the old desire to know what happens next; but the denial of all causal relation between disparate kairoi, which is after all basic to Sartre's treatment of time, makes form impossible, and it would never occur to us that a book written to such a recipe, a set of discontinuous epiphanies, should be called a novel. Perhaps we could not even read it thus: the making of a novel is partly the achievement of readers as well as writers, and readers would constantly attempt to supply the very connections that the writer's programme suppresses. In all these ways, then, the novel falsifies the philosophy.

We also find *physics*, in the widest sense of the word, concerned with the explanation of phenomena in the world; but it lies already in the nature of the explanations themselves that they cannot be sufficient. *Physics* is unable to stand on its own feet, but needs a *metaphysics* on which to support itself, whatever fine airs it may assume towards the latter. For it explains phenomena by something still more unknown than are they, namely by laws of nature resting on forces of nature, one of which is also the vital force. Certainly the whole present condition of all things in the world or in nature must necessarily be capable of explanation from purely physical causes. But such an explanation―supposing one actually succeeded so far as to be able to give it―must always just as necessarily be burdened with two essential imperfections (as it were with two sore points, or like Achilles with the vulnerable heel, or the devil with the cloven foot). On account of these imperfections, everything so explained would still really remain unexplained. The first imperfection is that the *beginning* of the chain of causes and effects that explains everything, in other words, of the connected and continuous changes, can positively *never* be reached, but, just like the limits of the world in space and time, recedes incessantly and *in infinitum*. The second imperfection is that all the efficient causes from which everything is explained always rest on something wholly inexplicable, that is, on the original *qualities* of things and the *natural forces* that make their appearance in them. By virtue of such forces they produce a definite effect, e.g., weight, hardness, impact, elasticity, heat, electricity, chemical forces, and so on, and such forces remain in every given explanation like an unknown quantity, not to be eliminated at all, in an otherwise perfectly solved algebraical equation. Accordingly there is not a fragment of clay, however little its value, that is not entirely composed of inexplicable qualities. Therefore these two inevitable defects in every purely physical, i.e., causal, explanation indicate that such an explanation can be only *relatively* true, and that its whole method and nature cannot be the only, the ultimate and hence sufficient one, in other words, cannot be the method that will ever be able to lead to the satisfactory solution of the difficult riddles of things, and to the true understanding of the world and of existence; but that the *physical* explanation, in general and as such, still requires one that is *metaphysical*, which would furnish the key to all its assumptions, but for that very reason would have to follow quite a different path. The first step to this is that we should bring to distinct consciousness and firmly retain the distinction between the two, that is, the difference between *physics* and *metaphysics*. In general this difference rests on the Kantian distinction between *phenomenon* and *thing-in-itself*. Just because Kant declared the thing-in-itself to be absolutely unknowable, there was, according to him, no *metaphysics* at all, but merely immanent knowledge, in other words mere *physics*, which can always speak only of phenomena, and together with this a critique of reason which aspires to metaphysics." ―from_The World as Will and Representation_. Translated from the German by E. F. J. Payne. In Two Volumes, Volume II, pp. 172-173

He believes the relationship between particle and quantum wave is more like a ship on automatic pilot guided by radar waves. A quantum wave does not push an electron about any more than a radar wave pushes a ship. Rather, it provides the electron with information about its environment which the electron then uses to maneuver on its own. In other words, Bohm believes that an electron is not only mindlike, but is a highly complex entity, a far cry from the standard view that an electron is a simple, structureless point. The active use of information by electrons, and indeed by all subatomic particles, indicates that the ability to respond to meaning is a characteristic not only of consciousness but of all matter. It is this intrinsic commonality, says Bohm, that offers a possible explanation for PK. He states, "On this basis, psychokinesis could arise if the mental processes of one or more people were focused on meanings that were in harmony with those guiding the basic processes of the material systems in which this psychokinesis was to be brought about. "4 It is important to note that this kind of psychokinesis would not be due to a causal process, that is, a cause-and-effect relationship involving any of the known forces in physics. Instead, it would be the result of a kind of nonlocal "resonance of meanings, " or a kind of nonlocal interaction similar to, but not the same as, the nonlocal interconnection that allows a pair of twin photons to manifest the same angle of polarization which we saw in chapter 2 (for technical reasons Bohm believes mere quantum nonlocality cannot account for either PK or telepathy, and only a deeper form of nonlocality, a kind of "super" nonlocality, would offer such an explanation).

