Causal Related Quotes

The only simple truth is that there is nothing simple in this complex universe. Everything relates. Everything connects

I was taught the popular folktale of racism: that ignorant and hateful people had produced racist ideas, and that these racist people had instituted racist policies. But when I learned the motives behind the production of many of America’s most influentially racist ideas, it became quite obvious that this folktale, though sensible, was not based on a firm footing of historical evidence. Ignorance/hateracist ideasdiscrimination: this causal relationship is largely ahistorical. It has actually been the inverse relationship—racial discrimination led to racist ideas which led to ignorance and hate. Racial discriminationracist ideasignorance/hate: this is the causal relationship driving America’s history of race relations.

At any particular stage in the development of science, our concepts concerning the causal relationships will then be true only relative to a certain approximation and to certain conditions.

As long as the firmament of the You is spread over me, the tempests of causality cower at my heels, and the whirl of doom congeals. The human being to whom I say You I do not experience. But i stand in relation to him, in the sacred basic word. Only when I step out of this do I experience him again. Experience is remoteness from You.

I have tried to read philosophers of all ages and have found many illuminating ideas but no steady progress toward deeper knowledge and understanding. Science, however, gives me the feeling of steady progress: I am convinced that theoretical physics is actual philosophy. It has revolutionized fundamental concepts, e.g., about space and time (relativity), about causality (quantum theory), and about substance and matter (atomistics), and it has taught us new methods of thinking (complementarity) which are applicable far beyond physics.

the laws remain undisturbed (ch. xxvii.). Apparent exceptions, the miracles, originate in these laws, although man is unable to perceive the causal relation.

The petulance that relatives show towards each other is in truth directed against that intangible Causality which has shaped the situation no less for the offenders than the offended, but is too elusive to be discerned and cornered by poor humanity in irritated mood.

Now take a look at the cemetery. It is quite difficult to do so because people who fail do not seem to write memoirs, and, if they did, those business publishers I know would not even consider giving them the courtesy of a returned phone call (as to returned e-mail, fuhgedit). Readers would not pay $26.95 for a story of failure, even if you convinced them that it had more useful tricks than a story of success.* The entire notion of biography is grounded in the arbitrary ascription of a causal relation between specified traits and subsequent events. Now consider the cemetery. The graveyard of failed persons will be full of people who shared the following traits: courage, risk taking, optimism, et cetera. Just like the population of millionaires. There may be some differences in skills, but what truly separates the two is for the most part a single factor: luck. Plain luck.

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.

Professor Smith has kindly submitted his book to me before publication. After reading it thoroughly and with intense interest I am glad to comply with his request to give him my impression. The work is a broadly conceived attempt to portray man's fear-induced animistic and mythic ideas with all their far-flung transformations and interrelations. It relates the impact of these phantasmagorias on human destiny and the causal relationships by which they have become crystallized into organized religion. This is a biologist speaking, whose scientific training has disciplined him in a grim objectivity rarely found in the pure historian. This objectivity has not, however, hindered him from emphasizing the boundless suffering which, in its end results, this mythic thought has brought upon man. Professor Smith envisages as a redeeming force, training in objective observation of all that is available for immediate perception and in the interpretation of facts without preconceived ideas. In his view, only if every individual strives for truth can humanity attain a happier future; the atavisms in each of us that stand in the way of a friendlier destiny can only thus be rendered ineffective. His historical picture closes with the end of the nineteenth century, and with good reason. By that time it seemed that the influence of these mythic, authoritatively anchored forces which can be denoted as religious, had been reduced to a tolerable level in spite of all the persisting inertia and hypocrisy. Even then, a new branch of mythic thought had already grown strong, one not religious in nature but no less perilous to mankind -- exaggerated nationalism. Half a century has shown that this new adversary is so strong that it places in question man's very survival. It is too early for the present-day historian to write about this problem, but it is to be hoped that one will survive who can undertake the task at a later date.

Without causality in the world, there is no point in educating people, or making any moral or political appeal.

The past and the future are not a collection of instants shared by all space, but a collection of events that correspond to a possible relation of causal order with the present event.

As material beings we belong wholly to the natural world. We are therefore subject to causal relations. As such, we have no free will. But as rational beings we have a part in what Kant calls das Ding an sich -- that is, the world as it exists in itself, independent of our sensory impressions. Only when we follow our 'practical reason' -- which enables us to make moral choices -- do we exercise our free will, because when we conform to moral law, it is we who make the law we are conforming to.

I rediscover the world - which I had distinguished from myself as a sum of things or of processes tied together through causal relations - ‘in myself’ as the permanent horizon of all of my thoughts and as a dimension in relation to which I never cease situating myself.

However, since we have never observed the construction of a world or observed the world constructors, we have no way of knowing what causal relations might be involved in such a project; all we can do is construct hypotheses, without any way of judging which of these are more or less likely.

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.

often has no suspicion of the causal connection between the precipitating event and the pathological phenomenon.

The typical difference that Lenin underscores between the old and the new capitalism does in fact exist, but it bears no necessary causal relation to either competition or monopoly capitalism but is easier to explain in terms of differences between early and late phases of capital accumulation in any given capitalist country at a given stage in the evolution of its technology.

In studies of body self-perception, women regularly overestimate their body size; in a study of economic self-perception, they regularly underestimate their business expenses. The point is that the two misperceptions are causally related. By valuing women’s skills at artificially low levels and tying their physical value into the workplace, the market protects its pool of cheap female labor.

All disciplines of science are built on the causality of the relationships governing related events. Yet the theory of evolution is built upon the idea of accidental changes that resulted in complex living systems. I was unable to comprehend how the notion that an infinite number of random accidents systematically happened to produce living species, and kept improving these beings, is justified.

Synchronistic phenomena prove the simultaneous occurrence of meaningful equivalences in heterogeneous, causally unrelated processes; in other words, they prove that a content perceived by an observer can, at the same time, be represented by an outside event, without any causal connection. From this it follows either that the psyche cannot be localized in space, or that space is relative to the psyche. The same applies to the temporal determination of the psyche and the psychic relativity of time. I do not need to emphasize that the verification of these findings must have far-reaching consequences.

I should still, paradoxical as it may sound, like to maintain the opposite valuation of the dream in relation to the mysterious foundation of our being, whose phenomena we are. The more aware I become of these omnipotent art impulses in nature, and find in them an ardent longing for illusion and for redemption by illusion, the more I feel compelled to make the metaphysical assumption that the truly existent, the primal Oneness, eternally suffering and contradictory, also needs the delightful vision, the pleasurable illusion for its constant redemption: an illusion that we, utterly caught up in it and consisting of it—as a continuous becoming in time, space and causality, in other words—are required to see as empirical reality.

When a culture is no longer centered in a living and continually renewed relational process, it freezes into the It-world which is broken only intermittently by the eruptive, glowing deeds of solitary spirits. From that point on, common causality, which hitherto was never able to disturb the spiritual conception of the cosmos, grows into an oppressive and crushing doom. Wise, masterful fate which, as long as it was attuned to the abundance of meaning in the cosmos, held sway over all causality, has become transformed into demonic absurdity and has collapsed into causality.

Even if a particle could travel backward in time, information could not. Retrocausality will be replaced by something more sophisticated. There are no perfect symmetries, there is no pure randomness everything is an approximation of something else. Information may appear in a digital form but meaning never does. Spacetime is built up from approximations, not discrete ones and zeros, and the only constant may be ratios. Quantum entanglement and geometry; if we think of a particle as being at one pole of an expanding sphere that is not perfectly symmetrical, this surface would be "rippling" like the surface of the ocean (in the audio world this is called dithering), at the other pole is the entangled particle's pair and it is a property of the sphere that gives the illusion of connectivity. This is not a physical geometry, it is a computational geometry. Is spacetime a product of entanglement? Renate Loll believes that time is not perfectly symmetrical. Her computer models require causality. Possibly some form of quantum random walk in state space. If a photon is emitted by an electron inside of a clock on Earth and it travels to a clock four light years away, time stops for the clock on Earth and time jumps forward eight years for the distant clock also, the electron that will capture the photon becomes infinitely large relative to the photon but the electron that emitted it does not become infinitely small therefore, time is not perfectly symmetrical.

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.

Rhine’s experiments confront us with the fact that there are events which are related to one another experimentally, and in this case meaningfully, without there being any possibility of proving that this relation is a causal one, since the “transmission” exhibits none of the known properties of energy.

There was the goal of all those con men of library and classroom, who sold their revelations as reason, their “instincts” as science, their cravings as knowledge, the goal of all the savages of the non-objective, the non-absolute, the relative, the tentative, the probable—the savages who, seeing a farmer gather a harvest, can consider it only as a mystic phenomenon unbound by the law of causality and created by the farmers’ omnipotent whim, who then proceed to seize the farmer, to chain him, to deprive him of tools, of seeds, of water, of soil, to push him out on a barren rock and to command: “Now grow a harvest and feed us!

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.

The associative machinery seeks causes. The difficulty we have with statistical regularities is that they call for a different approach. Instead of focusing on how the event at hand came to be, the statistical view relates it to what could have happened instead. Nothing in particular caused it to be what it is—chance selected it from among its alternatives. Our predilection for causal thinking exposes us to serious mistakes in evaluating the randomness of truly random events.

