溫故知新 Old wisdom, today’s insight — ONGO
Is Cause and Effect Something We Lay Over the World by Habit?
The "power" by which one event brings about another — have we ever truly seen it?
We never can observe any tie between them.
When Hume stripped necessity from causation, one of the pillars of reason that had upheld the world since Descartes trembled. Kant, taking the shock, moved causation from the world into the mind's necessary form for organizing experience, seeking to pass beyond Hume's doubt. Yet the question revived in twentieth-century science in an unforeseen way: correlation is not causation, and telling "what causes what" remains among the hardest problems. Hume's billiard ball still rolls today, reminding us how easily we mistake correlation for cause.
In an age flooded with correlations dressed up as causes, Hume's question — "is this truly the cause of that?" — becomes the most practical tool of discernment.
One billiard ball strikes another.
📝I, Too, Stand Before It
One billiard ball strikes another. We say the first "made" the second move. But Hume asks: what we actually saw was only one motion followed by another — nowhere the necessary tie binding the two. Causation, then, is not a power in the world but something the mind, habituated by repetition, lays over it as expectation. I read this not as demolishing the world but as making me look humbly again at the "because" I took for granted. I stand before that "because" too.
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