The Nature of Causality in Physics and Consciousness

Causality, as commonly understood, may not exist in the universe's equations, revealing a humbler connection in discrete computational models.

### Rethinking Causality: The Intersection of Physics, Free Will, and Consciousness
* 🔍 Causality is often perceived as a straightforward concept, where **one event causes another**, but this definition becomes slippery when applied to complex phenomena like the **Earth's orbit around the Sun**.
* 🌌 Einstein's equations describe the motion of celestial bodies **without invoking causality**, raising questions about whether such a concept is even **relevant in the realm of physics**.
* 🌀 The idea that the universe operates according to **immutable laws** suggests that both historical events and physical phenomena might be seen as "**just one thing after another**," further complicating our understanding of **causality**.
* 🤔 The struggle to reconcile our perception of **free will** with the **deterministic nature of the universe** adds another layer of complexity, as many people find it difficult to accept that they might not possess **true free will**.
* ⚡ The hard problem of consciousness highlights the challenge of **understanding subjective experience**, making it hard to accept that humans, like inanimate objects, might also be **bound by the same natural laws**.
* 🔗 Recent theories propose that the universe could be modeled as a **discrete computational system**, where applications of rules create **causal connections**, albeit in a **much humbler sense** than traditionally understood.
* 📉 This revised conception of causality, while limited, is **crucial for understanding the complexities of modern physics**, including special relativity and quantum mechanics, without invoking divine or mystical explanations.
* 🌐 Embracing this nuanced view of causality allows for a **deeper exploration of the universe's workings**, bridging the gap between **abstract equations** and the **chaotic reality** we experience.

do you know what causality is? If you do, let me know because I'm not so sure. I've never come across a conception of causality that makes sense to me. After all, our universe seems to follow simple equations like this one, and there's no mention of causality in these equations. It makes me think that maybe there's no such thing as causality unless... well, here's the thing. I'm no longer sure that our universe does follow these continuous equations. I'm beginning to think that at the smallest scale, our universe might evolve through discrete computation. If that turns out to be true, it allows for a limited conception of causality. After all, it's causality, Jim, but not as we know. [Music] It... what is causality? You might think it's a silly question. I mean, causality, it's straightforward, isn't it? It's when one thing causes another. If I throw this ball, it flies through the air. The motion of my hand causes the ball to move through the air. That's causality.

Right, well sure. I mean, that gives us an idea of what we mean when we say the word cause, but I still haven't said what causality is. I confess that I find the concept of causality slippery. Sure, if we think in the abstract, we can say things like the cause must precede the effect, the cause must create the necessary conditions for the effect, the cause must increase the probability of the effect, or if we dare be less timid, the cause must necessitate the effect. But the moment we try to apply the concept of causality to real phenomena, these abstractions prove meaningless. Let me show you what I mean. Take the orbit of the Earth around the Sun. Even the Catholic Church now concedes that this is a real phenomenon. Here's an equation that describes the orbit of the Earth around the Sun rather precisely. Einstein's equation tells you everything you need to know about how the Sun, the Earth, and the various other conglomerations of matter in the vicinity war space and time in such a

way that the Earth follows its slightly wobbly elliptical orbit around the sun. I'll say that again. That equation tells you everything you need to know. So, where's the causality in this phenomenon? Can we say that the Sun causes the Earth to move as it does? Can we say that the Earth causes the sun to move as it does? Can we say that the Sun and the Earth cause the warping of space and time, and that the warping of space and time causes the motion of the Sun and the Earth? Well, we could, but any such statement about what causes what seems redundant because I'll say it again. The equation tells you everything you need to know, and there's no mention of causality in the equation. These statements about the Earth causing the sun to move as it does or the sun causing the Earth to move as it does don't even conform with our abstract ideas of causality. Our most basic abstract idea of causality is that the cause must precede the effect. Does the sun precede the Earth?

does the Earth precede the sun? These questions are meaningless. Do the Sun and the Earth precede the warping of space and time? Does the warping of space and time precede the motion of the Sun and the Earth? Again, these questions are meaningless. There's no precedence; it all happens at the same time. There's no cause, no effect. Einstein's equations don't specify matter as the cause and motion as the effect any more than they specify motion as the cause and matter as the effect. Things aren't looking good for causality here. We have a real phenomenon: the orbit of the Earth around the Sun, and there's just no Ro for causality. Here's my conjecture: there's no such thing as causality, at least there's no such thing as causality in the common sense of the word, no such thing as the causality we invoke when we say that the motion of my hand causes the ball to move through the air. Sure, when it comes to history in all its chaos and complexity, you can talk

about causality. You can write an essay about the causes of the First World War, or if you really want to, I'm not so sure how much sense such an essay can make. I tend to think that history is just one thing after another, but sure, the causes of the First World War, that makes some kind of sense. But when it comes to physics, the kinds of phenomena like the orbit of the Earth around the Sun that can be described by an equation, there's no place for causality. I'll say it one more time: whether it's Newton's equations of gravitation and motion, Einstein's equations for the warping of space and time, or whatever formulation might supersede these theories in the future, the equations tell you everything you need to know. Here's the catch: if you think that the Universe evolves according to immutable laws of nature rather than, say, divine intervention, occult forces, or magic spells, then it's difficult to argue that there's a place for causality in history any more than there's a place for