In seeking to establish the causes of poverty and other social problems among black Americans, for example, sociologist William Julius Wilson pointed to factors such as “the enduring effects of slavery, Jim Crow segregation, public school segregation, legalized discrimination, residential segregation, the FHA’s redlining of black neighborhoods in the 1940s and ’50s, the construction of public housing projects in poor black neighborhoods, employer discrimination, and other racial acts and processes.”1 These various facts might be summarized as examples of racism, so the causal question is whether racism is either the cause, or one of the major causes, of poverty and other social problems among black Americans today. Many might consider the obvious answer to be “yes.” Yet some incontrovertible facts undermine that conclusion. For example, despite the high poverty rate among black Americans in general, the poverty rate among black married couples has been less than 10 percent every year since 1994.2 The poverty rate of married blacks is not only lower than that of blacks as a whole, but in some years has also been lower than that of whites as a whole.3 In 2016, for example, the poverty rate for blacks was 22 percent, for whites was 11 percent, and for black married couples was 7.5 percent.4 Do racists care whether someone black is married or unmarried? If not, then why do married blacks escape poverty so much more often than other blacks, if racism is the main reason for black poverty? If the continuing effects of past evils such as slavery play a major causal role today, were the ancestors of today’s black married couples exempt from slavery and other injustices? As far back as 1969, young black males whose homes included newspapers, magazines, and library cards, and who also had the same education as young white males, had similar incomes as their white counterparts.5 Do racists care whether blacks have reading material and library cards?

—I have been understood. At the opening of the Bible there is the whole psychology of the priest.—The priest knows of only one great danger: that is science—the sound comprehension of cause and effect. But science flourishes, on the whole, only under favourable conditions—a man must have time, he must have an overflowing intellect, in order to “know.”... “Therefore, man must be made unhappy,”—this has been, in all ages, the logic of the priest.—It is easy to see just what, by this logic, was the first thing to come into the world:—“sin.”... The concept of guilt and punishment, the whole “moral order of the world,” was set up against science—against the deliverance of man from priests.... Man must not look outward; he must look inward. He must not look at things shrewdly and cautiously, to learn about them; he must not look at all; he must suffer.... And he must suffer so much that he is always in need of the priest.—Away with physicians! What is needed is a Saviour.—The concept of guilt and punishment, including the doctrines of “grace,” of “salvation,” of “forgiveness”—lies through and through, and absolutely without psychological reality—were devised to destroy man’s sense of causality: they are an attack upon the concept of cause and effect!—And not an attack with the fist, with the knife, with honesty in hate and love! On the contrary, one inspired by the most cowardly, the most crafty, the most ignoble of instincts! An attack of priests! An attack of parasites! The vampirism of pale, subterranean leeches!... When the natural consequences of an act are no longer “natural,” but are regarded as produced by the ghostly creations of superstition—by “God,” by “spirits,” by “souls”—and reckoned as merely “moral” consequences, as rewards, as punishments, as hints, as lessons, then the whole ground-work of knowledge is destroyed —then the greatest of crimes against humanity has been perpetrated.—I repeat that sin, man’s self-desecration par excellence, was invented in order to make science, culture, and every elevation and ennobling of man impossible; the priest rules through the invention of sin.

Agnostics and other relativists dispute the value of metaphysical certainty; in order to demonstrate the illusory character of the de jure certainty of truth, they set it in opposition to the de facto certitude of error, as if the psychological phenomenon of false certainties could prevent true certainties from being what they are and from having all their effectiveness, and as if the very existence of false certainties did not prove in its own way the existence of true ones. The fact that a lunatic feels certain he is something that he is not does not prevent us from being certain of what he is and what we ourselves are, and the fact that we are unable to prove to him that he is mistaken does not prevent us from being right; or again, the fact that an unbalanced person may possibly have misgivings about his condition does not oblige us to have them about our own, even if we find it impossible to prove to him that our certainty is well founded. It is absurd to demand absolute proofs of suprasensorial realities that one thinks one ought to question while refusing in the name of reason to consider metaphysical arguments that are sufficient in themselves; for outside of these arguments the only proof of hidden realities—as we have already said—is the realities themselves. One cannot ask the dawn to be the sun or a shadow to be the tree that casts it; the very existence of our intelligence proves the reality of the relationships of causality, relationships that allow us to acknowledge the Invisible and by the same token oblige us to do so; if the world did not prove God, human intelligence would be deprived of its sufficient reason. First and foremost—leaving aside any question of intellectual intuition—the very fact of our existence necessarily implies pure Being; instead of starting with the idea that “I think; therefore I am”, one should say, “I am; therefore Being is”: 'sum ergo est Esse' and not 'cogito ergo sum'. What counts in our eyes is most definitely not some more or less correct line of reasoning but intrinsic certainty itself; reasoning is able to convey this in its own way: it describes the certainty in order to show forth its self-evident nature on the plane of discursive thought, and in this way it provides a key that others might use in actualizing this same certainty.