The difference between supermind and Big Mind (if we take Big Mind to mean the state experience of nondual Suchness, or turiyatita) is that Big Mind can be experienced or recognized at virtually any lower level or rung. Magic to Integral. In fact, one can be at, say, the Pluralistic stage, and experience several core characteristics of the entire sequence of state-stages (gross to subtle to causal to Witnessing to Nondual), although, of course, the entire sequence, including nondual Suchness, will be interpreted in Pluralistic terms. This is unfortunate in many ways—interpreting Dharma in merely Pluralistic terms (or Mythic terms, or Rational, and so on)—because it is so ultimately reductionistic; but it happens all the time, given the relative independence of states and structures at 1st and 2nd tier. Supermind, on the other hand, as a basic structure-rung (conjoined with nondual Suchness) can only be experienced once all the previous junior levels have emerged and developed, and as in all structure development, stages cannot be skipped. Therefore, unlike Big Mind, supermind can only be experienced after all 1st-, 2nd-, and 3rd-tier junior stages have been passed through. While, as Genpo Roshi has abundantly demonstrated, Big Mind state experience is available to virtually anybody at almost any age (and will be interpreted according to the View of their current stage), supermind is an extremely rare recognition. Supermind, as the highest structure-rung to date, has access to all previous structures, all the way back to Archaic—and the Archaic itself, of course, has transcended and included, and now embraces, every major structural evolution going all the way back to the Big Bang. (A human being literally enfolds and embraces all the major transformative unfoldings of the entire Kosmic history—strings to quarks to subatomic particles to atoms to molecules to cells, all the way through the Tree of Life up to its latest evolutionary emergent, the triune brain, the most complex structure in the known natural world.) Supermind, in any given individual, is experienced as a type of “omniscience”—the supermind, since it transcends and includes all of the previous structure-rungs, and inherently is conjoined with the highest nondual Suchness state, has a full and complete knowledge of all of the potentials in that person. It literally “knows all,” at least for the individual.

supervisors force professional service people to broadcast the Professional Smile? Am I the only consumer in whom high doses of such a smile produce despair? Am I the only person who’s sure that the growing number of cases in which totally average-looking people suddenly open up with automatic weapons in shopping malls and insurance offices and medical complexes and McDonald’ses is somehow causally related to the fact that these venues are well-known dissemination-loci of the Professional Smile?

For every relationship involves two related terms. Sometimes relationships are not real in either term, but arise from the way we think of the terms: we think identity, for example, by thinking one thing twice over and relating it to itself; and occasionally we relate what exists to what does not exist, or generate purely logical relations like that of genus to species. Sometimes relationships are real in both terms: grounded in the quantity of both, in the case of relationships like big/small or double/half, or in their activity and passivity, in the case of causal relationships, like mover-moved and father/son. Sometimes relationships are real in only one of the terms, with the other merely thought of as related [reciprocally] to that one; and this happens whenever the two terms exist at different levels. Thus seeing and understanding really relates us to things, but being seen and understood by us is not something real in the things; and similarly a pillar to the right of us does not itself have a left and a right.

What separates me most deeply from the metaphysicians is: I don’t concede that the’I’ is what thinks. Instead, I take the I itself to be a construction of thinking, of the same rank as ‘matter’, ‘thing’, ‘substance’, ‘individual’, ‘purpose’, ‘number’; in other words to be only a regulative fiction with the help of which a kind of constancy and thus ‘knowability’ is inserted into, invented into, a world of becoming. Up to now belief in grammar, in the linguistic subject, object, in verbs has subjugated the metaphysicians: I teach the renunciation of this belief. It is only thinking that posits the I: but up to now philosophers have believed, like the ‘common people’, that in ‘I think’ there lay something or other of unmediated certainty and that this ‘I’ was the given cause of thinking, in analogy with which we ‘understood’ all other causal relations. However habituated and indispensable this fiction may now be, that in no way disproves its having been invented: something can be a condition of life and nevertheless be false.

What separates me most deeply from the metaphysicians is: I don’t concede that the ’I’ is what thinks. Instead, I take the ’I’ itself to be a construction of thinking, of the same rank as ‘matter’, ‘thing’, ‘substance’, ‘individual’, ‘purpose’, ‘number’; in other words to be only a regulative fiction with the help of which a kind of constancy and thus ‘knowability’ is inserted into, invented into, a world of becoming. Up to now belief in grammar, in the linguistic subject, object, in verbs has subjugated the metaphysicians: I teach the renunciation of this belief. It is only thinking that posits the ’I’: but up to now philosophers have believed, like the ‘common people’, that in ‘I think’ there lay something or other of unmediated certainty and that this ‘I’ was the given cause of thinking, in analogy with which we ‘understood’ all other causal relations. However habituated and indispensable this fiction may now be, that in no way disproves its having been invented: something can be a condition of life and nevertheless be false.

as we have seen – we conceive God as infinite personal will and intelligence, as the exercise of infinite resource fully and eternally present in every moment of its action, there exists in creation the possibility of relation between finite and infinite at a level other than that of universal causal activation. Personal relatedness between divine and human will unites divine life with the highest of the levels of finite agency; and this relation transformingly illuminates how human intelligence and love are rooted in infinite agency.

It was Oppenheimer’s good fortune to arrive shortly before an extraordinary revolution in theoretical physics drew to its close: Max Planck’s discovery of quanta (photons); Einstein’s magnificent achievement—the special theory of relativity; Niels Bohr’s description of the hydrogen atom; Werner Heisenberg’s formulation of matrix mechanics; and Erwin Schrödinger’s theory of wave mechanics. This truly innovative period began to wind down with Born’s 1926 paper on probability and causality. It was completed in 1927 with Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and Bohr’s formulation of the theory of complementarity.

Hume had shown that we naively read causality into this world and think that we grasp necessary succession in intuition. The same is true of everything that makes the body of the everyday surrounding world into an identical thing with identical properties, relations, etc. (and Hume had in fact worked this out in detail in the Treatise, which was unknown to Kant). Data and complexes of data come and go, but the thing, presumed to be simply experienced sensibly, is not something sensible which persists through this alteration. The sensationalist thus declares it to be a fiction. He is substituting, we shall say, mere sense-data for perception, which after all places things (everyday things) before our eyes. In other words, he overlooks the fact that mere sensibility, related to mere data of sense, cannot account for objects of experience. Thus he overlooks the fact that these objects of experience point to a hidden mental accomplishment and to the problem of what kind of an accomplishment this can be. From the very start, after all, it must be a kind which enables the objects of pre-scientific experience, through logic, mathematics, mathematical natural science, to be knowable with objective validity, i.e., with a necessity which can be accepted by and is binding for everyone.

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.

Network theory confirms the view that information can take on 'a life of its own'. In the yeast network my colleagues found that 40 per cent of node pairs that are correlated via information transfer are not in fact physically connected; there is no direct chemical interaction. Conversely, about 35 per cent of node pairs transfer no information between them even though they are causally connected via a 'chemical wire' (edge). Patterns of information traversing the system may appear to be flowing down the 'wires' (along the edges of the graph) even when they are not. For some reason, 'correlation without causation' seems to be amplified in the biological case relative to random networks.

Just as it is by His goodness that God gives being to beings, so also it is by His goodness that He makes causes to be causes, thus delegating to them a certain participation in His actuality. Or rather, since causality flows from actuality, let us say that He confers the one in conferring the other, so that to the Christian mind the physical world in which we live offers a face which is the reverse of its physicism itself, a face where all that was read on the one side in terms of force, energy and law, is now read, on the other in terms of participations and analogies of the Divine Being. The Christian world takes on the character of a sacred world with a relation to God inscribed in its very being and every law that rules its functioning.

Suppose, by way of illustration, we isolate a relation between technological change and patterns of managerial organization in business firms. The expanding use of microchip technology, let us say, might be shown to be associated with a partial dissolution of more rigid forms of hierarchical authority. The ‘social force’ involved here is not like a force of nature. Causal generalizations in the social sciences always presume a typical ‘mix’ of intended and unintended consequence of action, on the basis of the rationalization of conduct, whether ‘carried’ on the level of discursive or of practical consciousness. Technological change is not something that occurs independently of the uses to which agents put technology, the characteristic modes of innovation, etc. It

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.

Hume begins by distinguishing seven kinds of philosophical relation: resemblance, identity, relations of time and place, proportion in quantity or number, degrees in any quality, contrariety, and causation. These, he says, may be divided into two kinds: those that depend only on the ideas, and those that can be changed without any change in the ideas. Of the first kind are resemblance, contrariety, degrees in quality, and proportions in quantity or number. But spatio-temporal and causal relations are of the second kind. Only relations of the first kind give certain knowledge; our knowledge concerning the others is only probable. Algebra and arithmetic are the only sciences in which we can carry on a long chain of reasoning without losing certainty. Geometry is not so certain as algebra and arithmetic, because we cannot be sure of the truth of its axioms. It is a mistake to suppose, as many philosophers do, that the ideas of mathematics 'must be comprehended by a pure and intellectual view, of which the superior faculties of the soul are alone capable'. The falsehood of this view is evident, says Hume, as soon as we remember that 'all our ideas are copied from our impressions'. The three relations that depend not only on ideas are identity, spatio-temporal relations, and causation. In the first two, the mind does not go beyond what is immediately present to the senses. (Spatio-temporal relations, Hume holds, can be perceived, and can form parts of impressions.) Causation alone enables us to infer some thing or occurrence from some other thing or occurrence: "'Tis only causation, which produces such a connexion, as to give us assurance from the existence or action of one object, that 'twas followed or preceded by any other existence or action.