causality in physics. If you think that the Universe evolves according to immutable laws of nature, then the only difference between the orbit of the Earth around the Sun and the First World War is the chaos and the complexity and the endless poetry. Physics and history are the same, just one thing after another. If we think that the Universe evolves according to immutable laws of nature, then why do we insist on causality? Well, here's another conjecture. We insist on causality because we insist on Free Will. It's easy to look at the Sun and the Earth and accept that there's no causality; it's all just equations. It's more difficult when we ourselves are involved. When I think about my throwing the ball, I placed the emphasis on the I. I decided to throw the ball. Sure, the Sun and the Earth just follow equations, but not me. I'm Different. The Sun and the Earth have no choice, but I do. I decided to throw the ball, but I could have decided not to throw it. I have free will. Sure, when it

comes to inanimate objects like the Earth and the Sun. Maybe it's just equations. Maybe there's no place for causality. But when it comes to me, well, I have free will. I decided to throw the ball. I caused the ball to fly through the air. Our concept of causality comes from our concept of free will. There's only one problem with this line of reasoning. There's no such thing as free will. Okay, I realized that by saying that there's no such thing as free will, I've just lost half my audience. There's something I've noticed about Free Will. No one over the age of 22 ever changes their mind about free will. All sorts of people of all sorts of ages changed their minds about all sorts of things, about whether God exists, about whether to have children, about the best flavor of ice cream. But if at the age of 22 you still believe in free will, then there's nothing I can say that'll change your mind. Why do we find it so hard to accept that there might be no such thing as

free will. Part of the problem is that, well, it feels like we have free will. Actually, it's deeper than that. Part of the problem is that it feels like anything at all to be ourselves. This is the hard problem of Consciousness. I can't tell you precisely how it feels to be me, but I can tell you that it does feel like something. If it didn't feel like anything at all to be me, if I were an ultimate on rather than a conscious human, then it wouldn't feel like I have free will. If that were the case, it wouldn't be so hard to accept that we humans, like the Sun and the Earth, just follow equations and that we, like the rest of the universe, evolve according to immutable laws of nature, that there's no need for a concept of causality. I don't have a solution to the hard problem of Consciousness. I don't know why it feels like something to be me. That's why they call it the hard problem of Consciousness. It's a hard problem to solve.

but I do have an idea why, quite apart from the fact that it feels like we have free will, we find it so hard to accept that we might be as bound by the immutable laws of nature as the Sun and the Earth. It goes back to the chaos and the complexity. It's difficult to overstate how much more chaotic and complex my throwing the more is than the orbit of the Earth around the Sun. Think about it: the mechanism by which my muscles contracted in the precise configurations required to move my hand in such a way as to throw the ball is not too complicated. Electrical impulses propagated along the nerves from my brain to my muscles; sodium and calcium ions were released into the muscle fibers; these fibers contracted. I mean, even here, it's tempting to lapse into the language of causality: the electrical impulses caused the release of the sodium and calcium ions; the sodium and calcium ions caused the muscle fibers to contract. But here, at least, it's not too hard to imagine that it all just follows.

from the biological pathways, which follow from the chemical reactions, which follow from the physical equations. Call it causality if you must, but it's all just one thing after another. Where we run into trouble is in tracing those electrical impulses back into my brain. What was the mechanism by which the neurons in my brain fired in the precise configuration required to move my hand in such a way as to throw the ball? Well, that's an astonishingly, ridiculously, impossibly complex question. The answer of the Free Will believer that I decided to throw the ball explains nothing. Any serious answer to that question must address the following realities: I threw the ball at the point in this episode which I first mentioned during the B. It seemed appropriate when I wrote the script of this episode. I is a simple visual example of what we think of as causality that involved what we think of as free will. I actually originally thought of throwing a stone, but I decided it would be better if I threw a ball since it's a clear demonstration of Val.

and so why did I write this script? Well, I wrote this script because I wanted to tackle the question of what causality is, since it's a natural question to arise from my previous episode on causal invariance, as well as an essential question to answer ahead of my upcoming episodes on the causal graph. I launched the last Theory because I heard about war physics, found a compelling opportunity to fight about it, and make videos about it. As I explored it, I was well placed to do so because I'd spent half a lifetime reading physics, reading philosophy, writing books, writing code, creating simulations, creating visualizations, and making movies. These predilections were made possible by the circumstances of my life, including the Technologies of paper, computers, cameras, and the culture of Education, Enterprise, and Freedom. The civilization in which I find myself arrived at these technologies and this culture after thousands of years of exploration, commerce, persuasion, and revolution. If the circumstances of my life made my reading, writing, coding, and creating possible, my genes too predispose me to these directions. My

