Causation Quotes - Page 2

• Where big data is all about seeking correlations - and thus to make incremental changes - small data is all about causations - seeking to understand the reasons why.

  Martin Lindstrom

  Data, Reason Why, Bigs

  Source: bobmorris.biz

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• It is what you think of this situation that governs  you and not the situation itself. Causation is always in mind and not in things.

  Ervin Seale

  Thinking, Mind, Situation

  ERVIN SEALE (1971). “TAKE OFF FROM WITHIN”

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• [E]very plot, worth the name, must be elaborated to its dénouement before anything be attempted with the pen. It is only with the dénouement constantly in view that we can plot its indispensable air of consequence, or causation, by making the incidents, and especially the tone at all points tend to the development of the intention.

  Edgar Allan Poe

  Air, Views, Names

  Edgar Allan Poe (2016). “Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works”, p.243, My Ebook Publishing House

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• Science must constantly be reminded that her purposes are not the only purposes and that the order of uniform causation which she has use for, and is therefore right in postulating, may be enveloped in a wider order, on which she has no claim at all.

  William James

  Technology, Order, Purpose

  William James (2012). “The Principles of Psychology”, p.576, Courier Corporation

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• Not one example of significant self-generation or self-organization can be found in the entire realm of nature.... Without causation, nothing happens and without organization by an intelligent being, systems tend to lower and lower levels of complexity.

  Hugh Ross

  Intelligent, Self, Organization

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• This is absolutely correct and forms part of the larger concept that top-down causation is a key factor not just in the way the brain works but in broader contexts in biology and even physics.

  George F. R. Ellis

  Top Down, Keys, Brain

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• In spite of all evidence that life is discontinuous, a valley of rifts, and that random chance plays a great part in our fates, we go on believing in the continuity of things, in causation and meaning. But we live on a broken mirror, and fresh cracks appear in its surface every day.

  Salman Rushdie

  Believe, Fate, Play

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• The parallelism, or denial of any causation between mind and body, derives basically, and fallaciously, from a theory of substances as having complete concepts that include everything that is true of them.

  Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra

  Mind, Substance, Denial

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Every attempt to solve the laws of causation, time, and space would be futile, because the very attempt would have to be made by taking for granted the existence of these three.

  Swami Vivekananda

  Law, Space, Would Be

  Swami Vivekananda (2015). “Jnana Yoga: The Yoga of Knowledge”, p.24, editionNEXT.com

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• Every one is as much bound in thought, word, deed, and mind, as a piece of stone or this table. That I talk to you now is as rigorous in causation as that you listen to me. There is no freedom until you go beyond Maya. That is the real freedom of the soul.

  Swami Vivekananda

  Real, Soul, Mind

  Swami Vivekananda (2015). “The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda”, p.948, Manonmani Publishers

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• The materialist is sure that history has been simply and solely a chain of causation, just as the [lunatic] is quite sure that he is simply and solely a chicken. Materialists and madmen never have doubts.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Doubt, Chickens, Chains

  Gilbert K. Chesterton (2013). “The Essential Gilbert K. Chesterton”, p.16, Simon and Schuster

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• The effort to eliminate synthetic pesticides because of unsubstantiated fears about residues in food will make fruits and vegetables more expensive, decrease consumption, and thus increase cancer rates. The levels of synthetic pesticide residues are trivial in comparison to natural chemicals, and thus their potential for cancer causation is extremely low. [Ames believes that "to eat your veggies" is the best way to prevent cancer.]

  Bruce Ames

  Cancer, Believe, Science

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• ... if we say that the Father is the origin of the Son and greater than the Son, we do not suggest any precedence in time or superiority in nature of the Father over the Son (cf. Jn. 14:28)? or superiority in any other respect save causation. And we mean by this, that the Son is begotten of the Father and not the Father of the Son, and that the Father naturally is the cause of the Son.

  Pope Clement I

  Christian, Father, Mean

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• Religion belongs to the realm that is inviolable before the law of causation and therefore closed to science.

  Max Planck

  Science, Law, Realms

  Max Planck (1959). “The new science: 3 complete works: Where is science going? The universe in the light of modern physics; The philosophy of physics”

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• Like many great ideas in biology, the idea implicating infectious causation in chronic diseases, though simple, has far-reaching implications. It is so simple and so significant, that one would think it would have been recognized by many and would be the starting point for any discussion on the causes of disease. Not yet.