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.

However, the many-instants interpretation puts an intriguingly different slant on causality, suggesting that it operates in nothing like the way we normally believe it to. In both classical physics and Everett's original scheme, what happens now is the consequence of the past. But with many instants, each Now 'competes' with all other Nows in a timeless beauty contest to win the highest probability. The ability of each Now to 'resonate' with the other Nows is what counts. Its chance to exist is determined by what it is in itself. The structure of things is the determining power in a timeless world. The same applies to us, for our conscious instants are embedded in the Nows. The probability of us experiencing ourselves doing something is just the sum of the probabilities for all the different Nows in which that experience is embedded. Everything we experience is brought into existence by being what it is. Our very nature determines whether we shall or shall not be. I find that consoling. We are because of what we are. our existence is determined by the way we relate to (or resonate with) everything else that can be. Although Darwinism is a marvellous theory, and I greatly admire and respect Richard Dawkins's writings, one day the theory of evolution will be subsumed in a greater scheme, just as Newtonian mechanics was subsumed in relativity without in any way ceasing to be great and valid science. For this reason, and for the remarks just made, I do not think that we are robots or that anything happens by chance. That view arises because we do not have a large enough perspective on things. We are the answers to the question of what can be maximally sensitive to the totality of what is possible. That is quite Darwinian. Species, ultimately genes, exist only if they fit in an environment. Platonia is the ultimate environment.

Nietzsche’s ‘theory of knowledge’ […] consists in the attempt to comprehend the categorical framework of the natural sciences (space, time, event), the concept of laws (causality), the operational axis of experience (measurement), and the rules of logic and calculation as the relative a priori of a world of objective illusion that has been produced for the purposes of mastering nature and of preserving existence: “the entire cognitive apparatus is an apparatus for abstraction and simplification—not directed at knowledge but at the control of things: ‘end’ and ‘means’ are as far from the essence as are ‘concepts.’” […] Nietzsche conceives science as the activity through which we turn ‘nature’ into concepts for the purpose of mastering nature. The compulsion to logical correctness and empirical accuracy exemplifies the constraint of the interest in possible technical control over objectified natural processes, and thereby the compulsion to preserving existence.

I regret that almost all novels ever written are much too obedient to the rules of unity of action. What I mean to say is that at their core is one single chain of causally related acts and events. These novels are like a narrow street along which someone drives his characters with a whip. Dramatic tension is the real curse of the novel, because it transforms everything, even the most beautiful pages, even the most surprising scenes and observations merely into steps leading to the final resolution, in which the meaning of everything that preceded is concentrated. The novel is consumed in the fire of its own tension like a bale of straw… Do you think that everything that is not a mad chase after a final resolution is a bore? As you eat this wonderful duck are you bored? Are you rushing towards a goal? On the contrary, you want the duck to enter into a slowly as possible and you never want its taste to end. A novel shouldn’t be like a bicycle race but a feast of many courses.

This is related to the phenomenon of the Professional Smile, a national pandemic in the service industry; and noplace in my experience have I been on the receiving end of as many Professional Smiles as I am on the Nadir, maître d’s, Chief Stewards, Hotel Managers’ minions, Cruise Director—their P.S.’s all come on like switches at my approach. But also back on land at banks, restaurants, airline ticket counters, on and on. You know this smile—the strenuous contraction of circumoral fascia w/ incomplete zygomatic involvement—the smile that doesn’t quite reach the smiler’s eyes and that signifies nothing more than a calculated attempt to advance the smiler’s own interests by pretending to like the smilee. Why do employers and supervisors force professional service people to broadcast the Professional Smile? Am I the only consumer in whom high doses of such a smile produce despair? Am I the only person who’s sure that the growing number of cases in which totally average-looking people suddenly open up with automatic weapons in shopping malls and insurance offices and medical complexes and McDonald’ses is somehow causally related to the fact that these venues are well-known dissemination-loci of the Professional Smile? Who do they think is fooled by the Professional Smile? And yet the Professional Smile’s absence now also causes despair. Anybody who’s ever bought a pack of gum in a Manhattan cigar store or asked for something to be stamped FRAGILE at a Chicago post office or tried to obtain a glass of water from a South Boston waitress knows well the soul-crushing effect of a service worker’s scowl, i.e. the humiliation and resentment of being denied the Professional Smile. And the Professional Smile has by now skewed even my resentment at the dreaded Professional Scowl: I walk away from the Manhattan tobacconist resenting not the counterman’s character or absence of goodwill but his lack of professionalism in denying me the Smile. What a fucking mess.

Whether it is a question of my body, the natural world, the past, birth or death, the question is always to know how I can be open to phenomena that transcend me and that, nevertheless, only exist to the extent that I take them up and live them, how the presence to myself that defines me and that conditions every external presence is simultaneously a depresentation and throws me outside of myself. Idealism, by making the exterior immanent in me, and realism, by subjecting me to a causal action, both falsify the relations of motivation that exist between the exterior and the interior and render this relation incomprehensible...On the level of being, we will never understand that the subject is simultaneously creating and created, and simultaneously infinite and finite. But if we uncover time beneath the subject, and if we reconnect the paradox of time to the paradoxes of the body, the world, the thing, and others, then we will understand that there is nothing more to understand.

As we have described, Dennett (1987) theorized that humans have evolved a mentalistic interpretational system that he calls the “intentional stance,” whose function is efficiently to predict and explain other people’s actions by inferring and attributing causal intentional mind states (such as beliefs, intentions, and desires) to them. This system implies an understanding that behavior can be caused by representational mental states that can be either true or false in relation to actual reality. Since intentional mind states (such as beliefs) are not directly visible, they need to be inferred from a variety of behavioral and situational cues that the interpreter needs to monitor constantly. The ability to mentalize, which can be seen as the central mechanism of “social (or mental) reality testing,” is therefore a developmental achievement that unfolds through the gradual sensitization to and learning about the mental significance of relevant expressive, behavioral, verbal, and situational cues that indicate the presence of mind states in persons.

As regards space, the modern view is that it is neither a substance, as Newton maintained, and as Leucippus and Democritus ought to have said, nor an adjective of extended bodies, as Descartes thought, but a system of relations, as Leibniz held. It is not by any means clear whether this view is compatible with the existence of the void. Perhaps, as a matter of abstract logic, it can be reconciled with the void. We might say that, between any two things, there is a certain greater or smaller distance, and that distance does not imply the existence of intermediate things. Such a point of view, however, would be impossible to utilize in modern physics. Since Einstein, distance is between events, not between things, and involves time as well as space. It is essentially a causal conception, and in modern physics there is no action at a distance. All this, however, is based upon empirical rather than logical grounds. Moreover the modern view cannot be stated except in terms of differential equations, and would therefore be unintelligible to the philosophers of antiquity.

When I come home from work and my dog rushes out to greet me, wagging his tail and jumping up and down, why exactly is it that I am so confident that he is conscious and indeed that there is a specific content to his consciousness, he is happy to see me? The usual answer given to this question is that because his behavior is so much like that of a happy person I can infer that he is a happy dog. But that seems to me a mistaken argument. To begin with, happy people do not in general wag their tails and try to lick my hands. Furthermore, and more importantly, someone might easily build a robot dog that would wag its tail and jump up and down without having any inner feelings whatever. What is so special about the real dog? I think the answer is that the basis on which I am confident that my dog is conscious and has a specific content to his consciousness is not simply that his behavior is appropriate, but that I can see that the causal underpinnings of the behavior are relatively similar to mine. He has a brain, a perceptual apparatus, and a bodily structure that are relevantly similar to my own: these are his eyes, these are his ears, this is his skin, there is his mouth. It is not just on the basis of his behavior that I conclude that he is conscious, but rather on the basis of the causal structure that mediates the relation between the input stimulus and the output behavior.

On his journey home from delivering his acceptance speech in Sweden the following summer, Einstein stopped in Copenhagen to see Bohr, who met him at the train station to take him home by streetcar. On the ride, they got into a debate. “We took the streetcar and talked so animatedly that we went much too far,” Bohr recalled. “We got off and traveled back, but again rode too far.” Neither seemed to mind, for the conversation was so engrossing. “We rode to and fro,” according to Bohr, “and I can well imagine what the people thought about us.”43 More than just a friendship, their relationship became an intellectual entanglement that began with divergent views about quantum mechanics but then expanded into related issues of science, knowledge, and philosophy. “In all the history of human thought, there is no greater dialogue than that which took place over the years between Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein about the meaning of the quantum,” says the physicist John Wheeler, who studied under Bohr. The social philosopher C. P. Snow went further. “No more profound intellectual debate has ever been conducted,” he proclaimed.44 Their dispute went to the fundamental heart of the design of the cosmos: Was there an objective reality that existed whether or not we could ever observe it? Were there laws that restored strict causality to phenomena that seemed inherently random? Was everything in the universe predetermined?

