Cause and Effect

Human beings understand the world through memory and perception dealing with two fundamental things: Cause and effect. This allows humans to understand why something exists and determine based on logical rules or observation what the cause was - either to reproduce the event or prevent it ahead of time as to protect themselves or manipulate their environment.

As absurd as it sounds, the universe doesn’t care about the direction of time and as such, cause and effect on a fundamental level do not actually exist.

The universe isn’t a case of “anything can happen whenever it wants to” so much as the constituents of the universe behave in predictable ways and interact with other rules of physics. In this way, we can just as easily know the path an object has traveled as we can predict its future and the same is true of a majority of particles based on their inertia and direction.

Neither however, is cause and effect: It is merely a mathematical pattern which occurs in an ordinal fashion, one following the other. In much the same way 10 is followed by 11 and preceded by 9, 9 does not cause 10 and 10 does not cause 11: there is just an ordinal pattern.

Enlarging scale, these patterns at a macroscopic personal human level of tables, chairs, predators, food, shelter and mating potential all seem to follow laws of cause and effect - though these only occur because so many pattern systems are involved that they give rise to effects sufficiently similar to “cause and effect” that modelling the real world in our minds using the idea of cause and effect works in enough cases to be considered accurate.

Time does not have a direction for small systems, but does on the macroscopic world: For us, a spark causes an explosion where hydrogen merges with oxygen to become water and release a large amount of energy. Removing or changing any part of the explosion however, does not remove that there was a preceding spark: This is called leverage.

Leverage also works vice-verca: The lead of a pencil contains trace amounts of radioactive Carbon 14, created by nuclear bomb testing. If the lead did not contain carbon 14, this would imply no nuclear bombs had been detonated if the pencil were being used as the only observation as to whether or not bombs went off from a purely subjective viewpoint of a single person — that we can only know what we observe based on evidence.

This means the pencil if it is treated as the only source of information has a very high leverage on whether or not in perception that the bombs had or had not gone off. This perception over the last is leverage - and rather than calling it the cause of the detonations (which would be absurd), it is merely a record of the bombs as a proof.

When an event in the present informs a person about the past, their subjective perception is altered, creating memory. This distinction between records (which are objective) and memories (which are subjective) and cause and effect is important and none of these systems (records, memories, cause and effects) are fundamental parts of the universe itself: They are just “software” used by minds to try to anticipate the universe in a forward flowing direction of time based on observation.

Other species may have models for understanding the universe which do not revolve around systems of cause and effect and may instead understand patterns as their most fundamental model of universal comprehension. This largely removes subjective interpretation or subjective interpretation becomes a separate system from natural comprehension – that a creature can pretend to make our observations but cannot understand the feeling, tone or flavour of them.