Causation Quotes

As to the causation, of the feeling of meaningless, one may say, albeit in an oversimplifying way, that people have enough to live by but nothing to live for; they have the means but no meaning. ~ Viktor E. Frankl

While the powers of the Primal Cause lie in causation, it shows itself in process through thoughts, perception and conception. It is the power of the Primal Cause to decipher what is perceived from the ordered plane and conceive judgments through thoughts from the unordered. ~ Dew Platt

I don't believe in fate or destiny or that everything turns out for the best. I'll concede that everything happens for a reason but only as a very general statement of causation. Some lousy things happen for really lousy reasons. ~ Dessa

You are telling me that I did something because I was going to do something."
"Well, didn't you? You were there."
"No, I didn't - no ... well, maybe I did, but it didn't feel like it."
"Why should you expect it to? It was something totally new to your experience."
"But ... but - " Wilson took a deep breath and got control of himself. Then he reached back into his academic philosophical concepts and produced the notion he had been struggling to express. "It denies all reasonable theories of causation. You would have me believe that causation can be completely circular. I went through because I came back from going through to persuade myself to go through. That's silly."
"Well, didn't you? ~ Robert A. Heinlein

Correlation is not causation. ~ Kenneth L. Woodward

One of the first things taught in introductory statistics textbooks is that correlation is not causation. It is also one of the first things forgotten. ~ Thomas Sowell

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

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

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. ~ G.K. Chesterton

There is a difference between correlation and causation - many people mistake one for the other ~ Steven D. Levitt

Don't confuse correlation and causation. Almost all great records eventually dwindle ... ~ Charlie Munger

Causation extraction makes Jack a dull reader. ~ Rabih Alameddine

The majority of people are carried along like the falling stone, obedient to environment, outside influences and internal moods, desires etc., not to speak of the desires and wills of others stronger than themselves, heredity, environment, and suggestion, carrying them along without resistance on their part, or the exercise of the Will. Moved like the pawns on the checkerboard of life, they play their parts and are laid aside after the game is over. But the Masters, knowing the rules of the game, rise above the plane of material life, and placing themselves in touch with the higher powers of their nature, dominate their own moods, characters, qualities, and polarity, as well as the environment surrounding them and thus become Movers in the game, instead of Pawns - Causes instead of Effects. The Masters do not escape the Causation of the higher planes, but fall in with the higher laws, and thus master circumstances on the lower plane. They thus form a conscious part of the Law, instead of being mere blind instruments. While they Serve on the Higher Planes, they Rule on the Material Plane. ~ Three Initiates

The sceptical attack [on free will philosophy's concept of libertarian freedom] amounts simply to a dogmatic determination to describe the world only in terms that already exclude freedom as a distinctive feature of human life. The sceptic assumes that the world can contain no power other than causation; and that any event that is not causally determined by prior events must just be random. But if we insist on describing the world only in these terms, then of course it may well appear that libertarian freedom is not possible and cannot exist. But by what right do we so exclude such freedom from the very outset? ~ Thomas Pink

Call to mind the whole of Substance of which you have a very small portion, and the whole of time whereof a small hair's breadth has been determined for you, and of the chain of causation whereof you are how small a link. ~ Marcus Aurelius

An obvious example of this reverse causation would be pregnant women, who are driven to fatten by hormonal changes. This hormonal drive induces hunger and lethargy as a result. In the context of evolution, these expanded fat stores would assure the availability of the necessary calories to nurse the infants after birth and assure the viability of the offspring. ~ Gary Taubes

As for the law of moral causation ('karma'): this is human justice dressed up as cosmic justice and then imputed to the impersonal workings of the natural world. ~ Stephen Batchelor

