Physics and causation*

The Physical Foundations of Causation

I sketch an account of causation, showing how several of the main features of causation—asymmetry, transitivity, and necessitation (and sometimes probability-raising)— arise from the combination of fundamental dynamical laws and a special constraint on the structure of matter in the past. The necessitation and transitivity of causation are grounded in the fundamental physics, but the causal asy...

Causation, physics, and fit

Our ordinary causal concept seems to fit poorly with how our best physics describes the world. We think of causation as a time-asymmetric dependence relation between relatively local events. Yet fundamental physics describes the world in terms of dynamical laws that are, possible small exceptions aside, time symmetric and that relate global time slices. My goal in this paper is to show why we a...

A Ghazalian Predicament Epistemology and Metaphysics of Causation in the Works of Ghazali

A Relic of a Bygone Age? Causation, Time Symmetry and the Directionality Argument∗

Bertrand Russell famously argued that causation is not part of the fundamental physical description of the world, describing the notion of cause as “a relic of a bygone age” (Russell, 1913, p. 1). This paper assesses one of Russell’s arguments for this conclusion: the ‘Directionality Argument’, which holds that the time symmetry of fundamental physics is inconsistent with the time asymmetry of ...

Downward causation in fluid convection

Recent developments in nonlinear dynamics have found wide application in many areas of science from physics to neuroscience. Nonlinear phenomena such as feedback loops, inter-level relations, wholes constraining and modifying the behavior of their parts, and memory effects are interesting candidates for emergence and downward causation. Rayleigh-Bénard convection is an example of a nonlinear sy...

Causation , Physics , and the Constitution of Reality : Russell ’ s

This is an outstanding anthology. It contains extended reflections on Russell’s idea that our notion of causation is a relic of stone-age metaphysics, which fails to fit contemporary physics and thus deserves elimination (‘On the Notion of Cause’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 13, 1913, pp. 1–26). It will be of interest to anyone interested in causation or the physical image of the w...