Can an effect have more than one cause?

[Willamena]

Can an effect have more than one cause?

 

[Willamena]

Follow-up question: Can an effect have only one cause?

 

[Somkid]

Philosophically speaking there has to be an initial cause that triggers an event or a series of events. Sometimes the effect of the first cause triggers a second cause and so on until it is seen as the result or effect. Sometimes the effect triggers a new cause. Depending on what cause or effect exactly you are dealing with the results will be different. If you do a study of the natural world and see the steps leading up to the eruption of a volcano in the end the result is total destruction of everything in its path but at what point does life spring from the destruction and is that life a new cause or a result of the last effect?

 

[Dunemeister]

One event can have multiple causes. World War I, for example, had several contributing causes.

 

[lilithu]

Cause and effect are an illusion.

 

[whereismynotecard]

Can an effect have more than one cause?

Yes. All the time. Almost every effect has more than one cause...

Follow-up question: Can an effect have only one cause?

Yes... probably the very first thing that ever happened (the singular cause) produced the very first effect that ever happened. Of course, I wasn't there, so this is merely speculation...

 

[heavyarms553]

Nothing EVER has only one cause. Heres an examples:

A child throws a basketball into the air and it falls to the ground. The immediate cause of the basketball falling was gravity. However, the child wouldn't have been there playing if it wasn't a weekend. In that respect you could say that the ball fell because school was out. Also, the ball falling depending on the child even existing. If his/her parents didn't have him, he wouldn't have been there to throw the ball, and it would never have fallen. Therefore, the ball fell because the child's dad fell in love with the child's mom. Also, what if economic conditions in the country were different? Then the basketball manufacturer may not have shipped basketballs to that child's town and he wouldn't have been able to buy one. In that case, the ball fell not because of gravity, but because of the high demand for sports equipment during that season.

 

[Magic Man]

An effect always has more than one cause, some direct and some indirect. Many times a cause is an effect of another cause, just like my father is a father (cause), but also an effect (son of his father). The idea is to find the original cause for everything. So, I guess in a way, everything has to have one cause, the original one.

 

[Wandered Off]

Cause and effect are an illusion.

Hi lilithu. Nice to see you around! Dopp alluded to this some months back, but I never could find any elaboration on it. Do you have a book recommendation or reference where I can learn the details behind this assertion? Or maybe you could help me understand in your own words. Thanks!

 

[Kungfuzed]

Hi lilithu. Nice to see you around! Dopp alluded to this some months back, but I never could find any elaboration on it. Do you have a book recommendation or reference where I can learn the details behind this assertion? Or maybe you could help me understand in your own words. Thanks!

I was about to ask her the same thing. Please elaborate Lilithu.

 

[Kungfuzed]

Can an effect have more than one cause?

I tend to think of our existence as a complicated web rather than a straight line.

 

[YmirGF]

Cause and effect are simply aspects of dualistic thought and therefore are illusory. There is only Oneness.

 

[Willamena]

Can there be an effect that causes nothing?

 

[Wandered Off]

Cause and effect are simply aspects of dualistic thought and therefore are illusory. There is only Oneness.

Well, that could make sense. Why didn't I know that before you posted it though? Put another way, why does localization appear isolated?

 

[Magic Man]

Can there be an effect that causes nothing?

I guess there can be a final result (effect), if there can be a first cause.

 

[Willamena]

Finally, can there be an effect that causes itself?

For those asking about the cause-effect illusion, here is one argument (among many):

Long ago, Galileo figured out that the correct way to think about motion was to abstract from messy real-world situations to idealized circumstances in which dissipative effects such as friction and air resistance could be ignored. (They can always be restored later as perturbations.) Only then do we realize that what matter really wants to do is to maintain its motion at a constant speed, until it is explicitly acted upon by some external force. Except that, once we have made this breakthrough, we realize that the matter doesn’t want to do anything — it just does it. Modern physics doesn’t describe the world in terms of “causes” and “effects.” It simply posits that matter (in the form of quantum fields, or strings, or what have you) acts in accordance with certain dynamical laws, known as “equations of motion.” The notion of “causality” is downgraded from “when I see B happening, I know it must be because of A” to “given some well-defined and suitably complete set of information about the initial state of a system, I can use the equations of motion to determine its subsequent evolution.” But a concept like “cause” doesn’t appear anywhere in the equations of motion themselves, nor in the specification of the type of matter being described; it is only an occasionally-appropriate approximation, useful to us humans in narrating the behavior of some macroscopic configuration of equation-obeying matter.

In other words, the universe runs all by itself. The planets orbit the Sun, not because anything is “causing” them to do so, but because that’s the kind of behavior that obeys Newton’s (or Einstein’s) equations governing motion in the presence of gravity. Deeply embedded as we are in this Galilean/Newtonian framework, statements like “every effect has a cause” become simply meaningless. Conservation of momentum completely undermines any force the cosmological argument might ever have had. The universe, like everything in it, can very well just be, as long as its pieces continue to obey the relevant equations of motion.