PROLOGUE
Have you ever had the feeling that someone was playing with your destiny? If so, this book is for you!
Destiny is certainly something people like to talk about. Wherever we go, we hear it mentioned in conversations or proverbs that seek to lay bare its mysteries.
If we analyse people's attitude towards destiny a little, we find straight away that at one extreme are those who believe that everything in life is planned by a higher power and that therefore things always happen for a reason, even though our limited human understanding cannot comprehend why.
In this perspective, everything is preordained, regardless of what we do or don't do.
At the other extreme we find the I can do it! believers. These focus on themselves: anything is possible if done with conviction, as part of the plan that they have drawn up themselves as the architects of their own Destiny.
We can safely say that everything happens for a reason. Whether it's because of decisions we take or simply because circumstances determine it, there is always more causation than coincidence in life. But sometimes such strange things happen! The most insignificant occurrence or decision can give way to the most unexpected futures.
Indeed, such twists of fate may well be the reason why you are reading my book now. Do you have any idea of the number of events, circumstances and decisions that had to conspire for me to write this and for you to be reading it now? There are so m ~ Gonzalo Guma

Internal and external nature, mind and matter, are in time and space, and are bound by the law of causation. ~ Swami Vivekananda

If there is anything in the world which I do firmly believe in, it is the universal validity of the law of causation. ~ Thomas Huxley

My aim is to argue that the universe can come into existence without intervention, and that there is no need to invoke the idea of a Supreme Being in one of its numerous manifestations. ~ Peter Atkins

What the innate apparatus of the mind contributes is a set of abstract conceptual frameworks that organize our experience-space, time, substance, causation, number, and logic (today we might add other domains like living things, other minds, and language). But each of these is an empty form that must be filled in by actual instances provided by the senses or the imagination. As Kant put it, his treatise "admits absolutely no divinely implanted or innate representations....There must, however, be a ground in the subject which makes it possible for these representations to originate in this and no other manner....This ground is at least innate." Kant's version of nativism, with abstract organizing frameworks but not actual knowledge built in to the mind, is the version that is most viable today, and can be found, for example, in Chomskyan linguistics, evolutionary psychology, and the approach to cognitive development called domain specificity. One could go so far as to say that Kant foresaw the shape of a solution to the nature-nurture debate: characterize the organization of experience, whatever it is, that makes useful learning possible. ~ Steven Pinker

The law of Karma is the law of causation. ~ Swami Vivekananda

Often the features metaphysicians are interested in, like causation, time, and essence, involve features that seem so basic or are so generally embedded in the way we experience the world that it takes special attention and focus to draw them out and develop an account of their nature. ~ L.A. Paul

It is always dangerous to treat simultaneity as causation ~ David Harvey

If you are the effect of it, you caused it. ~ Meir Ezra

He who wishes to explain Generation must take for his theme the organic body and its constituent parts, and philosophize about them; he must show how these parts originated, and how they came to be in that relation in which they stand to each other. But he who learns to know a thing not only from its phenomena, but also its reasons and causes; and who, therefore, not by the phenomena merely, but by these also, is compelled to say: 'The thing must be so, and it cannot be otherwise; it is necessarily of such a character; it must have such qualities; it is impossible for it to possess others' - understands the thing not only historically but truly philosophically, and he has a philosophic knowledge of it. Our own Theory of Generation is to be such a philosphic comprehension of an organic body, a very different one from one merely historical. (1764) ~ Caspar Friedrich Wolff

Quantum fluctuations are, at their root, completely a-causal, in the sense that cause and effect and ordering of events in time is not a part of how these fluctuations work. Because of this, there seem not to be any correlations built into these kinds of fluctuations because 'law' as we understand the term requires some kind of cause-and-effect structure to pre-exist. Quantum fluctuations can precede physical law, but it seems that the converse is not true. So in the big bang, the establishment of 'law' came after the event itself, but of course even the concept of time and causality may not have been quite the same back then as they are now. ~ Sten F. Odenwald

Distinguishing between correlation and causation is critical to our understanding of the biology and conservation of monarchs and milkweeds. Turning back to our study of chocolate: countrywide spending on science also correlates with per capita income, the latter of which correlates with chocolate consumption (at least in the Western world). Even so, I would happily participate in a controlled study to determine the influence of chocolate consumption on scientific discoveries. ~ Anurag Agrawal