Stoic ethics is a species of eudaimonism. Its central, organizing concern is about what we ought to do or be to live well—to flourish. That is, we make it a lemma that all people ought to pursue a good life for themselves as a categorical commitment second to none. It does not follow from this that they ought to pursue any one particular version of the good life, or to cling tenaciously to the one they are pursuing. … Living virtuously is the process of creating a single, spatiotemporal object—a life. A life has a value as an object, as a whole. It is not always the case that its value as an object will be a function of the value of its spatiotemporal parts considered separately. But it is always the case that an evaluation of the parts will be incomplete until they are understood in the context of the whole life. What seems so clearly valuable (or required or excellent) when we focus on a thin temporal slice of a life (or a single, long strand of a life) may turn out to be awful or optional or vicious when we take a larger view. And it is the life as a whole that we consider when we think about its value in relation to other things, or its value as a part of the cosmos. … In our view, a focus on the parts of a life, or on the sum of its parts, obscures some important features of ethical inquiry. One such feature is the extent to which an agent’s own estimate of the value of his life is necessarily inconclusive: others will have to judge his life as a whole, because its character as a whole is not likely to be predictable while he is around to judge it, and because many important holistic considerations, such as its beauty, excellence, justice, and net effect, are things that he is either not well situated to judge or at least not in a privileged position to judge. Another feature obscured is the range of ways in which a single event or characteristic, without wide causal connections to other elements of one’s life, can nonetheless ruin it; for example, the possibility that a monstrously unjust act can indelibly stain a whole life. A third, related obscurity introduced by ignoring a whole-life frame of reference is the extent to which both aesthetic criteria and the notion of excellence have clear roles in the evaluation of a life. The whole-life frame of reference, together with a plausible account of the variety of ways in which a life can be a good one, keeps Stoicism sharply distinct from Epicurean doctrines, or their modern “welfarist” offshoots. How well my life is going from the inside, so to speak, in terms of the quality of my experience, is only one of the things that enters into a Stoic evaluation of it. We hold that there is a single unifying aim in the life of every rational agent, and that aim, guided by the notion of a good life (happiness, eudaimonia), is virtue, understood as the perfection of agency.

Unconditional blame is the tendency to explain all difficulties exclusively as the consequence of forces beyond your influence, to see yourself as an absolute victim of external circumstances. Every person suffers the impact of factors beyond his control, so we are all, in a sense, victims. We are not, however, absolute victims. We have the ability to respond to our circumstances and influence how they affect us. In contrast, the unconditional blamer defines his victim-identity by his helplessness, disowning any power to manage his life and assigning causality only to that which is beyond his control. Unconditional blamers believe that their problems are always someone else’s fault, and that there’s nothing they could have done to prevent them. Consequently, they believe that there’s nothing they should do to address them. Unconditional blamers feel innocent, unfairly burdened by others who do things they “shouldn’t” do because of maliciousness or stupidity. According to the unconditional blamer, these others “ought” to fix the problems they created. Blamers live in a state of self-righteous indignation, trying to control people around them with their accusations and angry demands. What the unconditional blamer does not see is that in order to claim innocence, he has to relinquish his power. If he is not part of the problem, he cannot be part of the solution. In fact, rather than being the main character of his life, the blamer is a spectator. Watching his own suffering from the sidelines, he feels “safe” because his misery is always somebody else’s fault. Blame is a tranquilizer. It soothes the blamer, sheltering him from accountability for his life. But like any drug, its soothing effect quickly turns sour, miring him in resignation and resentment. In order to avoid anxiety and guilt, the blamer must disown his freedom and power and see himself as a plaything of others. The blamer feels victimized at work. His job is fraught with letdowns, betrayals, disappointments, and resentments. He feels that he is expected to fix problems he didn’t create, yet his efforts are never recognized. So he shields himself with justifications. Breakdowns are never his fault, nor are solutions his responsibility. He is not accountable because it is always other people who failed to do what they should have done. Managers don’t give him direction as they should, employees don’t support him as they should, colleagues don’t cooperate with him as they should, customers demand much more than they should, suppliers don’t respond as they should, senior executives don’t lead the organization as they should, administration systems don’t work as they should—the whole company is a mess. In addition, the economy is weak, the job market tough, the taxes confiscatory, the regulations crippling, the interest rates exorbitant, and the competition fierce (especially because of those evil foreigners who pay unfairly low wages). And if it weren’t difficult enough to survive in this environment, everybody demands extraordinary results. The blamer never tires of reciting his tune, “Life is not fair!