genes are an improvable combination of nucleotides in spirals that have evolved over billions of years of life on Earth, influenced by an unimaginable number of incidents in which organisms with different combinations of nucleotides thrived or wasted away. These nucleotides are made up of atoms formed in stars, scattered through space through supernova explosions, made up of particles formed in the first few seconds of the universe. I don't mean to be grandiose, but the story of how I came to throw the ball is the story of the universe. It's easy to accept that the parabolic path of the ball through the air follows simple equations. It's harder to accept that the billions of years of chaos and complexity that lay through particles, atoms, nucleotides, genes, evolution, proteins, and neurons, not to mention all of human history, to my throwing the ball also follows simple equations. That's just harder to accept. I don't blame you if you're tempted to collapse this low-level chaos and complexity into a more harmonious

high-level concepts such as God, the human soul, or free will. And if you do, I can see how the concept of causality might come along for the ride. God decrees human souls commit acts of virtue and vice. I, in an exercise of free will, decide. But if you hold out hope that there might be equations that tell you everything you need to know about how the universe evolves without resort to any such Dex smina, then you might be inclined to conclude that there's no such thing as causality. And yet, I do think that there's a role for causality in physics. I wouldn't be making videos about causal invariance and causal graphs if I didn't. There is such a thing as causality; it just ain't what you think it is. In this episode, I've been talking about equations like this one in which there's no role for causality. Lately, however, I've been beginning to wonder whether such continuous equations, though they undoubtedly capture the behavior of our universe at a large scale, might not be

mere approximations to a discrete computational model at a small scale. Warr physics postulates that the Universe might be modeled by a hypergraph of nodes and edges that evolves over time through the repeated application of rules in this discrete computational model of space and time. Physics is literally just one thing after another. There are no Godlike equations that trace the simple stable orbit of the Earth around the Sun over billions of years, at least not at the smallest scale, not at the scale of the nodes and the edges of the hypergraph. There's just one application of a rule to the hypergraph, then another application of a rule to the hypergraph, then another application of a rule to the hypergraph, and all the chaos and complexity that arises from these simple applications of a rule to the hypergraph. And it's here, in these applications of a rule to the hypergraph, that we uncover a role for causality. After all, if one application of a rule to the hypergraph plays a part in creating the necessary conditions for

another application of a rule to the hypergraph. We can say that there's a causal connection between those two applications of a rule to the hypergraph. It's not much. I'm not saying that one application of a rule to the hypergraph causes the other application of a rule to the hypergraph. I'm just saying that there's a causal connection between them. This is not your grandmother's causality. It turns out, though, that this humbler conception of causal connection is crucial to our understanding of the universe. According to the Warfare model, it takes us to the causal graph, and that takes us to special relativity, general relativity, and quantum mechanics. There's no de ex machina here, no God, no human soul, no free will. But if you're willing to accept that causality ain't what you think it is, if you're willing to embrace this humbler concept of causal connection, well, we can go a long way with that. [Music]

Causality ain't what you think it is

The Last Theory

Causality is often seen as straightforward, but its concept can be slippery and abstract.

The speaker questions the traditional understanding of causality, especially when applying it to real phenomena like the Earth's orbit around the Sun, where equations seem to provide all the answers without mentioning causality.

The speaker suggests that the universe might evolve through discrete computation at the smallest scale, allowing for a limited conception of causality.

The Question of Causality in the Universe

Causality is questioned in the context of the Earth's orbit around the Sun and the warping of space and time, suggesting that these phenomena occur simultaneously without a clear cause-and-effect relationship.

The author argues that causality, as commonly understood, may not exist in physics, where equations describe phenomena without implying a causal link.

The insistence on causality is linked to the concept of Free Will, creating a tension between the deterministic nature of the universe and the individual's perception of choice.

The concept of free will is often questioned, with the author arguing that it doesn't truly exist.

People tend to solidify their beliefs about free will by the age of 22, making it difficult to change their minds.

The complexity and chaos of human actions, like throwing a ball, create the illusion of free will, but the author suggests that we may be just as bound by the laws of nature as inanimate objects.

The Complexity of Causality and Free Will

Causality is a chain of events, but tracing the electrical impulses in the brain is incredibly complex.

The belief in free will doesn't provide a satisfactory explanation for actions, as they are influenced by various factors and circumstances.

The speaker's life experiences, technologies, and genes all play a role in shaping their actions and decisions.

The Evolution of Genes and the Complexity of Causality

Genes are made up of nucleotides, which have evolved over billions of years, influenced by various incidents in the history of life on Earth.

The story of these nucleotides traces back to particles formed in the universe's first moments and atoms created in stars.

The speaker contemplates the relationship between the chaos of the universe's evolution and the concept of causality, suggesting that while causality exists, it may not be as straightforward as commonly believed.

The Universe as a Hypergraph: A Discrete Computational Model

The Universe may be modeled by a hypergraph of nodes and edges, evolving over time through the application of rules.

There are no godlike equations governing its stability; instead, chaos and complexity arise from simple rule applications.

This humbler conception of causal connection is crucial for understanding the universe and leads to insights in special relativity, general relativity, and quantum mechanics.