The common denominator in all these problems is that the world is not a line of dominoes in which each event causes exactly one event and is caused by exactly one event. The world is a tissue of causes and effects that criss and cross in tangled patterns. The embarrassments for Hume's two theories of causation (conjunction and counterfactuals) can be diagrammed as a family of networks in which the lines fan in or out or loop around, as in the diagram on the following page. ~ Steven Pinker

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

[G]enes make enzymes, and enzymes control the rates of chemical processes. Genes do not make "novelty seeking" or any other complex and overt behavior. Predisposition via a long chain of complex chemical reactions, mediated through a more complex series of life's circumstances, does not equal identification or even causation. ~ Stephen Jay Gould

Every socialist wishes to revolutionize society from the economic angle and all the blessings he expects are to come through a change in economic institutions. This of course implies a theory about social causation - the theory that the economic pattern is the really operative element in the sum total of the phenomena that we call society. ~ Joseph Alois Schumpeter

Generalizations in biology are almost invariably of a probabilistic nature. As one wit has formulated it, there is only one universal law in biology: 'All biological laws have exceptions.' This probabilistic conceptualization contrasts strikingly with the view during the early period of the scientific revolution that causation in nature is regulated by laws that can be stated in mathematical terms. Actually, this idea occurred apparently first to Pythagoras. It has remained a dominant idea, particularly in the physical sciences, up to the present day. Again and again it was made the basis of some comprehensive philosophy, but taking very different forms in the hands of various authors. With Plato it gave rise to essentialism, with Galileo to a mechanistic world picture, and with Descartes to the deductive method. All three philosophies had a fundamental impact on biology. ~ Ernst W. Mayr

A certain motion becomes understood when it is referred to a force; certain sensations, to matter; certain changes outside, to law; certain changes in thought, to mind; certain order singly, to causation - and joined to time, to law. ~ Swami Vivekananda

I bump into a group of girls congregating around a locker. Jessica, Willow (who is notably the only Willow enrolled in our 397-student class and in our 1,579-student school), and Abby. Miney has labeled them in my notebook, in block letters and underlined with a Sharpie:THE POPULAR BITCHES.

When she first used this designation, Miney had to give me a long lecture about how this wasn't an oxymoron, how someone could be both popular, which I presumed meant that lots of people liked you, and at the same time also be a bitch, which I presumed would have the opposite outcome. Apparently popularity in the context of high school has a negative correlation with people actually liking you but a high correlation with people wanting to be your friend. After careful consideration, this makes sense, though in my case, I am both an outlier and a great example of the fact that correlation does not imply causation. I am nice to everyone but without any upside: People neither like me nor want to be my friend. ~ Julie Buxbaum

PROLOGUE Equinox: Whispers of Destiny
Have you ever had the feeling that someone was playing with your destiny? If so, this book is for you.
Destiny is certainly a topic people like to talk about. Wherever we go, we hear it mentioned in conversations or proverbs that seek to lay bare its mysteries.

If we analyze people's attitude towards destiny a little, we find straight away that at one extreme there are those who believe that everything in life is planned by a higher power and that therefore things always happen for a reason, even though our limited human understanding cannot comprehend why. In that perspective, everything is preordained, regardless of what we do or don't do.

At the other extreme we find the I can do it! Believers. These focus on themselves: anything is possible if done with conviction, as part of the plan that they have drawn up themselves as the architects of their own destiny.

We can safely say that everything happens for a reason. Whether it's because of decisions we take or simply because circumstances determine it, there is always more causation than coincidence in life. But sometimes such strange things happen. The most insignificant occurrence or decision can give way to the most unexpected futures.