This brings me to an objection to integrated information theory by the quantum physicist Scott Aaronson. His argument has given rise to an instructive online debate that accentuates the counterintuitive nature of some IIT's predictions. Aaronson estimates phi.max for networks called expander graphs, characterized by being both sparsely yet widely connected. Their integrated information will grow indefinitely as the number of elements in these reticulated lattices increases. This is true even of a regular grid of XOR logic gates. IIT predicts that such a structure will have high phi.max. This implies that two-dimensional arrays of logic gates, easy enough to build using silicon circuit technology, have intrinsic causal powers and will feel like something. This is baffling and defies commonsense intuition. Aaronson therefor concludes that any theory with such a bizarre conclusion must be wrong. Tononi counters with a three-pronged argument that doubles down and strengthens the theory's claim. Consider a blank featureless wall. From the extrinsic perspective, it is easily described as empty. Yet the intrinsic point of view of an observer perceiving the wall seethes with an immense number of relations. It has many, many locations and neighbourhood regions surrounding these. These are positioned relative to other points and regions - to the left or right, above or below. Some regions are nearby, while others are far away. There are triangular interactions, and so on. All such relations are immediately present: they do not have to be inferred. Collectively, they constitute an opulent experience, whether it is seen space, heard space, or felt space. All share s similar phenomenology. The extrinsic poverty of empty space hides vast intrinsic wealth. This abundance must be supported by a physical mechanism that determines this phenomenology through its intrinsic causal powers. Enter the grid, such a network of million integrate-or-fire or logic units arrayed on a 1,000 by 1,000 lattice, somewhat comparable to the output of an eye. Each grid elements specifies which of its neighbours were likely ON in the immediate past and which ones will be ON in the immediate future. Collectively, that's one million first-order distinctions. But this is just the beginning, as any two nearby elements sharing inputs and outputs can specify a second-order distinction if their joint cause-effect repertoire cannot be reduced to that of the individual elements. In essence, such a second-order distinction links the probability of past and future states of the element's neighbours. By contrast, no second-order distinction is specified by elements without shared inputs and outputs, since their joint cause-effect repertoire is reducible to that of the individual elements. Potentially, there are a million times a million second-order distinctions. Similarly, subsets of three elements, as long as they share input and output, will specify third-order distinctions linking more of their neighbours together. And on and on. This quickly balloons to staggering numbers of irreducibly higher-order distinctions. The maximally irreducible cause-effect structure associated with such a grid is not so much representing space (for to whom is space presented again, for that is the meaning of re-presentation?) as creating experienced space from an intrinsic perspective.

With Bayesian networks, we had taught machines to think in shades of grey, and this was an important step toward humanlike thinking. But we still couldn't teach machines to understand causes and effects. We couldn't explain to a computer why turning the dial of a barometer won't cause rain.... Without the ability to envision alternate realities and contrast them with the currently existing reality, a machine...cannot answer the most basic question that makes us human: "Why?

Because I think there are events of another category that are likewise not fixed in a causal chain: acts of volition. Free will is a kind of miracle; when we make a genuine choice, we bring about a result that cannot be reduce to the workings of physical law. Every act of volition is, like the creation of the universe, a first cause.

an essay called “The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within,” by Edward Tufte, a Yale professor who is an authority on the visualization of information.1 Tufte identified in one sentence the problem we’d been experiencing: “As analysis becomes more causal, multivariate, comparative, evidence based, and resolution-intense,” he writes, “the more damaging the bullet list becomes.” That description fit our discussions at the S-Team meetings: complex, interconnected, requiring plenty of information to explore, with greater and greater consequences connected to decisions. Such analysis is not well served by a linear progression of slides that makes it difficult to refer one idea to another, sparsely worded bits of text that don’t fully express an idea, and visual effects that are more distracting than enlightening. Rather than making things clear and simple, PowerPoint can strip the discussion of important nuance. In our meetings, even when a presenter included supporting information in the notes or accompanying audio, the PowerPoint presentation was never enough.

