Causation
Another piece of the puzzle is the way we think about what makes things happen. We think that one thing leads to another, like you hit a snooker ball with a cue, and that ball hits another, and then one ball goes into the pocket.
This simplicity is an illusion. Everything happens because of many other things happening (or not happening). You only potted the snooker ball because nobody coughed while you were shooting, or the table wasn’t truly flat, or a grain of dust deflected one of the balls just slightly.
For complex events there are chains and circuits of actions, reactions and consequences which build to a crescendo of the final outcome. Some small factors are amplified by positive feedback, some large factors are blocked or otherwise diminish. We see an outcome like a car crash and the chain of causation stretches back and out across all the cars, that bit of the road, the drivers, what was on the radio one of the drivers was listening to just before the crash, how the drivers slept last night, how the mechanic who adjusted the steering of one of the cars three weeks ago slept and so on.
Yet our intuition about causation is to find a single cause. “Whose fault was this?”. “Who is to blame?”. Morally, we can maybe assign responsibility to a single person or thing, but causally, we certainly can’t.
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What happens when you tell people they are, or they aren’t free: EXPTS; direct link expts