Indeed, such twists of fate may well be the reason why you are reading my book now. Do you have any idea of the number of events, circumstances and decisions that had to conspire for me to writ ~ Gonzalo Guma

Everything that we know is within our universe, and everything within our universe is moulded by the conditions of space, time, and causation. ~ Swami Vivekananda

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

This causation exists as a streamed organization of constantly fluid potential. Anything that can be must first hold the streaming potential to be. It is soul.
It is always potential. It is never static. It is never rigid. Its essence is all these, which means it can not be anything other and be the Primal Cause. It is never nothing. Nothing does not exist with it. It is something. It is anything. It is everything. At the same time! Just like your consciousness. Pure Unordered Potential! ~ Dew Platt

Isn't language loss a good thing, because fewer languages mean easier communication among the world's people? Perhaps, but it's a bad thing in other respects. Languages differ in structure and vocabulary, in how they express causation and feelings and personal responsibility, hence in how they shape our thoughts. There's no single purpose "best" language; instead, different languages are better suited for different purposes. For instance, it may not have been an accident that Plato and Aristotle wrote in Greek, while Kant wrote in German. The grammatical particles of those two languages, plus their ease in forming compound words, may have helped make them the preeminent languages of western philosophy. Another example, familiar to all of us who studied Latin, is that highly inflected languages (ones in which word endings suffice to indicate sentence structure) can use variations of word order to convey nuances impossible with English. Our English word order is severely constrained by having to serve as the main clue to sentence structure. If English becomes a world language, that won't be because English was necessarily the best language for diplomacy. ~ Jared Diamond

Some lessons you learn gradually and some you learn in a sudden moment, like a flash going off in a dark room. I sift and rake and dig around in my vivid recollections of young Sean on the floor in summer, and I try to see what makes him tick, but I know a secret about young Sean, I guess, that he kind of ends up telling the world: nothing makes him tick. It just happens all by itself, tick tick tick tick tick, without any proximal cause, with nothing underneath it. He is like a jellyfish adrift in the sea, throbbing quietly in the warm waves of the surf just off the highway where the dusty white vans with smoked windows and indistinct decals near their wheel hubs roll innocently past. ~ John Darnielle

The next thing you do is center yourself, get to that Effortless Action place, and then you present yourself in the middle of the environment you want to Create a Cause in, from a perfectly centered position. And then you place your Intention on the desired Result. As soon as you do that, "accidents" begin to happen. Jung calls them "synchronicities". Be prepared for those accidents to happen. You know they're going to happen. You don't know when or what they're going to be. Every one is a surprise. But every time an accident occurs in a situation, you pick it up and say Thank you to Mother Nature for creating this accident. And place it on the focus of your Intention. The causation thus begins, and your idea begins to become manifested. You're building a bridge, you're building a house, you're building a relationship with your girl friend or boy friend. You're bombarded with chaos and accidents, but every time something happens that aligns with your intention, thank the universe for it, position it, stroke it, mould it, "kiss it", as Blake would say. And go back to the beginning. I'm drawing a closed loop to fulfil your intention. Correct things to be sure that the results you're getting are what you really want. Get centered again. Be alert for more "accidents". And Mother Nature will produce what you desire. And She'll thank you for it. Mother Nature is a living principle that is dedicated to your well being, but you've got to ask before She can do it. So She's sitting the ~ Dean Brown

The very hope of experimental philosophy, its expectation of constructing the sciences into a true philosophy of nature, is basedon induction, or, if you please, the a priori presumption, that physical causation is universal; that the constitution of nature is written in its actual manifestations, and needs only to be deciphered by experimental and inductive research; that it is not a latent invisible writing, to be brought out by the magic of mental anticipation or metaphysical mediation. ~ Chauncey Wright

When we predicate of any thing an abstract name, we affirm of the thing that it is one or other of these five things; that it is a case of Existence, or of Co-existence, or of Causation, or of Sequence, or of Resemblance. ~ John Stuart Mill

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

Science was tearing through the 'fine-spun ecclesiastical cobwebs' to behold a new cosmos, in which our Earth is merely an 'eccentric speck' - a world of evolution 'and unchanging causation'. It invited new ways of thinking. It demanded a new rationale for belief. With science's truths the only accessible ones, 'blind faith' was no longer admirable but 'the one unpardonable sin'. ~ Adrian Desmond

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

Fate is the endless chain of causation, whereby things are; the reason or formula by which the world goes on. ~ Citium Zeno