Here are ten facts about IQ. These facts are debated and often controversial among the general public but far less so among scientists who study intelligence. The best review of the academic literature supporting these facts is a 2012 paper by Richard Nisbett and colleagues – an interdisciplinary team of leading scholars, household names within intelligence research, comprised of psychologists, an economist, a behavioral geneticist, and a former President of the American Psychological Association. Their areas of expertise include cultural and sex differences in intelligence, the effect of social and genetic factors that affect intelligence, the development of intelligence over the lifespan, the relationship between economic development and intelligence, and changes in intelligence over history 1. IQ is a good predictor of school and work performance, at least in WEIRD societies. 2. IQ differs in predictive power and is the least predictive of performance on tasks that demand low cognitive skill. 3. IQ may be separable into what can be called ‘crystallized intelligence’ and ‘fluid intelligence’. Crystalized intelligence refers to knowledge that is drawn on to solve problems. Fluid intelligence refers to an ability to solve novel problems and to learn. 4. Educational interventions can improve aspects of IQ, including fluid intelligence, which is affected by interventions such as memory training. Many of these results don’t seem to last long, although there is strong evidence that education as a whole causally raises IQ over a lifetime. 5. IQ test scores have been dramatically increasing over time. This is called the Flynn effect after James Flynn (also an author of the review mentioned above), who first noticed this pattern. The Flynn effect is largest for nations that have recently modernized. Large gains have been measured on the Raven’s test, a test that has been argued to be the most ‘culture-free’ and a good measure of fluid intelligence. That is, it’s not just driven by people learning more words or getting better at adding and subtracting. 6. IQ differences have neural correlates – i.e. you can measure these differences in the brain. 7. IQ is heritable, though the exact heritability differs by population, typically ranging from around 30% to 80%. 8. Heritability is lower for poorer people in the US, but not in Australia and Europe where it is roughly the same across levels of wealth. 9. Males and females differ in IQ performance in terms of variance and in the means of different subscales. 10. Populations and ethnicities differ on IQ performance. You can imagine why some people might question these statements. But setting aside political considerations, how do we scientifically make sense of this? Popular books from Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve (1994) to Robert Plomin’s Blueprint (2018) have attributed much of this to genes. People and perhaps groups differ in genes, making some brighter than others. But humans are a species with two lines of inheritance. They have not just genetic hardware but also cultural software. And it is primarily by culture rather than genes that we became the most dominant species on earth. For a species so dependent on accumulated knowledge, not only is the idea of a culture-free intelligence test meaningless, so too is the idea of culture free intelligence.

Whenever you rebel against causality, your motive is the fraudulent desire, not to escape it, but worse: to reverse it. You want unearned love, as if love, the effect, could give you personal value, the cause—you want unearned admiration, as if admiration, the effect, could give you virtue, the cause—you want unearned wealth, as if wealth, the effect, could give you ability, the cause—you plead for mercy, mercy, not justice, as if an unearned forgiveness could wipe out the cause of your plea. And to indulge your ugly little shams, you support the doctrines of your teachers, while they run hog-wild proclaiming that spending, the effect, creates riches, the cause, that machinery, the effect, creates intelligence, the cause, that your sexual desires, the effect, create your philosophical values, the cause.

Rami - "What do you mean by the phrase Diamond Consciousness?" Dayah- "Diamond Consciousness is Divine Consciousness awakened within all of the centers of your Being. It is Oneness with the All, Timeless and Changeless. Diamond Consciousness cannot be effected by any outer influence other than the pure white light of Infinite Source, and when this light enters, it is refracted across the entire rainbow of human potential. Thus one awakened in Diamond Consciousness if Free from any effect of the realm material and instead is at cause." Rami - "What do you mean when you say awakened?" Dayah - "Awakened Consciousness is Divine Consciousness recognizing and experiencing itself as the actual expression of who you are as a Being prior to and beyond any planetary identity. It is the realization of you Universal Infinite Origin and Destiny. It is the EXPERIENTIAL KNOWING of who you actually are." Rami - "Then what is the difference between Awakened Consciousness and Diamond Consciousness." Dayah "With Awakened Consciousness you can go there as a visitor. You can find the pathway there, It can become increasingly familiar. But yet you do not stay, you return to your planetary viewpoint of sentient and temporal existence. Within the state of Diamond Consciousness it becomes where you reside prior to and beyond time or space it is your Holy Origin and Divine Destiny. Diamond Consciousness is changeless prior to and beyond effect. It is Causal. It is the realm of the true Spiritual Master.