...the working classes—that motor of social transformation which Marx increasingly stipulated for the role of the proletariat; the dispossessed and alienated revolutionary vehicle of his early writings, which later became defined and analysed into the collective worker who 'owner' nothing but his labour power—chains rather than assets. In the event, the working class actually came to fulfill most of the optimistic prognoses of liberal thinkers; they have become largely 'socialized' through access to privilege, consumption, organization, and voting participation, as well as obtaining massive social benefits. They have become supporters of the status quo—not vociferous perhaps, but tacit approvers and beneficiaries none the less. The ferment today comes from sections of the community to whom political and social thought has never hitherto assigned any specific role; who have hitherto never developed specific political institutions of their own: youth, mostly students; racial minorities, a few dissident intellectuals—these form the new 'proletariat'. The basis of their dissatisfaction is not necessarily and always an objective level of deprivation but rather a mixture of relative deprivation—consciousness of possibilities and of the blockages which prevent their attainment—and above all an articulate dissatisfaction with the society around them. There is no good reason why such groups should not form, and act like, a proletariat in a perfectly Marxist sense. The economic causality collapses; the analysis of a decaying bourgeois society and the determination to overthrow it remain.

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

...Alas, this is simply an illusion. For how can it be possible to relate two or more observational experiences, even if they concern the relations between things that are perceived to be the same or similar, as falsifying (or confirming) each other, rather than merely neutrally record them as one experience here and one experience here, one repetitive of another or not, and leaving it at that (i.e., regarding them as logically incommensurable) unless one presupposed the existence of time-invariantly operating causes? Only if the existence of such time-invariantly operating causes could be assumed would there by any logically compelling reason to regard them as commensurable and as falsifying or confirming each other. However, Popper, like all empiricists, denies that any such assumption can be given an a priori defense (there are for him no such things as a priori true propositions about reality such as the causality principle would have to be) and is itself merely hypothetical. Yet clearly, if the possibility of constantly operating causes as such is only a hypothetical one, then it can hardly be claimed, as Popper does, that any particular predictive hypothesis could ever be falsified or confirmed. For then the falsification (or confirmation) would have to be considered a hypothetical one: any predictive hypothesis would only under go tests whose status as tests were themselves hypothetical. And hence one would be right back in the muddy midst of skepticism. Only if the causality principle as such could be unconditionally established as true, could any particular causal hypothesis ever be testable, and the outcome of a test provide rational grounds for deciding whether or not to uphold a given hypothesis.

One can even alter, confuse, or interfere with particular conscious states by intruding upon the activities of the brain, chemically, surgically, traumatically, or otherwise; but one can never enter into, let alone measure, the persistent and irreducibly private perspective of the subject in whom these states inhere. This should be obvious, even to the most committed believer in empirical method, but its implications often prove strangely difficult to grasp (perhaps they are altogether too obvious): there is an absolute qualitative abyss between the objective facts of neurophysiology and the subjective experience of being a conscious self, and so a method capable of providing a model of only the former can never produce an adequate causal narrative of the latter. While one may choose to believe that the brain’s objectively observable electrochemical processes and the mind’s subjective, impenetrably private experiences are simply two sides of a single, wholly physical phenomenon, there is still no empirical way in which the two sides can be collapsed into a single observable datum, or even connected to one another in a clear causal sequence. The purely physical nature of those experiences remains, therefore, only a conjecture, and one that lacks even the support of a plausible analogy to some other physical process, as there is no other “mechanism” in nature remotely similar to consciousness. The difference in kind between the material structure of the brain and the subjective structure of consciousness remains fixed and inviolable, and so the precise relation between them cannot be defined, or even isolated as an object of scientific scrutiny. And this is an epistemological limit that it seems reasonable to think may never be erased, no matter how sophisticated our knowledge of the complex activities of the brain may become;

That such a surprisingly powerful philosophical method was taken seriously can be only partially explained by the backwardness of German natural science in those days. For the truth is, I think, that it was not at first taken really seriously by serious men (such as Schopenhauer, or J. F. Fries), not at any rate by those scientists who, like Democritus2, ‘would rather find a single causal law than be the king of Persia’. Hegel’s fame was made by those who prefer a quick initiation into the deeper secrets of this world to the laborious technicalities of a science which, after all, may only disappoint them by its lack of power to unveil all mysteries. For they soon found out that nothing could be applied with such ease to any problem whatsoever, and at the same time with such impressive (though only apparent) difficulty, and with such quick and sure but imposing success, nothing could be used as cheaply and with so little scientific training and knowledge, and nothing would give such a spectacular scientific air, as did Hegelian dialectics, the mystery method that replaced ‘barren formal logic’. Hegel’s success was the beginning of the ‘age of dishonesty’ (as Schopenhauer3 described the period of German Idealism) and of the ‘age of irresponsibility’ (as K. Heiden characterizes the age of modern totalitarianism); first of intellectual, and later, as one of its consequences, of moral irresponsibility; of a new age controlled by the magic of high-sounding words, and by the power of jargon. In order to discourage the reader beforehand from taking Hegel’s bombastic and mystifying cant too seriously, I shall quote some of the amazing details which he discovered about sound, and especially about the relations between sound and heat. I have tried hard to translate this gibberish from Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature4 as faithfully as possible; he writes: ‘§302. Sound is the change in the specific condition of segregation of the material parts, and in the negation of this condition;—merely an abstract or an ideal ideality, as it were, of that specification. But this change, accordingly, is itself immediately the negation of the material specific subsistence; which is, therefore, real ideality of specific gravity and cohesion, i.e.—heat. The heating up of sounding bodies, just as of beaten or rubbed ones, is the appearance of heat, originating conceptually together with sound.’ There are some who still believe in Hegel’s sincerity, or who still doubt whether his secret might not be profundity, fullness of thought, rather than emptiness. I should like them to read carefully the last sentence—the only intelligible one—of this quotation, because in this sentence, Hegel gives himself away. For clearly it means nothing but: ‘The heating up of sounding bodies … is heat … together with sound.’ The question arises whether Hegel deceived himself, hypnotized by his own inspiring jargon, or whether he boldly set out to deceive and bewitch others. I am satisfied that the latter was the case, especially in view of what Hegel wrote in one of his letters. In this letter, dated a few years before the publication of his Philosophy of Nature, Hegel referred to another Philosophy of Nature, written by his former friend Schelling: ‘I have had too much to do … with mathematics … differential calculus, chemistry’, Hegel boasts in this letter (but this is just bluff), ‘to let myself be taken in by the humbug of the Philosophy of Nature, by this philosophizing without knowledge of fact … and by the treatment of mere fancies, even imbecile fancies, as ideas.’ This is a very fair characterization of Schelling’s method, that is to say, of that audacious way of bluffing which Hegel himself copied, or rather aggravated, as soon as he realized that, if it reached its proper audience, it meant success.

In Leibniz we can already find the striking observation that *cogitatur ergo est* is no less evident than *cogito ergo sum*. Naturally, *est* here does not mean existence or reality but being of whatever kind and form, including even ideal being, fictive being, conscious-being [*Bewusst-Sein*], etc. However, we must go even beyond this thesis of Leibniz. The correlate of the act of *cogitatio* is not, as Leibniz said, being simply, but only that type of being we call "objectifiable being." Objectifiable being must be sharply distinguished from the non-objectifiable being of an act, that is, from a kind of entity which possesses its mode of being only in performance [*Vollzug*], namely, in the performance of the act. "Being," in the widest sense of the word, belongs indeed to the being-of-an-act [*Akt-Sein*], to *cogitare*, which does not in turn require another *cogitare*. Similarly, we are only vaguely "aware" of our drives [*Triebleben*] without having them as objects as we do those elements of consciousness which lend themselves to imagery. For this reason the first order of evidence is expressed in the principle, "There is something," or, better, "There is not nothing." Here we understand by the word "nothing" the negative state of affairs of not-being in general rather than "not being something" or "not being actual." A second principle of evidence is that everything which "is" in any sense of the possible kinds of being can be analyzed in terms of its character or essence (not yet separating its contingent characteristics from its genuine essence) and its existence in some mode. With these two principles we are in a position to define precisely the concept of knowledge, a concept which is prior even to that of consciousness. Knowledge is an ultimate, unique, and underivable ontological relationship between two beings. I mean by this that any being A "knows" any being B whenever A participates in the essence or nature of B, without B's suffering any alteration in its nature or essence because of A's participation in it. Such participation is possible both in the case of objectifiable being and in that of active [*akthaften*] being, for instance, when we repeat the performance of the act; or in feelings, when we relive the feelings, etc. The concept of participation is, therefore, wider than that of objective knowledge, that is, knowledge of objectifiable being. The participation which is in question here can never be dissolved into a causal relation, or one of sameness and similarity, or one of sign and signification; it is an ultimate and essential relation of a peculiar type. We say further of B that, when A participates in B and B belongs to the order of objectifiable being, B becomes an "objective being" ["*Gegenstand"-sein*]. Confusing the being of an object [*Sein des Gegenstandes*] with the fact that an entity is an object [*Gegenstandssein eines Seienden*] is one of the fundamental errors of idealism. On the contrary, the being of B, in the sense of a mode of reality, never enters into the knowledge-relation. The being of B can never stand to the real bearer of knowledge in any but a causal relation. The *ens reale* remains, therefore, outside of every possible knowledge-relation, not only the human but also the divine, if such exists. Both the concept of the "intentional act" and that of the "subject" of this act, an "I" which performs acts, are logically posterior. The intentional act is to be defined as the process of becoming [*Werdesein*] in A through which A participates in the nature or essence of B, or that through which this participation is produced. To this extent the Scholastics were right to begin with the distinction between an *ens intentionale* and an *ens reale*, and then, on the basis of this distinction, to distinguish between an intentional act and a real relation between the knower and the being of the thing known." ―from_Idealism and Realism_