Special pleading that the universe is essentially different from its constituents, and (by nature of its unique status as all that there is to the physical world) that it could not have either (1) just existed forever, nor (2) come spontaneously into existence all by itself, is groundless. The only sensible response such skepticism is “Why not?” It’s certainly true that we don’t yet know whether the universe is eternal or whether it had a beginning, and we certainly don’t understand the details of its origin. But there is absolutely no obstacle to our eventually figuring those things out, given what we already understand about physics. General relativity asserts that spacetime itself is dynamical; it can change with time, and potentially even be created from nothing, in a way that is fundamentally different from the Newtonian conception (much less the Aristotelian). And quantum mechanics describes the universe in terms of a wavefunction that assigns amplitudes to any of an infinite number of possibilities, including — crucially — spontaneous transitions, unforced by any cause. We don’t yet know how to describe the origin of the universe in purely physical terms, but someday we will — physicists are working on the problem every day.

~from The God Conundrum | Cosmic Variance

Also, Friedrich Nietzsche presented a philosophical argument.

We say it is "explanation "; but it is only in "description" that we are in advance of the older stages of knowledge and science. We describe better, we explain just as little as our predecessors. We have discovered a manifold succession where the naive man and investigator of older cultures saw only two things, "cause" and "effect,"as it was said; we have perfected the conception of becoming, but have not got a knowledge of what is above and behind the conception. The series of "causes" stands before us much more complete in every case; we conclude that this and that must first precede in order that that other may follow - but we have not grasped anything thereby. The peculiarity, for example, in every chemical process seems a "miracle," the same as before, just like all locomotion; nobody has "explained" impulse. How could we ever explain? We operate only with things which do not exist, with lines, surfaces, bodies, atoms, divisible times, divisible spaces - how can explanation ever be possible when we first make everything a conception, our conception? It is sufficient to regard science as the exactest humanizing of things that is possible; we always learn to describe ourselves more accurately by describing things and their successions. Cause and effect: there is probably never any such duality; in fact there is a continuum before us, from which we isolate a few portions - just as we always observe a motion as isolated points, and therefore do not properly see it, but infer it. The abruptness with which many effects take place leads us into error; it is however only an abruptness for us. There is an infinite multitude of processes in that abrupt moment which escape us. An intellect which could see cause and effect as a continuum, which could see the flux of events not according to our mode of perception, as things arbitrarily separated and broken - would throw aside the conception of cause and effect, and would deny all conditionality.

~from Friedrich Nietzsche

"Before the effect one believes in different causes than one does after the effect." (Nietzsche)

And then there is this:
"We enter a realm of crude fetishism when we summon before consciousness the basic presuppositions of the metaphysics of language — in plain talk, the presuppositions of reason. Everywhere reason sees a doer and doing; it believes in will as the cause; it believes in the ego, in the ego as being, in the ego as substance, and it projects this faith in the ego-substance upon all things — only thereby does it first create the concept of "thing." Everywhere "being" is projected by thought, pushed underneath, as the cause; the concept of being follows, and is a derivative of, the concept of ego. In the beginning there is that great calamity of an error that the will is something which is effective, that will is a capacity. Today we know that it is only a word." (Nietzsche)

Yay for copy-paste skills!

 

[lilithu]

Wow, fancy stuff!

We perceive things like a table as solid - ie, distinct. This is generally a very useful way for us to navigate this world, which is probably why we evolved to perceive things this way. But that doesn't mean that's the way it really is. We know from science that what we perceive as a solid object isn't really solid. It's a mass of motions and interactions. In other words, it's not really distinct.

Similarly, we tend to perceive things as distinct in time, as particular events. Hence, we perceive one event is followed by another event, and in our minds that means one caused the other. But in reality, it is all one interdependent web of existence. Thus, there is no particulate cause and effect. Again, normally it's highly useful for us to perceive what we call cause and effect. Until we start speculating on philosophical questions like can an effect have more than one cause?

 

[Kungfuzed]

I think I actually get it now. Cause and effect are illusions. They are just random events we choose in order to make sense of what's going on around us. I don't see that a continuum or interdependence would have much of a different meaning from cause and effect, it just removes the arbitrary moments and shows all of existence as one event. Everything is dependent on everything else. If you add or remove one thing, if that were possible to add or remove something from the universe, then it would have an effect on the whole of existence. Since that isn't possible at the moment, everything simply is what it is. Did I get it right?

 

[Willamena]

I think I actually get it now. Cause and effect are illusions. They are just random events we choose in order to make sense of what's going on around us. I don't see that a continuum or interdependence would have much of a different meaning from cause and effect, it just removes the arbitrary moments and shows all of existence as one event. Everything is dependent on everything else. If you add or remove one thing, if that were possible to add or remove something from the universe, then it would have an effect on the whole of existence. Since that isn't possible at the moment, everything simply is what it is. Did I get it right?

I'll send frubals when I get another chance.
:rainbow1:

 

[lilithu]

..., it just removes the arbitrary moments and shows all of existence as one event. Everything is dependent on everything else.

:hearts:

I'll send frubals when I get another chance.
:rainbow1:

Done.