The imaginative man does not deny the reality of the sensuous outer world of Becoming, but he knows that it is the inner world of continuous imagination that is the force by which the sensuous outer world of Becoming is brought to pass. He sees the outer world and all its happenings as projections of the inner world of Imagination. To him everything is a manifestation of the mental activity goes on in man's imagination without the sensuous reasonable man being aware of it. But he realises that every man must become conscious of this inner activity and see the relationship between the inner causal world of imagination and the sensuous outer world of effects.

Drama is physical, mental, and emotional activity that focuses on and fiddles with effects without impacting causality.

counterfactuals make us better causal thinkers. In experiments, people improve their causal reasoning after engaging in counterfactual thinking than the other way around. Cognitive scientists, notably Ruth Byrne at Trinity College Dublin, suggest that counterfactuals are so helpful because they remind us of options, broadening rather than deepening our focus. As we think about options, we also ponder cause and effect; in contrast, when we just focus on a single cause, we are not stimulating our imagination. That’s why imagining alternative realities is such a central element for successful framing.

They achieved their breakthrough not because they came up with something completely novel but because they masterfully applied the very frame they had identified to be the best fit. They weren’t geniuses—they were exemplary framers. They attained success by thinking clearly about cause and effect, by imagining alternatives, and by applying the constraints derived from the laws of physics. These three features—causality, counterfactuals, and constraints—are essential to applying frames.

In advance of the class, he asked students to fill in a quick survey in which he asked them to describe their own experiences with one of these three uses of statistics. He tells the students that he has read their answers, as well as their student profiles, and asks for volunteers to talk about what they wrote. Several hands go up, and he picks Juliana, a student from Brazil, interested in education. She starts to talk about a program she helped to run in Brazil which assessed whether improvements in teacher training had a causal effect on test scores. As she is talking, her words appear on the big screen, in big quotation marks, along with her photo. The class laughs, and as she looks up she realises she has become a celebrity.

So what is the alternative to rational choice conceived as a value-neutral predictive science? Hermeneutics encourages economists to conceive of rational choice as a heuristic. Heuristics, in this sense, are fruitful ways of generating insights or conclusions about social reality. Heuristics are not to be confused with explanations. Because humans are self-interpreting, explanation requires grasping the actual meanings and beliefs that contingently cause a belief or action. To explain social reality economists must construct narratives or stories. By contrast, a heuristic need neither describe nor explain economic life. Instead, it offers a way of thinking about society that might help consider possible outcomes and hypothetical scenarios. This means that rational choice must never be confused as having generated an actual account of what particular people are doing or why they are doing it. Colin Hay helpfully proposes the notion of rational choice as an effective method for considering

Contemplation of the Map of Consciousness can, for instance, transform one’s understanding of causality. As perception itself evolves with one’s level of consciousness, becomes apparent that what the world calls the domain of causes is in fact the domain of effects. By taking responsibility for the consequences of their own perceptions, observers can transcend the role of victim to an understanding that “nothing out there has power over you.” It is not life’s events, but how one reacts to them and the attitude that one has about them, which determine whether the events have a positive or negative effect on one’s life, whether they are experienced as opportunity or as stress.

[Sociology is ] ... the science whose object is to interpret the meaning of social action and thereby give a causal explanation of the way in which the action proceeds and the effects which it produces. By 'action' in this definition is meant the human behaviour when and to the extent the agent or agents see it as subjectively meaningful ... the meaning to which we refer may be either (a) the meaning actually intended either by an individual agent on a particular historical occasion or by a number of agents on an approximate average in a given set of cases, or (b) the meaning attributed to the agent or agents, as types, in a pure type constructed in the abstract. In neither case is the 'meaning' thought of as somehow objectively 'correct' or 'true' by some metaphysical criterion. This is the difference between the empirical sciences of action, such as sociology and history, and any kind of a priori discipline, such as jurisprudence, logic, ethics, or aesthetics whose aim is to extract from their subject-matter 'correct' or 'valid' meaning.