Correlation and causality. Why is it that throughout the animal kingdom and in every human culture, males account for most aggression and violence? Well, what about testosterone and some related hormones, collectively called androgens, a term that unless otherwise noted, I will use simplistically as synonymous with testosterone. In nearly all species, males have more circulating testosterone than do females, who secrete small amounts of androgens from the adrenal glands. Moreover, male aggression is most prevalent when testosterone levels are highest; adolescence and during mating season in seasonal breeders. Thus, testosterone and aggression are linked. Furthermore, there are particularly high levels of testosterone receptors in the amygdala, in the way station by which it projects to the rest of the brain, the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis, and in its major targets, the hypothalamus, the central gray of the mid-brain, and the frontal cortex. But these are merely correlative data. Showing that testosterone causes aggression requires a subtraction plus a replacement experiment. Subtraction, castrate a male: do levels of aggression decrease? Yes, including in humans. This shows that something coming from the testes causes aggression. Is it testosterone? Replacement: give that castrated individual replacement testosterone. Do pre-castration levels of aggression return? Yes, including in humans, thus testosterone causes aggression. Time to see how wrong that is. The first hint of a complication comes after castration. When average levels of aggression plummet in every species, but crucially, not to zero, well, maybe the castration wasn't perfect, you missed some bits of testes, or maybe enough of the minor adrenal androgens are secreted to maintain the aggression. But no, even when testosterone and androgens are completely eliminated, some aggression remains, thus some male aggression is testosterone independent. This point is driven home by castration of some sexual offenders, a legal procedure in a few states. This is accomplished with chemical castration, administration of drugs that either inhibit testosterone production or block testosterone receptors. Castration decreases sexual urges in the subset of sex offenders with intense, obsessive, and pathological urges. But otherwise, castration doesn't decrease recidivism rates as stated in one meta-analysis. Hostile rapists and those who commit sex crimes motivated by power or anger are not amenable to treatment with the anti-androgenic drugs. This leads to a hugely informative point. The more experience the male had being aggressive prior to castration, the more aggression continues afterward. In otherwise, the less his being aggressive in the future requires testosterone and the more it's a function of social learning.

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.

All this shows a very mediocre idea of oneself - always imputing misfortune to some objective cause. Once it has been exorcized by causes, misfortune is no longer a problem: it becomes susceptible of a causal solution and, above all, it originates elsewhere - in original sin, in history, in the social order, or in natural perversion. In short, it originates in an objectivity into which we exile it the better to be rid of it. Once again, this bespeaks very little pride and self-respect. In the past, what struck you down was your destiny, your personal fatum. You didn't look for some 'objective' cause of this or some attenuating circumstance, which would amount to saying we have no part in what happens to us. There is something humiliating in that. The intelligence of evil begins with the hypothesis that our ills come to us from an evil genius that is our own. Let us be worthy of our 'perversity' of our evil genius, let us measure up to our tragic involvement in what happens to us (including good fortune). In a word, let us not be imbeciles, for imbecility in the literal sense lies in the superficial reference to misfortune and exemption from evil. This is how we make imbeciles of the victims themselves, by confining them to their condition of victim. And by the compassion we show them we engage in a kind of false advertising for them. We take no account of what degree of choice and defiance, of connivence with oneself, of - unconscious or quasi-deliberate - provocative relation to evil there may be in AIDS, in drug-taking, in suffering and alienation, in voluntary servitude - in this acting-out in the fatal zone. It is the same with suicide, which is always ascribed to depressive motivations with no account taken of an originality of, an original will to commit, the act itself (Canetti speaks in the same way of the interpretation of dreams as a violence done to dreams that takes no account of their literalness). So, the understanding of misfortune is everywhere substituted for the intelligence of evil. Now, unlike the former, this latter rests on the rejection of the presumption of innocence. By contrast with that understanding, we are all presumptive wrongdoers - but not responsible ones, for, in the last instance, we do not have to answer for ourselves - that is the business of destiny or of the divinity. For the act we commit, it is right we should be dealt with - and indeed punished - accordingly. We are never innocent of that act in the sense of having nothing to do with it or being victims of it. But this does not mean we are answerable for it either, as that would suppose we were answerable for ourselves, that we were invested with total power over ourselves, which is a subjective illusion. It's a good thing we don't possess that power or that responsibility. A good thing we are not the causes of ourselves - that at least confers some degree of innocence on us. For the rest, we are forever complicit in what we do, even if we are not answerable to anyone. So we are both irresponsible and without excuses. Never explain, never complain.

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.

Empiricism is not just an empirical method but also a theory of experience. Essentially, it conceives of human beings as passive and sense perception as providing replicas or copies of reality that are based on association. As key proponents of empiricism, Piaget identified Hume, Locke, and behaviorist stimulus-response theories, but he also thought that empiricism is trenchant in psychology (and, one might add, even today, see Müller & Giesbrecht, 2008). According to Piaget, empiricists misconstrue the fundamentally active relation between infant and environment as a passive, causal relation: “Even before language begins, the young infant reacts to objects not by a mechanical set of stimulus-response associations but by an integrative assimilation to schemes of action, which impress a direction on his activities and include the satisfaction of a need or an interest” (Piaget, 1965/1971, p. 131; see also OI, p. 411). Furthermore, Piaget (1970) rejected the idea that knowledge is a copy of reality. Rather, he was influenced by Kant's (1787/1929) idea that objectivity is constituted by the subject (see Chapter 3, this volume). Kant argued that our intuition (i.e., sensibility) and understanding use a priori (i.e., independent of all experience) forms and categories, which are the condition of the possibility for experiencing objectivity. Piaget subscribed to the ordering and organizing function of the mind, but he believed that the forms and categories are not a priori but undergo development as a result of the subject's interaction with the world (OI, pp. 376–395).

Claude Monet's Water Lilies (The Clouds) consists of nothing more than dabs of different colored paint on a canvas.14 But because of the particular arrangement of those dabs of paint, Monet has produced not simply a piece of canvas with dabs of paint on it. Monet has produced for us a painting, a unique picture, a cognitively recognizable and culturally meaningful representation of a reality, a new entity with its own characteristics and capacities to cause effects in the world. One of the emergent causal capacities of those particularly arranged dabs of paint is the ability to evoke certain emotions in people who view the painting, such as warmth or serenity. Neither the recognizable and meaningful picture nor the capacity to evoke emotions is present in the dabs of paint totaled up. It is through Monet's particular relational arrangement of those paint dabs that a unique picture emerges possessing particular characteristics and capacities that can cause experiences in observers. To say that Monet's Water Lilies (The Clouds) is reducible to many dabs of colored paint on a canvas would be to say that all of the characteristics and capacities we observe in the painting are present in the sum total of all the dabs of paint and the piece of canvas. To say that about this painting would be to make oneself a reductionist in relation to it. And to do this would be misguided.

The most common accident causality models assume that accidents are caused by component failure and that making system components highly reliable or planning for their failure will prevent accidents. While this assumption is true in the relatively simple electromechanical systems of the past, it is no longer true for the types of complex sociotechnical systems we are building today.

