Causality Quotes

“We live in a universe driven by chance,” his father had said once, “but the bullshit artists all want causality.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Authority

“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.”
― Blaise Pascal

“But one thing is the thought, another thing is the deed, and another thing is the idea of the deed. The wheel of causality doth not roll between them.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

“We do not teach history; we recreate the experience. We follow the chain of consequences - the tracks of the beast in its forest. Look behind our words and you see the broad sweep of social behavior that no historian has ever touched.”
― Frank Herbert, Chapterhouse: Dune

“It’s a scientific fact that gratitude reciprocates.”
― Matthew McConaughey

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

“Hetun paticca sambutan hetu banga nirujjathi”
― Gautama Buddha

“Act and opportunities will manifest. There is no such thing as luck. There is only causality. Are you strong enough to cause something to happen – that’s the question.”
― Abhijit Naskar, 7 Billion Gods: Humans Above All

“Be the action and bring the change. Leave the rest to the law of causality. Be bold enough to cause something to happen and it will happen.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Lord is My Sheep: Gospel of Human

“The thing you know as Karma, does not really exist the way you think. It can only exist through the law of causality, which means, when you make efforts to achieve something, the results do indeed occur, given enough time, resources and above all, perseverance.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Lord is My Sheep: Gospel of Human

“The entropy of the world in the far past appears very low to us. But this might not reflect the exact state of the world: it might regard the subset of the world' s variables with which we, as physical systems, have interacted. It is with respect to the dramatic blurring produced by our interactions with the world, caused by the small set of macroscopic variables in terms of which we describe the world, that the entropy of the universe was low.”
― Carlo Rovelli

“Let us not forget this: when 'I raise my arm', my arm goes up. And the problem arises: what is left over if I subtract the fact that my arm goes up from the fact that I raise my arm?”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

“We do not see our hand in what happens, and so we call certain events melancholy accidents...”
― Stanley Cavell

“I’m a scientist, I should never have used the word coincidence. There’s less synchronicity and more causality than we often think. Things happen. Sometimes in ways we couldn’t even start to imagine.”
― Aminatta Forna, Happiness

“Statistical results with a causal interpretation have a stronger effect on our thinking than non-causal information. But even compelling causal statistics will not change long-held beliefs or beliefs rooted in personal experience.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“Hostility, malice, and sadism are the result of helplessness and self-loathing; that they are all produced by adaptation to a hypercritical social reality and are not attributable to innate aggression.”
― Arno Gruen

“...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.”
― Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Economic Science and the Austrian Method

“Fighting for the acceptance of Bayesian networks in AI was a picnic compared with the fight I had to wage for causal diagrams [in the stormy waters of statistics].”
― Judea Pearl, The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect

“Time, Space and Causality - study these three.”
― Laurence Galian, 666: Connection with Crowley

“[E]volution is not a cause, but the description of a process … Can we in any way explain the origin of species? Are we to suppose that each species, or what we regard as a species, originated in the fiat of an almighty power? Or are we to suppose that we are to go indefinitely backwards, and affirm that a chain of secondary causation is to be continued indefinitely backwards? … The treatment of evolution as a cause, capable of leading us on indefinitely, tends to shut out the idea of a First Cause; its treatment as a possible mode of sequence, leading us a step or two onwards, still leaves the mind directed towards a First Cause, though ‘Clouds and darkness are round about Him.’ [cf. Psalm 97] … Remember, Evolution does not mean a cause.”
― George Gabriel Stokes, Memoir and Scientific Correspondence of the Late Sir George Gabriel Stokes, Bart;, Sc; D., LL. D., D. C. L., Past Pres; R. S, Vol. 2

“An instant realization sees endless time.
Endless time is as one moment.
When one comprehends the endless moment
They realize the person who is seeing it.”
― Paul Reps and Nyogen Senzaki

“We have evolved with a tendency to link causality to things we can touch or feel, not to some distant or difficult phenomenon. We believe especially in near-term causes: a snake bites your friend, he screams with pain, and he dies. The snakebite, you conclude, must have killed him. Most of the time, such a reckoning is correct. But when it comes to cause and effect, there is often a trap in such open-and-shut thinking. We smirk now when we think of ancient cultures that embraced faulty causes—the warriors who believed, for instance, that it was their raping of a virgin that brought them victory on the battlefield. But we too embrace faulty causes, usually at the urging of an expert proclaiming a truth in which he has a vested interest.”
― Steven D. Levitt, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything

