cause

Self-consciousness

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Think about it – a cause of consciousness.  What does it mean?  Does it mean that the cause is operative in the identification of itself?  Or does it mean that the cause and effect work in some kind of relationship brought about by a difference occasioning an interaction?

But how are we to identify a difference without a point of comparison that is particular to the nature of consciousness?   And how can the observation of parallel changes in the operations of consciousness and its physical support processes prove sufficient to explain any differences or show that they are one and the same thing?

Mike Laidler

Vital factors

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No fact exists alone.  Every perceptible fact is the manifestation of a state of existence relative to the existence of other facts.  Thereby every fact is distinguishable by what it is and isn’t, including the ‘fact of existence’.  Then life is and is not a prominent feature of the way things are – because reality amounts to a continuum of changes that can be traced backwards as a convergence upon what was and forwards as a divergence from the past.  Consequently, whatever importance can or cannot be attached to the nature of ‘things in themselves’, it remains a fact that the difference they make is set within a wider reality.

In every case, we may perceive a fact in terms of its origins in something else – that is, relative to some other fact identifiable as its cause.  But even then we can never see an ‘original cause’ as it is, on its own, since every cause is manifestly incomplete in the absence of an effect.  In turn, effects are seen to make a difference when it becomes apparent that things differ from the way they were – a difference which at first contrasts with the state of ‘the cause’ as it was and afterwards with ‘the effect’ as it furthers a succession of changes.

However, causes do not explain existence.  For instance, we do not find the nature of life in the non-living states of its precursors; and it is only after its appearance that we can begin to look for its causes there.  So we perceive life as a fact that is wrapped up in a continuum of factors which we cannot explain fully in terms of the way things were – because of the essential ingredient of change. Therefore we can neither explain this vital factor retrospectively as an ‘originating cause’ nor in terms of the difference ‘it makes’, which becomes consummate only in the wake of things yet to be.

Mike Laidler

The maker of causes

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The idea that truth will free us from contradiction owes to our belief in logic as a basis for assessing the facts.  Logic has shown us a universe where up cannot be down, curved cannot be straight, one cannot be two, right cannot be wrong, facts cannot be fictions, after cannot come before etc.

However, more relativistic realisations lead us to understand that things are not necessarily either/ or – that a fact may be both one thing and another: uniform and diverse, clear and fuzzy, fixed and fluid, true and false, explicable and inexplicable – and that there are ways of understanding facts that defy the language by which we try to present our explanations as logically consistent.

Indeed our pride in being logical may actually be a source of ignorance.  For instance, if we are to understand the origins of the universe we may need to rethink the logic of causality, which errs towards the embroidery of our observations of change – as if the nature of the cause explains the nature of possibility, as if the cause equates to the ensuing difference, as if nature and possibility are explicable in terms of things as they were – as if it is the possibility of change that is ‘caused’ when that possibility is, in fact, the maker of causes.  Then, when the gaps in explanation gape and all else fails, we say the cause is chance, as if chance might be sufficient to explain the origin of everything, including the nature of possibility – including the possibility for chance to exist.

Likewise, no ‘cause of life’ has proved sufficient to explain the change that comes about, because whenever the change is attributed to pre-existing causes, it leaves unexplained a difference that cannot be found in things as they were – in the entirety of those unliving causes.

Mike Laidler