Modern economics, by which I mean the style of economics taught and practised in today's leading universities, likes to start the enquiries from the ground up: from individuals, through the household, village, district, state, country, to the whole world. In various degrees, the millions of individual decisions shape the eventualities people face; as both theory, common sense, and evidence tell us that there are enormous numbers of consequences of what we all do. Some of these consequences have been intended, but many are unintended. There is, however, a feedback, in that those consequences in turn go to shape what people subsequently can do and choose to do. When Becky's family drive their cars or use electricity, or when Desta's family create compost or burn wood for cooking, they add to global carbon emissions. Their contributions are no doubt negligible, but the millions of such tiny contributions sum to a sizeable amount, having consequences that people everywhere are likely to experience in different ways. It can be that the feedbacks are positive, so that the whole contribution is greater than the sum of the parts. Strikingly, unintended consequences can include emergent features, such as market prices, at which the demand for goods more or less equals their supply. Earlier, I gave a description of Becky's and Desta's lives. Understanding their lives involves a lot more; it requires analysis, which usually calls for further description. To conduct an analysis, we need first of all to identify the material prospects the girls' households face - now and in the future, under uncertain contingencies. Second, we need to uncover the character of their choices and the pathways by which the choices made by millions of households like Becky's and Desta's go to produce the prospects they all face. Third, and relatedly, we need to uncover the pathways by which the families came to inherit their current circumstances. These amount to a tall, even forbidding, order. Moreover, there is a thought that can haunt us: since everything probably affects everything else, how can we ever make sense of the social world? If we are weighed down by that worry, though, we won't ever make progress. Every discipline that I am familiar with draws caricatures of the world in order to make sense of it. The modern economist does this by building models, which are deliberately stripped down representations of the phenomena out there. When I say 'stripped down', I really mean stripped down. It isn't uncommon among us economists to focus on one or two causal factors, exclude everything else, hoping that this will enable us to understand how just those aspects of reality work and interact. The economist John Maynard Keynes described our subject thus: 'Economics is a science of thinking in terms of models joined to the art of choosing models which are relevant to the contemporary world.

Finally, in terms of overall spiritual intelligence—which we have been briefly tracking—on the other side of the leading edge of evolution we have 3 or 4 higher, at this point mostly potential, levels of development, including levels of spiritual intelligence. Individually, their basic strcture-rungs are referred to as para-mind, meta-mind, overmind, and supermind; collectively, they are called 3rd tier. What all 3rd-tier structures have in common is some degree of direct transpersonal identity and experience. Further, each 3rd-tier structure of consciousness is integrated, in some fashion, with a particular state of consciousness (often, para-mental with the gross, meta-mental with subtle, overmind with causal/Witnessing, and supermind with nondual, although this varies with each individual’s actual history). Previously, in 1sst and 2nd tier, structures and states were relatively independent. One could have a state center of gravity at gross and yet structurally evolve all the way to Integral without fully objectifying the gross stage (i.e., fully making it an object, fully transcending it). But beginning with the 3rd-tier para-mind, whenever you experience that structure, you also implicitly or intuitively understand or experience the gross realm as objectified, which means that state is intimately connected to the structure at this level, which gives rise, or can give rise, to expanded states such as nature mysticism (this can be experienced at earlier levels but not inherently, and is interpreted according to the Views of those lower levels; but at this level becomes an inherent potential). Likewise, because of the conjunction with the gross state, this level often carries variations of the realization that the physical world is not merely physical, but is rather psychophysical in its true nature. This can also evoke flashes of higher state presences, such as Witnessing states or even nondual. And so on with the subtle state and meta-mind; causal/Witnessing and overmind; and nondual Suchness and supermind. Those states are all “minimally” connected to those structures, in the sesne that, for example, a person at meta-mind might have already and previously moved his or her state center of gravity to subtle, but if not, the person cannot proceed beyond the meta-mind without doing so at this point. And likewise with causal/Witnessing and overmind; and nondual Suchness and supermind.

Between state building and economic growth Having a state is a basic precondition for intensive economic growth. The economist Paul Collier has demonstrated the converse of this proposition, namely, that state breakdown, civil war, and interstate conflict have very negative consequences for growth.20 A great deal of Africa’s poverty in the late twentieth century was related to the fact that states there were very weak and subject to constant breakdown and instability. Beyond the establishment of a state that can provide for basic order, greater administrative capacity is also strongly correlated with economic growth. This is particularly true at low absolute levels of per capita GDP (less than $1,000); while it remains important at higher levels of income, the impact may not be proportionate. There is also a large literature linking good governance to economic growth, though the definition of “good governance” is not well established and, depending on the author, sometimes includes all three components of political development.21 While the correlation between a strong, coherent state and economic growth is well established, the direction of causality is not always clear. The economist Jeffrey Sachs has maintained that good governance is endogenous: it is the product of economic growth rather than a cause of it.22 There is a good logic to this: government costs money. One of the reasons why there is so much corruption in poor countries is that they cannot afford to pay their civil servants adequate salaries to feed their families, so they are inclined to take bribes. Per capita spending on all government services, from armies and roads to schools and police on the street, was about $17,000 in the United States in 2008 but only $19 in Afghanistan.23 It is therefore not a surprise that the Afghan state is much weaker than the American one, or that large flows of aid money generate corruption.

It is possible, for instance, to spend a great deal of time proving the existence of a pure and true causal relation while forgetting that the question itself is of limited interest. The new methods often lead to a neglect of history and of the fact that historical experience remains our principal source of knowledge.

Perhaps the public would be better served by reframing the issue of media violence in terms of public health, where we seldom speak of causality (even with smoking and lung cancer) because of the variability among individuals and the nature of their exposures, but rather of alterations in “relative risk.

We should not imagine that this means our fate is fixed by our planets, however. Even though each vital organ corresponds to a planet—the liver to Jupiter, the brain to the moon, the heart to the sun, the spleen to Saturn, the lungs to Mercury, the gallbladder to Mars, and the kidneys to Venus—yet the one is not governed by the other: "Saturn has nothing to do with the spleen, nor the spleen anything to do with Saturn." Rather, these correspondences are simply a manifestation of the cosmic mirror that makes man a microcosm of the universal macrocosm. The two are analogs but are not causally related. From a scale model of a building you can read the proportions and relationships of the building itself, but crushing the former does not raze the latter.

Man as an individualised soul is essentially causal-bodied,” my guru explained. “That body is a matrix of the thirty-five ideas required by God as the basic or causal thought forces from which He later formed the subtle astral body of nineteen elements and the gross physical body of sixteen elements. “The nineteen elements of the astral body are mental, emotional, and lifetronic. The nineteen components are intelligence; ego; feeling; mind (sense-consciousness); five instruments of knowledge, the subtle counterparts of the senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch; five instruments of action, the mental correspondence for the executive abilities to procreate, excrete, talk, walk, and exercise manual skill; and five instruments of life force, those empowered to perform the crystallising, assimilating, eliminating, metabolising, and circulating functions of the body. This subtle astral encasement of nineteen elements survives the death of the physical body, which is made of sixteen gross chemical elements. “God thought out different ideas within Himself and projected them into dreams. Lady Cosmic Dream thus sprang out decorated in all her colossal endless ornaments of relativity. “In thirty-five thought categories of the causal body, God elaborated all the complexities of man’s nineteen astral and sixteen physical counterparts. By condensation of vibratory forces, first subtle, then gross, He produced man’s astral body and finally his physical form. According to the law of relativity, by which the Prime Simplicity has become the bewildering manifold, the causal cosmos and causal body are different from the astral cosmos and astral body; the physical cosmos and physical body are likewise characteristically at variance with the other forms of creation. “The fleshly body is made of the fixed, objectified dreams of the Creator. The dualities are ever present on earth: disease and health, pain and pleasure, loss and gain.

In succeeding chapters we will explore the emerging evidence that matter alone does not suffice to generate mind, but that, to the contrary, there exists a "mental force" that is not reducible to the material. Mental force, which is closely related to the ancient Buddhist concepts of mindfulness and karma, provides a basis for the effects of mind on matter that clinical neuroscience finds. What is new here is that a question with deep philosophical roots, as well as profound philosophic al and moral implications, can finally be addressed (if not yet fully solved) through science. If materialism can be challenged in the context of neuroscience, if stark physical reductionism can be replaced by an outlook in which the mind can exert causal control, then, for the first time since the scientific revolution, the scientific worldview will become compatible with such ideas as will-and, therefore, with morality and ethics. The emerging view of the mind, and of the mind-matter enigma, has the potential to imbue human thought and action with responsibility once again.

The foregoing remarks illustrate the fact that the 'tilting' of light cones, i.e. the distortion of causality, due to gravity, is not only a subtle phenomenon, but a real phenomenon, and it cannot be explained away by a residual or 'emergent' property that arises when conglomerations of matter get large enough. Gravity has its own unique character among physical processes, not directly discernible at the level of the forces that are important for fundamental particles, but nevertheless it is there all the time. Nothing in known physics other than gravity can tilt the light cones, so gravity is something that is simply different from all other known forces and physical influences, in this very basic respect. According to classical general relativity theory, there must indeed be an absolutely minute amount of light-cone tilting resulting from the material in the tiniest speck of dust. Even individual electrons must tilt the light cones. But the amount of tilting in such objects is far too ridiculously tiny to have any directly noticeable effect whatsoever.

If there is to be a resolution to the mystery of how mind relates to matter, it will emerge from explaining the data of the human brain in terms of these laws-laws capable of giving rise to a very different view of the causal efficacy of human consciousness. Quantum mechanics makes it feasible to describe a mind capable of exerting effects that neurons alone cannot.

Although both men and women philander, get jealous, mate-guard, and mate-poach, in the context of expanding women’s reproductive rights and men’s attempt to restrict them, male jealousy and mate guarding—whether through vigilance or violence—are strong causal factors. (Studies show, for example, that in the United States more than twice as many women were shot and killed by their husband or intimate acquaintance than were murdered by strangers using guns, knives, or any other means,47 and that women make up the majority of victims of intimate partner/family-related homicides.48)

Precepts" refers to moral deportment, the deep meaning of the sutras, and the signification of good, and segregating oneself from accepting impure things and from all causal relations with impure things. Also, the precepts segregate one from such as the four grave offences, the thirteen samghavasesas, two aniyatans, thirty naihsargika-prayascittikas, ninety-one payatikas, four desaniyas, siksakaraniya, seven ways of adhikaranasamatha, etc.

