TIME AND CAUSATION:
WHERE (AND HOW) DOES
CAUSATION ARISE IN THE
ARCHITECTURE OF THE
COSMOS
Jenann Ismael
University of Arizona

"The aim of physics,
consciously or
unconsciously, has
always been to
discover what we may
call the causal
skeleton of the world."
Russell, The Analysis
of Matter (1955).
NEWTON
Causation didn’t appear in the presentation of
his theory at all.
 Mathematical equations, usually expressed in the
form of differential equations that give the rate of
change of a quantity over time
 There is no direction or asymmetry in the
determination.

RUSSELL (1913, “ON THE NOTION OF
CAUSE)

“Causation is a folk
notion that has no
place in mature
science.’
CARTWRIGHT

Dynamical laws
cannot play the role of
causal relations in
science because
specifically causal
information is needed
to distinguish effective
from ineffective
strategies for bringing
about ends.
SCM…
provides a precise formal framework for
representing causal relationships that is well
suited to causal search and discovery in science.
 can be used to define normative solutions to
causal inference and judgment problems.
 has facilitated new insights into the role of causal
thinking and cognition.

THE FORMALISM
Type causation is basic and relative to networks
 Networks are defined by collections of variables.
 Individual properties are represented as the
values of variables.
 Singular causal claims are derived from type
causation.

DAGS (DIRECTED, ACYCLIC
GRAPHS)
DAGs represent the causal relations among the
variables in a network.
 A variable Xi is a direct cause of another variable
Xj, relative to a variable set V, just in case there
is an intervention on Xi that will change the
value of Xj (or the probability distribution over
the values of Xj) when all variables in V except Xi
and Xj are held fixed.

DAGS
HOW DOES CAUSAL INFORMATION GO
BEYOND THE INFORMATION CAPTURED
IN DYNAMICAL LAWS?
Global dynamical laws give us information about
relations between global states at different times.
 Causal information is information about the
results of hypothetical interventions
 The antecedents to intervention counterfactuals
are nomologically impossible)

HOW IS CAUSAL KNOWLEDGE
POSSIBLE?
There are various ways of effectively randomizing
the values of a variable, so that we can treat
changes to the values of some variables as
interventions
 Causal knowledge rests on the fact that we can
effectively isolate systems in the laboratory,
manipulate the external input to them, and
observe the effects of our manipulations.

THE PHYSICAL SUBSTRUCTURE
THAT SUPPORTS CAUSAL BELIEF


In a classical world that decomposes into a
collection of rule-governed components and the
laws governing configurations are given in
terms of the laws governing components and
their interactions, causal information can be
extracted from laws governing components and
interactions.
So, facts about the results of hypothetical
interventions can be grounded in the local
nomological structure of the world
CAUSAL PROCESSES (PHIL DOWE)
Causal processes are chains of events related by
causal interactions.
 An interaction that involves the local exchange of
a conserved quantity.
 Causal processes can be defined more directly in
terms of microdynamical laws.

TEMPORAL ASYMMETRY
Causal relationships are temporally asymmetric.
 The underlying dynamical laws have no intrinsic
direction of determination.
 How do temporally asymmetric high-level causal
pathways arise from temporally symmetric
underlying laws?

DAVID ALBERT (TIME AND CHANCE)
The account has three
first principles:
 1. The Newtonian
laws of motion
 2. A Statistical
Postulate: Pr(S is in
microstate m/S is in
macrostate m*)
 3. The PastHypothesis: the
universe started in a
state of low entropy

RESERVATIONS
Albert tells the whole story at the global level,
but might be better applied at the level of local
adiabatically isolated subsystems of the world
 There is some dispute about the proper form of
the past hypothesis

WHICH PAST HYPOTHESIS?
Mathias Frische

It would do just as
well to assume a
causal Markov
condition, microscopic
randomness in the
initial, but not final
state of a system.
David Wallace

It’s notthe entropy,
but the randomness or
uniformity of the early
universe that really
matters.
THE ASYMMETRY OF AGENCY
If you start with a thermodynamic gradient, and
hold fixed all of the information embodied in the
present surveyable macroscopic state of the
world, it turns out that
 the probabilistic effect of local interventions will
propagate asymmetrically
 Local interventions on the world’s present state
will make a difference to the macroscopic future,
but leave the macroscopic past discernibly
untouched
 So strategic routes to brining about ends will run
from past to future

CAUSAL CONCEPTS
Introduce an agent
 Couple it informationally to the macroscopic
structure of the world
 Look to psychology and cognitive science for an
understanding of how causal concepts arise, and
the role they play in an internal inferential
network that is linked to experience at one end
and action at the other

STRUCTURE AT DIFFERENT LEVELS
the geometry of spacetime
 the matter content
 the temporally
symmetric microscopic
laws
 the emergent
macroscopic
asymmetries.
 creatures that use
information to guide
behavior, and develop
causal concepts

TWO QUESTIONS PHILOSOPHERS
ASK
1.
2.
Are causes inside or outside the head? Are they
part of the mind-independent fabric of reality,
or in the eyes of the observer?
Where does the asymmetry come from?
THIS ACCOUNT…
secures the objectivity of causal relations, making
them apt objects of scientific study, and
 is a good antidote to reifying causal relations as
compulsive asymmetric relationships between
localized events.

WHAT ABOUT THE QUANTUM???

If there are causal processes in quantum
mechanics, they have to happen at a more
fundamental level, and they don’t occur in spacetime.
THANK YOU!!!