Systemic causation must be taught if the effects of global warming are to be seriously understood. The ~ George Lakoff

Can we say, in this case, that the cause of a cause is the relevant cause? ~ Johnny Rich

Amid increasing chaos, here lay the potential dominants. Much action and the play of forces even on a huge scale and with enormous material effects is often irrelevant, and counts for little or nothing in the final result: but along the chain of commanding causation even the smallest events are vital. It is these which should be studied and pondered over; for in them is revealed the profound significance of human choice and the sublime responsibility of men. No one can tell that he may not some day set a stone rolling or take or neglect some ordinary step which in its consequences will alter the history of the world. ~ Winston S. Churchill

[Tolstoy] denounced [many historians'] lamentable tendency to simplify. The experts stumble onto a battlefield, into a parliament or public square, and demand, "Where is he? Where is he?" "Where is who?" "The hero, of course! The leader, the creator, the great man!" And having found him, they promptly ignore all his peers and troops and advisors. They close their eyes and abstract their Napoleon from the mud and the smoke and the masses on either side, and marvel at how such a figure could possibly have prevailed in so many battles and commanded the destiny of an entire continent. "There was an eye to see in this man," wrote Thomas Carlyle about Napoleon in 1840, "a soul to dare and do. He rose naturally to be the King. All men saw that he was such."
But Tolstoy saw differently. "Kings are the slaves of history," he declared. "The unconscious swarmlike life of mankind uses every moment of a king's life as an instrument for its purposes." Kings and commanders and presidents did not interest Tolstoy. History, his history, looks elsewhere: it is the study of infinitely incremental, imperceptible change from one state of being (peace) to another (war).
The experts claimed that the decisions of exceptional men could explain all of history's great events. For the novelist, this belief was evidence of their failure to grasp the reality of an incremental change brought about by the multitude's infinitely small actions. ~ Daniel Tammet

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

The fundamental activity of medical science is to determine the ultimate causation of disease. ~ Wilfred Trotter

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

Although Adam Smith is today often regarded as a "conservative" figure, he in fact attacked some of the dominant ideas and interests of his own times. Moreover, the idea of a spontaneously self-equilibrating system - the market economy - first developed by the Physiocrats and later made part of the tradition of classical economics by Adam Smith, represented a radically new departure, not only in analysis of social causation but also in seeing a reduced role for political, intellectual, or other elites as guides or controllers of the masses. ~ Thomas Sowell

The Guardian's headline is 'How Going Green May Make You Mean.' We're inclined to think the chain of causation runs the other way - that people who are jerks to begin with gravitate toward verdant sanctimony. ~ James Taranto

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

Keats mourned that the rainbow, which as a boy had been for him a magic thing, had lost its glory because the physicists had found it resulted merely from the refraction of the sunlight by the raindrops. Yet knowledge of its causation could not spoil the rainbow for me. I am sure that it is not given to man to be omniscient. There will always be something left to know, something to excite the imagination of the poet and those attuned to the great world in which they live (p. 64) ~ Robert Frost

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

If the social stress is physical, sexual, or emotional abuse, the way to treat the depression is to stop the abuse. Unfortunately, advocates of the biochemical treatment of depression have gone along with the view of academic theory and popular culture that the problem is entirely within the skull of the victim. Enthusiasm for biochemical treatment and research is partly due to the fact that it helps perpetuate the myth that suicide and depression should be treated by changing the victim, not by changing ourselves. As long as we have a narrow view of the causes of biochemical imbalance, such as limiting it to innate genetic defects, we can practice denial on the social complicity in the causation of suicide. The narrow view does nothing to help reduce pain and increase resources for the millions of people whose problems do not respond to medications. It also deprives us of an opportunity for progress in a much broader area for social reform. The dynamics behind the oppression of the suicidal is similar to the dynamics of other forms of injustice; progress in one area can support progress in other areas. ~ David L. Conroy

An inference of perspective,
a glimpse of regularity,
causation of habit,
and the only recurrence:
my faith in you. ~ Camilo Garzon