[Sociology is] ...the science whose object is to interpret the meaning of social action and thereby give a causal explanation of the way in which the action proceeds and the effects which it produces. By 'action' in this definition is meant the human behaviour when and to the extent the agent or agents see it as subjectively meaningful ... the meaning to which we refer may be either (a) the meaning actually intended either by an individual agent on a particular historical occasion or by a number of agents on an approximate average in a given set of cases, or (b) the meaning attributed to the agent or agents, as types, in a pure type constructed in the abstract. In neither case is the 'meaning' thought of as somehow objectively 'correct' or 'true' by some metaphysical criterion. This is the difference between the empirical sciences of action, such as sociology and history, and any kind of a priori discipline, such as jurisprudence, logic, ethics, or aesthetics whose aim is to extract from their subject-matter 'correct' or 'valid' meaning.

If we look at the Book of Hebrews (and combine all the words that convey the idea of gratitude to God and even to human beings) we notice that it is used more than a thousand times. This tells us that if we would pray effectively we must cultivate a kind of ontology (nature of being) of gratitude which creates a cosmology of praise. Gratitude is in itself a spiritual practice that can transform our world. It is not a state of mind — but of being. It is intrinsically a grammar of being, and spirituality that communicates authenticity. For the believer, it is the environment within which their spiritual life has its ebb and flow. The way each of us goes about showing gratitude may differ but, for the believer who has an effective prayer life, this mode of being in the world is indispensable. The believer’s relationship with God and the created world, which he/she believes is the gift of a gracious God to humankind, calls forth this flow of gratitude in the believer. The practice of gratitude in prayer can increase our ability to deal with the circumstances that befall us. A prayer of gratitude is a way of looking beyond the causality of life and, instead of adapting a “ho-hum” attitude, returning to joy by being surprised by the wonder in the so-called mundane.

around. For a human being, this has two distinct aspects. The unity of what we may call your “acting self”—a unity that we also call “integrity”—enables you to pursue your ends effectively and maintain your projects, commitments, relationships, and values over time.14 The unity of what we may call your “knowing self” involves the formation of an integrated conception of your environment, one that enables you to identify relations between the different parts of your environment well enough to find your way around in it. Those relations are temporal, spacial, causal, and for many animals social. By forming a unified conception of your environment, you also unify yourself as the subject of that conception. The fact that I identify with my self—with the agent of my projects and commitments and the subject of my conception of the world—means that there may be things about my body, such as its tendency to senescence, that are not good for me, even if perhaps they are good for my species or my genes. They are not good, that is, for the thing that I experience, and identify, as “me.” My functional good is what maintains the aspects of me that support my having a self.

Another situation in which we attend to base rates occurs if people ascribe some causal significance to discrepant rates. When they can see the causal relevance of the base rates, they often incorporate them into their reasoning. For example, the belief that one bus company has more accidents than another because its drivers are more poorly selected and trained will influence mock jurors to take this difference in accident rates into account in evaluating eyewitness testimony; but belief that a bus company has more accidents simply because it is larger will not. Study after study has shown that when these rates are merely statistical as opposed to causal, they tend to be ignored. Exactly the same effect seems to occur in real courtrooms; naked statistical evidence is notoriously unpersuasive.

Take the effects of volunteering as an example. It’s possible that those choosing to volunteer are those most likely to benefit from it, which means that we may not be able to generalize the happiness effects of volunteering to a wider population. Also, those with greater happiness may be those most likely to volunteer in the first place, and so part of any correlation will be picking up the reverse causality from happiness to volunteering. Telling the chicken from the egg in happiness research is quite a challenge.

Then he or she grants to that small number primary causal power, while ignoring others of equal or greater importance. It is most effective to utilize a major motivational system or large-scale sociological fact or conjecture for such purposes. It is also good to select those explanatory principles for an unstated negative, resentful, and destructive reason, and then make discussion of the latter and the reason for their existence taboo for the ideologue and his or her followers (to say nothing of the critics). Next, the faux theorist spins a post-hoc theory about how every phenomenon, no matter how complex, can be considered a secondary consequence of the new, totalizing system. Finally, a school of thought emerges to propagate the methods of this algorithmic reduction (particularly when the thinker is hoping to attain dominance in the conceptual and the real worlds), and those who refuse to adopt the algorithm or who criticize its use are tacitly or explicitly demonized.