Causation is the sequence with the cause in the beginning and the effect in the end. Understanding of causation is often wrong, deadly wrong.
Questions of causation appear in our everyday lives, in the broadest range of cases. Let me try to attack the most generic of all, the epistomologic view of causation.
The search for causation, the ‘what caused what’ questioning is a consequence of the linear narrative structure of perception. I, as the individual, am taught to communicate in linear forms, just like I am doing now, letters follow each other from left to right, one after another in a row.
I could, however communicate differently. And I do, it’s just that the linear form is postulated as the leading concept. Imagine me speaking to you live. You hear my words. The words and sentences become a linear narrative stream in your perception, but that’s not all. You hear the tone of voice I am using, the melody I am using, the quality of my English, the intonation, etc. Moreover you see me. You see my gesturing, my facial expressions. Even more than that, here and there I touch you, there’s the environment too, it’s cold maybe, the breeze is gushing from the sea, there are waves crumbling on the shore, birds chirping in the shrubs, your hair is swirling, nice 😉
And yet. There’s more. Everything happens in a rhythm, some things are synced, others appear randomly, yet most importantly, you actually never get to distinguish what was ment to be told and what slipped unintentionally. Causality only seems clear in the linear stream of words, however even there there is order of words, type of sounds choosen to paint the picture, mistakes, fillers, breaks.
A simple discussion between two persons is potentially an infinite well of information. Everything relates to everything. Causation is therefore potentially an infinite quest for a logical sequential story within a context of multiple possible histories.
Alas to perception of time. Time need not be linear. In a different mode of perception this part of your reading happens not just after you have started reading, usually at the beginning, but could actually happen before, at the same time, or like usually, after, or maybe the concept of time is a complete misperception anyways.
Now hear the most absurd of all ideas. The Sun is not heating up our solar system, and hence us, but we make it heated up. Every photon that ever comes from the Sun and is sent into the vast spaces of the universe is actually sent in the opposite direction. In the terms of relativity a photon is frozen in time anyways, so it doesn’t really matter to the photon whether it goes from the Sun into you eye, or from your eye to the Sun. It does not matter!
What matters then?
Now that’s a completely different article. Yet in a strange and magical causationaly weird manner the article is already here and you have already read it, morever, you wrote it and I will read it, and then I will have written it. See?
June 16, 2012 at 17:13
“In the terms of relativity a photon is frozen in time anyways, so it doesn’t really matter to the photon whether it goes from the Sun into you eye, or from your eye to the Sun.”
== WHAT? 🙂 Seriously: what?
“…article is already here and you have already read it, morever, you wrote it and I will read it, and then I will have written it.”
== yes, but since I couldn’t write it exactly like I had imagined it, you wouldn’t have read it it exactly as I wrote it and you surely couldn’t write it exactly as you remember it (memory, imagination, intuition and ambition blend). Maybe you could write it like I wanted it to be written in the begining.
There is some error to all workings of the universe, otherwise it would not have existed in the first place 🙂
June 18, 2012 at 18:03
on frozen photons …
when moving close to the speed of light, time flows slower, until, when speed of light is achieved, time stops completely. Stopping in time simply means that the time of that enviroment is frozen. In this case the whole ray of light stretching from one end to the other. In such cases the beginning and the end could be inverted. Nothing prohibits this inversion.
on existence of the universe …
actually existence of the universe is not a prerequisite, i.e. the primary cause of anything, nor is it the consequence of anything else. The universe simply – is. And funny enough the word ‘jahve’, the name of God in genesis, means ‘I am that I am’. And even funnier, goddess of fertility in Egypt is Isis, while Jesus in Arabic is Isa. Now count that in. In a paraphrase, Hamlet should not ask ‘to be or not to be’ but simply state ‘to be is to be’.