GENIUS FORUMS

Things without limbs have to be moved from A to B by the director of the universe, which is a sentient turing machine. Things with limbs can take their own sentience around with them, and break roughly 20% free of the machine. The other 80% is still part of the machine. 20% is enough for you to realise, and live your own life without cause, and effect.

divine focus wrote:

David Quinn wrote:Circumstances become ripe when the circumstances are ripe!

In other words, the sorts of causal conditions which produce, say, a localized pocket of order are themselves the product of causal conditions (which, in turn, have been produced by causal conditions as well). And so on back forever.

Meaning: it's arbitrary! It may be true in a sense, but something's missing.

If it helps you and others to become "empty" as I think you mean it, then there's value there. But here's how I see causality: There's only one cause, and many effects. The effects begin with the cause, and they "end" with the same cause. The cause produces new effects that all exist simultaneously. What we're doing when we're seeking "Truth" is trying to bring the cause into the effect. We're trying to change the effect, which is our experience, from within the effect. Doing so, individually and collectively, changes all effects everywhere. All effects will have the ability, the blueprint so to speak, to do the same. The cause can "grow" to encompass what it wasn't aware that it was.

That's a very imaginative view. I tend to see it a lot more simply. Things are never generated by a single cause, but always by a multiplicity of causes. Indeed, it is impossible for us to count the number of causes of a particular event because these causes stretch back forever. And they don't stretch back linearly either. They fan out in all directions, touching all things, eventually embracing the entire Universe.

For example, some of the causes of my own existence are my parents, the community, food production, oxygen, organic molecules, DNA, the evolution of the species, the primeval soup, the formation of the stars and planets, and so on. Moreover, all these things are, or were, casually interacting with other things as well. So in effect, Nature is a massively complex causal web - too complex for us to trace in much detail, yet simple enough as a principle to be fully understood by the human mind.

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True. I just think of all those causes as unified, though maybe not apparently. Imaginative, maybe; but simple, too.