“To be sure, there were all these maddening permutations of what could be that were not to be ignored—possibilities that were still too many to consider to one’s satisfaction. Yet, there was also a stunning beauty to all of this that was so profound that one could not help but love every facet of every conceivability, whether realized or beyond reach. There was so much to capture even in stillness that was akin to grasping at grains of sand so fine as to elude the grip—it was all so intricate, so overwhelming and so rapid, and nothing ever ceased in its glorious transformation that it could be sufficiently arrested and processed and thoroughly acknowledged. But still, there was an exhilaration in being engrossed in the details that evaded capture and in being oneself ensconced in constant flux so as to surrender without recourse to what was to come.

A train whistle blows and a new door is to open: the tracks have many junction points and no shortage of stopovers and destinations. Yet, there is no instance that ever becomes the destination, no circumstance the definitive possibility, and one, for that very fact, could scarcely help but be filled with a heartening love for all of creation, if, indeed, it could be called ‘creation’ and such a word held reasonable accuracy. The Moment, after all, was Always and thus there was no ‘before,’ no instance preceding the instance. There was no infinite regression of causality, no ‘hello’ or ‘goodbye’ and certainly no ‘take care of yourself’ that need wrench one’s heart. There was simply the EverToward: the shifting of Now and the reformulation of Then, wherein the form and essence engendered instantaneously a sculpting of arbitrary and historic juxtapositions—which, themselves, were composed of retroactively-shaped illusions.

In spite of this, there still emerges a yearning for those prehistoric elements now faded, those characters for whom one has felt an affection and who nourished one’s growth and one’s formulations of what exists—if ‘exist’ indeed suffices as a descriptor. There is twinge of loss for what was, even if it has never been or has otherwise taken on new and ersatz constructions in mind. Notwithstanding this, one cannot help but perseverate upon the hypothetical stories of a speculative childhood that presumably nurtured imagination, the scoldings that established assumptive boundary, the conjectural sacrifices that ostensibly granted sustenance. So much of one’s respiration had been populated of this air and of this interplay of actors and elements. And yet, one’s breath cycles ceaselessly through many phases on a given day. In the morning, it is yet purging itself of that mythspell of yesterday; by afternoon, it consumes the horsefeathers of new dynamics, halted again by that which passes by too fast and which can never be frozen; as evening descends, it grows slow and pensive, sometimes coughing up senescent horsefeathers and fatigued by the persistent irregularities introduced by the day itself.”
― Ashim Shanker

“Nothing exists in isolation without its counterpart; the opposite. Individuality cannot be expressed in consonance with the totality of freedom as ultimate freedom exists only in the inevitability of death and as for living, we all are bound to aspects of causality.”
― Aman Tiwari, Memoir: The Cathartic Night

“What people call #AI is no more than using correlation to find answers to questions we know to ask. Real #AI has awareness of causality, leading to answering questions we haven't dreamed of yet.” - Tom Golway”
― Tom Golway

“The problem with the idea of cause and effect is that what is deemed the cause is an effect.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Le vide n'existe pas. Le tableau est toujours achevé. Même si Scarlatti s'était contenté de transcrire les notes jouées par son chat, le morceau aurait été là. Un seul et unique cil suffit à reconstituer l'individu entier. Chaque partie contient le tout.”
― Nancy Huston, Cantique des plaines

“The sounds of my breaths slowly begin to fade away, and I can hear again the waves in the darkness. The waves again! Reverberating through a hollow tube. Focus inward, and ignore the sound! Ignore the cause. Think not upon the cause of that cause or upon that cause’s cause’s cause. There is more than we will ever be able to explain. More than I will ever know and observe, and thus our systems are riddled with gaps.”
― Ashim Shanker, trenches parallax leapfrog

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

“It's important to note that a top-down (or feed-backward) flow of information (from higher to lower layers) also occurs in the visual cortex; in fact, there are about ten times as many feed-backward connections as feed-forward ones. However the role of these backward connections is not well understood by neuroscientists, although it is well established that our prior knowledge and expectations, presumably stored in higher brain layers, strongly influence what we perceive.”
― Melanie Mitchell