Perceived causality is evidently not that of the scientist (i.e. the relation of a function to certain variables), but rather a productive and quasi-magical causality.

Beneath the explicit acts by which I posit and object out in front of myself, in a definite relation with other objects and with definite characteristics that can be observed, beneath, then, perceptions properly so-called, there is, sustaining them, a deeper function without which perceived objects would lack the mark of reality, as it is missing for the schizophrenic, and by which the objects begin to count or to have value for us. This is the movement that carries us beyond subjectivity, that places us in the world prior to every science and every verification through a sort of 'faith,' or 'primordial opinion'--or that, on the contrary, becomes bogged down in our private appearances. In this domain of originary opinion, hallucinatory illusion is possible even though hallucination is never perception...because here we are still within pre-predicative being, and because the connection between appearance and total experiences is merely implicit and presumptive, even in the case of true perception...The world remains the vague place of all experiences. It accommodates, pell-mell, true objects as well as individual and fleeting fantasies--because it is an individual that encompasses everything and not a collection of objects linked together through causal relations. To have hallucinations and, in general, to imagine is to exploit this tolerance of the pre-predicative world as well as our vertiginous proximity to all of being in syncretic experience. Thus, we only succeed in giving an account of the hallucinatory deception by stripping perception of its apodictic certainty and perceptual consciousness of its full self-possession...The perceived is and remains, despite all critical training, beneath the level of doubt and demonstration. The sun 'rises' for the scientist just as much as it does for the uneducated person, and our scientific representations of the solar system remain merely so many rumors, like the lunar landscapes--we never believe in them in the sense in which we believe in the rising of the sun. The rising of the sun, and the perceived in general, is 'real'--we immediately assign it to the world. Each perception, although always potentially 'crossed out' and pushed over to the realm of illusions, only disappears in order to leave a place for another perception that corrects it. Of course, each thing can, apres coup, appear uncertain, but at least it is certain for us that there are things, that is, that there is a world. To wonder if the world is real is to fail to understand what one is saying, since the world is not a sum of things that one could always cast into doubt, but precisely the inexhaustible reservoir from which things are drawn...Correlatively, we must surely deny perceptual consciousness full self-possession and the immanence that would exclude every illusion. If hallucinations are to be possible, consciousness must at some moment cease to know what it does, otherwise it would be conscious of constituting an illusion, it would no longer adhere to it, and there would thus be no more illusion...It is simply necessary that the self-coincidence with myself, such as it is established in the cogito, must never be a real coincidence, and must merely be an intentional and presumptive coincidence. In fact a thickness of duration already intervenes between myself who has just had this thought and myself who thinks that I have just had this thought, and I can always doubt whether that thought, which has already gone by, was really as I currently see it...But my confidence in reflection ultimately comes down to taking up the fact of temporality and the fact of the world as the invariable frame of every illusion and of every disillusion: I only know myself in my inherence in the world and in time; I only know myself in ambiguity.

As in his analogy, the reason that apparently different particles, separated in space and with no possible proximate influence, can seem nonetheless to be causally related is be- cause they are in reality the same object “projected” by a higher-dimensional space.

In the early phases of change, Westernization thus promotes modernization. In the later phases, modernization promotes de-Westernization and the resurgence of indigenous culture in two ways. At the societal level, modernization enhances the economic, military, and political power of the society as a whole and encourages the people of that society to have confidence in their culture and to become culturally assertive. At the individual level, modernization generates feelings of alienation and anomie as traditional bonds and social relations are broken and leads to crises of identity to which religion provides an answer. This causal flow is set forth in simple form in Figure 3.2.

Let’s follow the causal chain I’ve been linking together: the spread of a religious belief that every individual should read the Bible for themselves led to the diffusion of widespread literacy among both men and women, first in Europe and later across the globe. Broad-based literacy changed people’s brains and altered their cognitive abilities in domains related to memory, visual processing, facial recognition, numerical exactness, and problem-solving. It probably also indirectly altered family sizes, child health, and cognitive development, as mothers became increasingly literate and formally educated. These psychological and social changes may have fostered speedier innovation, new institutions, and—in the long run—greater economic prosperity.25

In the theory of nerve functioning everything happens as if we were obliged to submit to the alternative of anthropomorphism or the anatomical conception of the reflex, when perhaps it is necessary to go beyond it. Before any systematic interpretation, the description of the known facts shows that the fate of an excitation is determined by its relation to the whole of the organic state and to the simultaneous or preceding excitations, and that the relations between the organism and its milieu are not relations of linear causality but of circular causality,

Nonetheless, this falsely reversed causality has been the prevalent way in which creativity and originality have been identified in the modern era; for instance in the visual arts since the era of Dadaism about a century ago.31 In avant garde circles, successfully provoking outrage (especially among ‘respectable’ people and the religious) has usually been regarded as sufficient evidence of originality, hence genius – leading to the ludicrous situation in which artistically-talentless confidence tricksters and public relations manipulators have successfully passed themselves off as artistic geniuses, and for three or four generations have dominated the professional world of Art.

Ask your client to recall a time that he or she was able to successfully manage a time of transition or change—a time that he or she was able to “bounce back” from adversity or “survive in a changing world.” Together with your client, create a “causal loop map” of this ‘story of change’ by going through the following steps: 1.While the client is speaking, note down 7-10 key words from the story or example on a piece of paper. Key words may be of any type: behaviors, people, beliefs, values, phenomena, etc. 2.Draw arrows connecting the key words which illustrate the influences between key words and capture the flow of the story. (The arrows should be in the form of an arc or semi-circle rather than a straight line.) A positive or strengthening influence can be indicated by adding a (+) under the arrow. Negative or weakening influences can be shown by placing a (-) under the arrow. 3.When your client has finished telling his or her story, go over your initial map, checking the key words and giving him or her the chance to edit them, or add other key words you may have missed. Also review and check the links you have drawn between the key words. 4.Make sure that you have “closed” feedback loops (as a rule of thumb all key words should have at least one arrow going from them, and another arrow pointing to them). 5.Refine the map by considering the delays that may be involved between links, and searching for other missing links that may be an important part of the story. 6.Find out what beliefs are behind the map (what assumptions do these links presuppose?). Frequently, you will find that managing change involves several loops relating to the how (the steps and strategies involve), the why (the beliefs, values and motivation related to the change) and who (the role and identity issues).

EVOLUTION, ALTRUISM AND GENETIC SIMILARITY THEORY by J. PHILIPPE RUSHTON The reason people give preferential treatment to genetically similar others is both simple and profound: they thereby replicate their genes more effectively. Altruism is a very interesting phenomenon, even recognized by Darwin as an anomaly for his theory. How could it evolve through his hypothesized "survival of the fittest" individual when such behavior would appear to diminish personal fitness? If the most altruistic members of a group sacrificed themselves for others, they ran the risk of leaving fewer offspring to carry forward their genes for altruistic behavior? Hence altruism would be selected out, and indeed, selfishness would be selected in. Altruistic behaviors, however, occur in many animal species, some to the point of self-sacrifice (Wilson, 1975). For example, honey bees die when they sting in the process of protecting their nests. Darwin proposed the competition of "tribe with tribe" to explain altruism (1871, p. 179). Thus, a tribe of people willing to cooperate and, if necessary, sacrifice themselves for the common good would be victorious over tribes made up of those less willing or able. Subsequently Herbert Spencer (1892/93) extended this, suggesting that the operation of a 'code of amity' towards the members of their own group, and a 'code of enmity' toward those of out-groups prevailed in successful groups. In non-elaborated forms, some version of "group-selection" was held by most evolutionists for several decades. A degree of polarization followed [Wynne-Edwards' advocacy of group selection] As D. S. Wilson put it, "For the next decade, group selection rivaled Lamarkianism as the most thoroughly repudiated idea in evolutionary theory" Essentially, there did not seem to exist a mechanism by which altruistic individuals would leave more genes than individuals who cheated. The solution to this paradox is one of the triumphs that led to the new synthesis of sociobiology. Following Hamilton (1964) the answer proposed was that individuals behave so as to maximize their "inclusive fitness" rather than only their individual fitness by increasing the production of successful offspring by both themselves and their relatives, a process that has become known as kin selection. This formulation provided a conceptual breakthrough, redirecting the unit of analysis from the individual organism to his or her genes, for it is these which survive and are passed on. Some of the same genes will be found in siblings, nephews and nieces, grandchildren, cousins, etc., as well as offspring. If an animal sacrifices its life for its siblings' offspring, it ensures the survival of shared genes for, by common descent, it shares 50% of its genes with each sibling and 25% with each siblings' offspring. …the makeup of a gene pool causally affects the probability of any particular ideology being adopted, which subsequently affects relative gene frequencies. Religious, political, and other ideological battles may become as heated as they do because they have implications for genetic fitness; genotypes will thrive more in some cultures than others. … Obviously causation is complex, and it is not intended to reduce relationships between ethnic groups to a single cause. Fellow ethnics will not always stick together, nor is conflict inevitable between groups any more than it is between genetically distinct individuals. Behavioral outcomes are always mediated by multiple causes.