In one of history's most bizarre chains of causation, the brutal, efficient newcomers were driven by a hunger for, of all things, culinary ingredients that today lie largely unused in most Western kitchens. ~ William J. Bernstein

The laborious process of causation which sooner or later will bring about every possible effect, including, consequently, those which one believed to be least possible, naturally slow at times, is rendered slower still by our desire (which in seeking to accelerate only obstructs it), by our very existence, and comes to fruition only when we have ceased to desire, and sometimes ceased to live. ~ Marcel Proust

The great unity which true science seeks is found only by beginning with our knowledge of God, and coming down from Him along the stream of causation to every fact and event that affects us. ~ Howard Crosby

From the mid-1970s, I also started work on the causation and prevention of famines. ~ Amartya Sen

Space-time-causation, or name-and-form, is what is called Maya. ~ Swami Vivekananda

Generations of Humeans have… been misled into offering analyses of causation and of natural law that have been far too weak because they had no basis for accepting the existence of either cause and effect or natural laws… Hume's scepticism about cause and effect and his agnosticism about the external world are of course jettisoned the moment he leaves his study. ~ Antony Flew

It looks as if the offspring have eyes so that they can see well (bad, teleological, backward causation), but that's an illusion. The offspring have eyes because their parents' eyes did see well (good, ordinary, forward causation). ~ Steven Pinker

In philosophy, metaphorical pluralism is the norm. Our most important abstract philosophical concepts, including time, causation, morality, and the mind, are all conceptualized by multiple metaphors, sometimes as many as two dozen. What each philosophical theory typically does is to choose one of those metaphors as "right," as the true literal meaning of the concept. One reason there is so much argumentation across philosophical theories is that different philosophers have chosen different metaphors as the "right" one, ignoring or taking as misleading all other commonplace metaphorical structurings of the concept. Philosophers have done this because they assume that a concept must have one and only one logic. But the cognitive reality is that our concepts have multiple metaphorical structurings. ~ George Lakoff

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

More often than not correlation is mistaken for causation. ~ Alok Karkera

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

To establish evolutionary interrelatedness invariably requires exhibiting similarities between organisms. Within Darwinism, there's only one way to connect such similarities, and that's through descent with modification driven by the Darwinian mechanism. But within a design-theoretic framework, this possibility, though not precluded, is also not the only game in town. It's possible for descent with modification instead to be driven by telic processes inherent in nature (and thus by a form of design). Alternatively, it's possible that the similarities are not due to descent at all but result from a similarity of conception, just as designed objects like your TV, radio, and computer share common components because designers frequently recycle ideas and parts. Teasing apart the effects of intelligent and natural causation is one of the key questions confronting a design-theoretic research program. Unlike Darwinism, therefore, intelligent design has no immediate and easy answer to the question of common descent.

Darwinists necessarily see this as a bad thing and as a regression to ignorance. From the design theorists' perspective, however, frank admissions of ignorance are much to be preferred to overconfident claims to knowledge that in the end cannot be adequately justified. Despite advertisements to the contrary, science is not a juggernaut that relentlessly pushes back the frontiers of knowledge. Rather, science is an interconnected web of theoretical and factual c ~ William A. Dembski

The Sravaka (literally 'hearer,' the name given by Mahayana Buddhists to contemplatives of the Hinayana school) fails to perceive that Mind, as it is in itself, has no stages, no causation. Disciplining himself in the cause, he has attained the result and abides in the samadhi (contemplation) of Emptiness for ever so many aeons. However enlightened in this way, the Sravaka is not at all on the right track. From the point of view of the Bodhisattva, this is like suffering the torture of hell. The Sravaka has buried himself in Emptiness and does not know how to get out of his quiet contemplation, for he has no insight into the Buddha-nature itself. Mo Tsu When Enlightenment is perfected, a Bodhisattva is free from the bondage of things, but does not seek to be delivered from things. Samsara (the world of becoming) is not hated by him, nor is Nirvana loved. When perfect Enlightenment shines, it is neither bondage nor deliverance. Prunabuddha-sutra ~ Aldous Huxley

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