  Paul W. Ewald

  Simple, Thinking, Ideas

  Paul W. Ewald (2000). “Plague Time: How Stealth Infections Cause Cancers, Heart Disease, and Other Deadly Ailments”, p.56, Simon and Schuster

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• That food nourishes, sleep refreshes, and fire warms us; that to sow in the seed-time is the way to reap in the harvest, and, in general, that to obtain such or such ends, such or such means are conducive, all this we know, not by discovering any necessary connexion between our ideas, but only by the observation of the settled laws of nature, without which we should be all in uncertainty and confusion, and a grown man no more know how to manage himself in the affairs of life than an infant just born.

  George Berkeley

  Mean, Sleep, Men

  George Berkeley (2013). “Principles of Human Knowledge”, p.27, Simon and Schuster

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• In their precise tracings-out and subtle causations, the strongest and fieriest emotions of life defy all analytical insight.

  Herman Melville

  Emotion, Subtle, Insight

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• One way to explain the complexity and unpredictability of historical systems, despite their ultimate determinacy, is to note that long chains of causation may separate final effects from ultimate causes lying outside the domain of that field of science.

  Jared Diamond

  Lying, Long, Historical

  Jared Diamond (2017). “Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies”, p.393, W. W. Norton & Company

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• If ... we choose a group of social phenomena with no antecedent knowledge of the causation or absence of causation among them, then the calculation of correlation coefficients, total or partial, will not advance us a step toward evaluating the importance of the causes at work.

  Ronald Fisher

  Groups, Statistics, Causes

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• God's existence needs to be established independently before he can be brought into account for causation; it cannot be assumed at the start.

  S. T. Joshi

  Atheism, Needs, Existence

  S. T. Joshi (2003). “God's Defenders: What They Believe and why They are Wrong : William James, C.K. Chesterton, T.S. Eliot, William F. Buckley, Jerry Fallwell, Annie Dillard, C.S. Lewis”, Pyr Books

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• However inadequate our ideas of causal efficacy may be, we are less wide of the mark when we say that our ideas and feelings have it, than the Automatists are when they say they haven't it. As in the night all cats are gray, so in the darkness of metaphysical criticism all causes are obscure. But one has no right to pull the pall over the psychic half of the subject only . . . whilst in the same breath one dogmatizes about material causation as if Hume, Kant, and Lotze had never been born.

  William James

  Cat, Night, Ideas

  William James (2007). “The Principles of Psychology”, p.137, Cosimo, Inc.

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• Space and force pervade language. Many cognitive scientists (including me) have concluded from their research on language that a handful of concepts about places, paths, motions, agency, and causation underlie the literal or figurative meanings of tens of thousands of words and constructions, not only in English but in every other language that has been studied.

  Steven Pinker

  Agency, Space, Research

  Steven Pinker (2009). “How the Mind Works”, p.355, W. W. Norton & Company

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• I am afraid that those comments go back to the late 80's. At that time I was a skeptic - the argument based on Koch's postulates to try to distinguish between cause and association. Today I would regard the success of the many antiviral agents which lower the virus titers (to be expected) and also resolve the failure of the immune system (only expected if the virus is the cause of the failure) as a reasonable proof of the causation argument .

  Walter Gilbert

  Trying, Viruses, Agents

  Personal email message, momentofscience.blogspot.ru. July 11, 2006.

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• Olympics are three times more likely to be employed than people of a similar age, ethnic and socioeconomic status who have not been participating. It's a correlation, not a causation as far as the statisticians go, but the fascinating question is; Is there something in participation in sports, in community-building, confidence building, self-image-building, strength building, social networking - that greatly enhance employability?

  Timothy Shriver

  Sports, Self, People

  Source: abilitymagazine.com

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• The man who is unhappy will, as a rule, adopt an unhappy creed, while the man who is happy will adopt a happy creed; each may attribute his happiness or unhappiness to his beliefs, while the real causation is the other way round.

  Bertrand Russell

  Real, Men, Unhappy

  Bertrand Russell (2013). “The Conquest of Happiness”, p.89, W. W. Norton & Company

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