For the same reason that apples grow in northern Europe, where people drink cider, and grapes grow in the south, where people drink wine; or that I was born where people happen to speak my native language; or that the sun which warms us is at the right distance from us—not too close and not too far away. In all these cases, the “strange” coincidence arises from confusing the causal relations: it isn’t that apples grow where people drink cider, it is that people drink cider where apples grow. Put this way, there is no longer anything strange about it.

Racial discriminationracist ideasignorance/hate: this is the causal relationship driving America’s history of race relations.

In other words, questions about the validity of your ministry, your ability to do ministry, or who you are in ministry all have a causal point that has little to do with those specific questions, or is only tangentially related; the stated questions have more to do with unnamed and unexamined assumptions and expectations than the issue named on the surface. Being able to identify this underlying matter when addressing a superficial issue as presented is an important strategy for success. If you spend your time and energy tending the manifesting topic rather than the fundamental concern, this will be a significant cause, at best, for fatigue in your ministry and, at worst, for burnout. Managing the indications without addressing their root cause will also lead to a personal sense of loss—and likely an actual loss—of your own power.

The entire notion of biography is grounded in the arbitrary ascription of a causal relation between specified traits and subsequent events. Now

One might think that as a country almost always involved in a military operation of one kind or another, the United States would be accustomed to and prepared for injured soldiers coming home. Yet this is not the case. Conflicts during the twenty years prior to Iraq (Grenada, the Gulf War, Somalia, and the Balkans) produced relatively few US causalities and thus never stressed the home front medical system as the current war has. Not since the Vietnam War has Walter Reed seen thousands of returning wounded soldiers, some needing months, if not years, of medical care.8

Science and philosophy have for centuries been sustained by unquestioning faith in perception. Perception opens a window on to things. This means that it is directed, quasi-teleologically, towards a *truth in itself* in which the reason underlying all appearances is to be found. The tacit thesis of perception is that at every instant experience can be co-ordinated with that of the previous instant and that of the following, and my perspective with that of other consciousnesses—that all contradictions can be removed, that monadic and intersubjective experience is one unbroken text—that what is now indeterminate for me could become determinate for a more complete knowledge, which is as it were realized in advance in the thing, or rather which is the thing itself. Science has first been merely the sequel or amplification of the process which constitutes perceived things. Just as the thing is the invariant of all sensory fields and of all individual perceptual fields, so the scientific concept is the means of fixing and objectifying phenomena. Science defined a theoretical state of bodies not subject to the action of any force, and *ipso facto* defined force, reconstituting with the aid of these ideal components the processes actually observed. It established statistically the chemical properties of pure bodies, deducing from these those of empirical bodies, and seeming thus to hold the plan of creation or in any case to have found a reason immanent in the world. The notion of geometrical space, indifferent to its contents, that of pure movement which does not by itself affect the properties of the object, provided phenomena with a setting of inert existence in which each event could be related to physical conditions responsible for the changes occurring, and therefore contributed to this freezing of being which appeared to be the task of physics. In thus developing the concept of the thing, scientific knowledge was not aware that it was working on a presupposition. Precisely because perception, in its vital implications and prior to any theoretical thought, is presented as perception of a being, it was not considered necessary for reflection to undertake a genealogy of being, and it was therefore confined to seeking the conditions which make being possible. Even if one took account of the transformations of determinant consciousness, even if it were conceded that the constitution of the object is never completed, there was nothing to add to what science said of it; the natural object remained an ideal unity for us and, in the famous words of Lachelier, a network of general properties. It was no use denying any ontological value to the principles of science and leaving them with only a methodical value, for this reservation made no essential change as far as philosophy was concerned, since the sole conceivable being remained defined by scientific method. The living body, under these circumstances, could not escape the determinations which alone made the object into an object and without which it would have had no place in the system of experience. The value predicates which the reflecting judgment confers upon it had to be sustained, in being, by a foundation of physico-chemical properties. In ordinary experience we find a fittingness and a meaningful relationship between the gesture, the smile and the tone of a speaker. But this reciprocal relationship of expression which presents the human body as the outward manifestation of a certain manner of being-in-the-world, had, for mechanistic physiology, to be resolved into a series of causal relations.” —from_Phenomenology of Perception_. Translated by Colin Smith, pp. 62-64 —Artwork by Cristian Boian

So, Einstein's theory of gravity is a theory of causal structure. It tells us that the essence of spacetime is causal structure and that the motion of matter is a consequence of alterations in the network of causal relations. What is left out from the notion of causal structure is any measure of quantity or scale.

Ignorance/hateracist ideasdiscrimination: this causal relationship is largely ahistorical. It has actually been the inverse relationship—racial discrimination led to racist ideas which led to ignorance and hate. Racial discriminationracist ideasignorance/hate: this is the causal relationship driving America’s history of race relations.

The distinction between segregation by state action and racial imbalance caused by other factors has been central to our jurisprudence. . . . Where [racial imbalance] is a product not of state action but of private choices, it does not have constitutional implications.” Because neighborhoods in Louisville and Seattle had been segregated by private choices, he concluded, school districts should be prohibited from taking purposeful action to reverse their own resulting segregation. Chief Justice Roberts himself was quoting from a 1992 opinion by Justice Anthony Kennedy in a case involving school segregation in Georgia. In that opinion Justice Kennedy wrote: “[V]estiges of past segregation by state decree do remain in our society and in our schools. Past wrongs to the black race, wrongs committed by the State and in its name, are a stubborn fact of history. And stubborn facts of history linger and persist. But though we cannot escape our history, neither must we overstate its consequences in fixing legal responsibilities. The vestiges of segregation . . . may be subtle and intangible but nonetheless they must be so real that they have a causal link to the de jure violation being remedied. It is simply not always the case that demographic forces causing population change bear any real and substantial relation to a de jure violation.” The following pages will refute this too-comfortable notion, expressed by Justice Kennedy and endorsed by Chief Justice Roberts and his colleagues, that wrongs committed by the state have little causal link to the residential segregation we see around us.

Firestone is therefore claiming that there is a biological component to something that other feminists have taken to be purely cultural. For this, she has been criticized for biologism, or biological determinism. Donna Haraway, for example, has charged Firestone with making ‘the basic mistake of reducing social relations to natural objects’; which mistake – Haraway thinks – then leads Firestone into a dangerously reckless championing of technological control over nature. Michelle Barrett has also worried that Firestone’s account falls into ‘biologistic assumptions,’ wondering whether ‘“feminist biologism”’ can escape the problems of other biologisms – such as suggesting that there is little hope for change. But for Firestone, precisely the point is that without attributing biology some causal role, the ubiquity of male domination remains unexplained. And, I would add, because it is unexplained it precisely is therefore mystified. There is no accounting for why it should be the case that all societies (or even, if one wants to argue for exceptions, most societies) are, and have been, male-dominated. And precisely because there is no explanation, this phenomenon becomes available to other explanations that do seek to claim the correctness and immutability of male rule: to propose, for example, that it is the consequence of an innate male superiority.

Self is differentiated so not to be by itself. The purpose of self companionship. Love so love.

We become mindful of how the world around us relates to our own state of being (Inner-Outer Correspondence), and know what measure (inner and outer) to take to harmonize the two in life. By understanding the forces that evoke positive responses from life, we create infinite fulfillment. Through opening up to the Force, we induce these from inside, to evoke the most positive life responses that emanate from the behavior of the Force on the causal plane. The normal definitions of cause and effect, space and time, and subjectivity and objectivity contradict the life responses that exist.

Supermind gave us the eternal, the timeless, and the spaceless; the limitless potential in the finite. (Translating as infinite potential, achievement, opportunities, happiness, pleasure, grace, wisdom, greatness, etc.) The intervention of the Supramental Force will change past causality to create a new current (e.g. consecration of the source of a disease deliberately identified as chronic or lethal has, on many occasions, been allowed by a practitioner to rediagnose that the condition does not occur). That which seems to be at odds with Supermind is part of a peace. In its harmony and wholeness it sees all such things through due relation to each other. (It sees unity and equilibrium in that which is separated in spirit. There is no mistake as in thought.) Supermind comprehends all things in being and eternal self-consciousness, abstract, immutable, spaceless, hence it comprehends all objects in fluid awareness and rules their rational self-embodiment in space and time. (This is a powerful statement of how because Supermind knows the forces in Being it knows them in becoming.) Supermind sees all the possibilities of Space and Time that Mind cannot understand, without the mistake, groping, and uncertainty of mind. It perceives each capacity in its own power, necessary need, right relationships with others. Knower, knowledge, in Supermind intelligence is one. Supermind is the intermediate connection between Existence-Consciousness-Bliss and Mind that can explain each other and establish a relationship between them that will enable us to realize the one Existence, Consciousness, Delight in the mold of mind, life, and body.