Created: January 27, 2022
Modified: February 07, 2022
Modified: February 07, 2022
there's never a single cause
This page is from my personal notes, and has not been specifically reviewed for public consumption. It might be incomplete, wrong, outdated, or stupid. Caveat lector.- For several reasons:
- multiple object-level causes
- a telescoping tower of causes at increasing levels of generality or abstraction
- 'because the neuron firing triggered a muscle contraction'
- 'because he pulled the trigger'
- a chain of causes, which can be broken by removing any link:
- 'because he pulled the trigger'
- '…because he was scared'
- '…because he was in the woods alone at night'
- '…because he was running from the police'
- '…because he stole a pineapple'
- Physical causation (dynamics) versus logical causation (modus ponens)
- At a certain level of abstraction, we switch into logical dynamics (?)
- We have many models, and each model tells its own causal story.
- Causal chains branch