Sunday, October 14, 2012

Causality


What does theosophy have to say about causality and chance?

There’s no such thing as chance.

Nothing happens by chance.

Because nothing happens in isolation.

Everything is part of an intricate web of causal interconnections and interactions.

Two types of action are sometimes distinguished: causal action and distant action.

Causal action means that one thing acts on another through the transference of some kind of energy or force.

Whether physical or nonphysical.

And whether faster or slower than the speed of light.

Distant action, or action at a distance, means that one thing acts on another.

Either instantaneously

Or after a delay, without the transfer of any kind of energy or force.

This idea – whether it’s called ‘acausal synchronicity’ or ‘quantum nonlocality’ or whatever – is an irrational abstraction that explains nothing.

It assumes that no concrete, causal explanation is possible even in principle.

And so it’s little more than a pompous way of saying that things just happen for no reason at all.
 
Two events may seem to occur absolutely simultaneously to us, but one may actually follow the other and be caused by the other through faster-than-light interactions.

If two events do occur simultaneously then obviously one cannot be said to ‘act’ on the other,

Or to be the direct cause of the other.

But simultaneous events, or near-simultaneous events where the first does not exercise a significant causal influence on the other, can still be meaningfully correlated because the causal factors behind both of them are interlinked.

In fact, since all events occurring throughout the universe at any particular instant are interconnected in some way, they are all meaningfully related, but it’s only events that are conspicuously meaningful for us that we call ‘synchronicities’

And some people then invent an ‘acausal connecting principle’ to ‘explain’ them.

A few people have even gone so far as to propose ‘backward causation’

 i.e. that present events can be influenced by future events.

Which basically means that effects can generate their causes.

This is utter twaddle!

David Pratt

No comments: