“what is the purpose of brain convolutions?”) refer not to an underlying plan but to function or evolutionary advantage.
Hume [1935] redefined causality in more pragmatic terms. His definition of a cause is “an object precedent and contiguous to another, and where all objects resembling the former are placed in like relations of precedency and contiguity to those objects that resemble the latter.” We can forgive Hume’s constipated wording, I hope, on the grounds that definitions, like legal jargon, must be unambiguous and yet comprehensive. In other words, systematic (nonrandom) proximity in both space and time implies causality, and the event that occurs first is considered to be the cause of the second event. If event B is commonly preceded by an association with event A, then event A is a cause of event B. Note that neither requires the other: A may not be the only type of event that can cause B, and other conditions may be needed before A can cause B. We will consider these variables of causality and their tests in a later section on Mill’s canons.
Lenzen [1938] used the example of Newtonian physics to demonstrate that even Hume’s careful definition has exceptions. Cause does not always precede effect, as is evidenced by the fact that force causes simultaneous acceleration, not delayed acceleration. Cause and effect need not be contiguous, as is evidenced by the fact that gravitational attraction acts over millions of miles (else the earth would go careening away from the sun and off into space). To me, these exceptions are inconsequential. Hume’s causality is meant to be a pragmatic concept, and a principle that is almost always useful should not be discarded for the purity of a void.
If causality is to be limited to the observable and testable as Hume’s concept is, then several familiar attributes of causality may have to be stripped away: Aristotelian interest in purpose, the inevitability or necessity of an effect given a cause, and concern with underlying (unobservable) mechanisms [Boyd, 1985]. We are left with a sterile association between events, firmly founded in observations but lacking deeper understanding of processes. One twentieth-century philosophical school reached a similar conclusion with different logic: causality is nonunique -- one ‘cause’ can generate several paths and different causes can lead to the same ‘effect’ -- so causality should be confined to associations. Physicist Victor Weisskopf often said that causality is simply connections. A philosophical movement called logical positivism skirted this limitation by emphasizing that deduction from natural laws can provide a causal explanation of observations.
For the Sufis, cause-and-effect is a misguided focus on a single thread in the tapestry of intertwined relationships. They illustrate this lesson with the parable of the hanged man [Shah, 1972], which we can recast as follows:
In 212 B.C., in his home in Syracuse, while working a math problem, Archimedes was killed by a Roman soldier. What caused his death? Was it that his applied scientific contributions – in the form of novel defensive weapons – were no defense against treason? Was it that the leader of the victorious invaders, in giving the order to leave the house of Archimedes alone, failed to assure that individual soldiers attended to the order? Was it that Archimedes, when commanded by a soldier to leave his home, was so preoccupied by his math problem that he refused to let even the fall of a city distract him? Or was it simply that the soldier had had a hard day, exhausting his patience for the cranky stubbornness of an old man?
Causality or pattern – is the choice a cultural one rather than innate? And if it is cultural, what about related fundamental scientific assumptions: comparison, linear thought, and time? A provocative perspective on these questions was provided by Lee’s [1950] classic study of the language of the Trobriand Islanders, a virtually pristine stone-age culture of Southeast Asia. Her goals were to
