I was trying to call a friend of mine an hour or so ago and the voice dialing software on my iPhone interpereted my “call <friend name>, mobile” request for “call mom, home.” I didn’t realize it until she answered. The mistake turned in to an hour long conversation about some things that have been going on in the last couple of days for her. Without getting in to details, she just happened to be in a bit of a sticky situation and needed a listening ear and a little bit of advice.
As an aside, I do have to say it’s an honor to be able to give my own mother advice. She has a tendency to worry things she can’t change or to let a situation become more emotional than it should be, hence clouding her judgment. Yes I am aware that women are typically more emotional creatures than men. I understand that and I took it in to consideration while typing that. But, back to the story…
I was able to listen and give some objective feedback on the whole situation and she seemed to genuinely appreciate the advice I gave her. She even said she was going to try it! Thanks for humoring me, mom!
I gave her some tips on thinking about things objectively; visualize, analyze, reason, then act. I even suggested a few minutes of
stream of consciousness writing to help her with the “analyze” part. One of the things I strive for every day is to be objective and I tend to promote that to those around me for solving life-problems. But all of that is neither, here nor there. I really wanted to talk about what happened before the iPhone malfunction.
There’s something in particular I find intriguing about causation. For some reason, I can’t seem to grasp it entirely due to it’s built-in property of “going on forever”. Causation and Chaos tend to be tightly wound in my mind, and if anyone reading this is a “real” (i.e. formally trained and practicing) philosopher who knows about the two ideas, please comment (constructively and objectively). I’m no expert on either so all of what I’m saying is still quite elementary. I digress…
Since the rule applies, that, “in order for something to happen, something had to happen before it” you end up with a nasty problem on your hands; this is known as “cause and effect.” We are swimming in a vast sea teeming with causality. You’re reading this as a result of clicking, typing, or copy/pasting the URL. You own a computer right now as a result of buying one. You bought one as a result of the need/desire for one. You needed/desired a computer because of something which is the result of something else, and so on. This is a weak abstraction, but I think you get the picture. Essentially, event En cannot occur until E(…n-1) have come and gone. Simple concept when you break it down this way. But think about all of the things that happen in the world. Right now as you read this, there is a high probability that someone in your town is having sex, or breaking the speed limit, or contemplating suicide, or smoking marijuana, or dancing, or laughing, or giving birth, or sitting through a green light on accident, or drinking coffee (mine is delicious by the way), or even Googling “causation” and about to stumble across this very same blog post. Every effect is, essentially, also a cause. It also seems that this property is required (a law of causality?) for causation to function. Without an effect, there was no cause, and no cause can be a cause without causing something.
It feels like there is a problem here, but I can’t put my finger on it yet. I’ll do some thinking before I go any further in to all of that.
“Where are you going with this, man!?” Okay, okay, sorry. I’ve said a lot but haven’t gotten to my point yet so here it goes.
Go under the notion we just derived that an effect cannot exist without a cause and that cause is merely a property of effect. This is exclusive in terms of coincidence. Coincidence is a perception of an event (chock it up to wishful thinking or rationality) being something more than it is.
Hard to disregard that some times though.
I don’t claim to be an expert in any fields so don’t read my blog as if I am one. I’m just an explorer looking for answers and I welcome constructive and objective responses.
- John
