we have scientific knowledge when we know the cause.", and ". In his Posterior Analytics and Metaphysics, Aristotle wrote, "All causes are beginnings.", ". Vice versa, any experiment designed to show violation of causality so far failed to do so. It should be noted here, however, that physicists themselves never denied causality or stated that causality is violated in quantum mechanics or relativity. However, according to Sowa (2000), "relativity and quantum mechanics have forced physicists to abandon these assumptions as exact statements of what happens at the most fundamental levels, but they remain valid at the level of human experience." " Contiguity postulates that cause and effect must be in spatial contact or connected by a chain of intermediate things in contact." (Born, 1949, as cited in Sowa, 2000)."Antecedence postulates that the cause must be prior to, or at least simultaneous with, the effect."Causality postulates that there are laws by which the occurrence of an entity B of a certain class depends on the occurrence of an entity A of another class, where the word entity means any physical object, phenomenon, situation, or event.Though cause and effect are typically related to events, other candidates include processes, properties, variables, facts, and states of affairs which of these comprise the correct causal relata, and how best to characterize the nature of the relationship between them, has as yet no universally accepted answer, and remains under discussion.Īccording to Sowa (2000), up until the twentieth century, three assumptions described by Max Born in 1949 were dominant in the definition of causality: In the western philosophical tradition explicit discussion stretches back at least as far as Aristotle, and the topic remains a staple in contemporary philosophy journals. The work of philosophers to understand causality and how best to characterize it extends over millennia. While this informal understanding will suffice in everyday usage, the philosophical analysis of causality or causation has proved exceedingly difficult. Ĭausality or causation denotes a logical relationship between one event (called cause) and another event (called effect) which is the direct consequence (result) of the first. Another possibility is the instant rewriting of a whole reality, by making Reality X (the current reality) the cause of Reality Y (a tailor-made one).Īt high levels, the user would be able to rewrite the laws of causality as a whole, essentially playing God.The Illustrated Sutra of Cause and Effect. The user could also instantly erase anything from existence, by making it's existence the cause of its own nonexistence. A finger snap which normally causes sound and kinetic force could instead cause a sun explosion or a massive resurrection. This allows one to achieve virtually anything by redirecting the selected cause to the desired effect.
The user can redirect any cause to any effect, undo anything by inverting the relation cause/effect, or even separate them entirely, making a specific effect impossible to be caused or a specific cause not producing any effect. NEO has the ability to manipulate both Cause and Effect Summary