Cause Effect Paradigm 000

Cause-Effect Paradigm, Obsession Syndrome &
Paradigm Inverse_

[This is in continuation of the dialogue that begun in 2003 and continued till early 2006 in Choice of Destiny and Destiny of Choice. The present dialogue began in the second half of 2006. Man suffers from a great dilemma whether to believe in God and spiritualism or in Science and materialism. Choice of Destiny and Destiny of Choice tried to explore and expose this dilemma. Those who believe in God have difficulty in leading a life that is based on the acceptance of the proposition that they are puppets in the hands of God. They like to reserve something that they can do and choose independently of God. This is a dilemma that separates Man from God even for those who believe in God. But a similar dilemma faces those who do not believe in God and believe in reason, rationality, Science, Scientific methods and Supremacy of Mankind over Universe. For them the key is the methods of science and the past success of science’s explanatory power, but they still need for themselves a scientific proof to establish the certainty of the triumph of science in completely explaining the entire Universe in finite time. However optimistic one may be about the future of science based on its past success of science, a probability of less than one here gives rise to a dilemma whether the progress of science can be fully be explained by science itself. How far is the disbelief in God is dependent on a firm faith in the ultimate state of complete scientific knowledge about the Universe? This needs to be explored. One way of exploring that is to study how far choices are really made under Cause-Effect Paradigm.]

1. Cause-Effect Paradigm

G: We are meeting after a long time. Last time we met you were so obsessed with your Destiny Principle that you intended to explain all aspects of societal progress over time solely in terms of that Principle.
S: I know you do not like a Destiny Principle that refutes the existence of any choice to man as an individual or society. Many of my learned friends who believe in God did not like the human choice destructing Destiny Principle, even if it is of stochastic variety. Man wants to determine, at least partly, the destination he reaches at any future point of time.
G: That is true. Your concept of Destiny is not merely a meaningless one from the point of view of science; it takes away the freedom of choice to believe in God even from a person who believes in God.
S: I am sorry for that. But I can’t help. If you believe in God, you cannot but accept that it is God who has forced you to believe in God. It’s that simple.
G: Nor do you leave those who do not believe in God happy. You say that their disbelief in God is not an outcome of their free, independent choice but is the effect of God’s will.
S: It is not my choice either.
G: I understand your position. But your theories make the progress of science and human civilization beyond Man’s control.
S: Yes. But that seems to be the Truth. Something causes progress of science to take place in a sequence and pace that vary over time. Scientific progress is the effect of something. Science is about establishing links between causes and effects. Science is based on a particular paradigm of reasoning. And, it is a natural phenomenon. But associated with that is another natural phenomenon: a strong Cause-Effect Paradigm Obsession Syndrome.
G: Yes, Cause-Effect Paradigm is very fundamental to scientific methods: the association of effects and causes. But where do you get an obsession syndrome here?
S: Before that let us look at the cause-effect paradigm in a time perspective.
G: OK.
S: If you would observe the cause precedes the effect in time.
G: Yes, that is the sequence. It was the Big Bang that caused the Universe. It is energy and our limbs that help us jump. It is weight and gravity that pulls us down. It is some cells / DNA/ RNA within the body and their interaction among themselves and with external environment that determine our physical, emotional and intellectual growth, stability/ instability and decay. Whatever happens now must have a cause/ reason that exited before that particular happening.
S: Can you not think of effects preceding causes?
G: No. How can that happen?
S: We keep that for the next session.

2. Cause-Effect Inversion

G: How do you say that effect can precede cause in time? It is not possible.
S: The reason why one cannot believe in cause preceding effect is because of blind faith in Cause-Effect Paradigm. This paradigm gives rise to an obsession that I call cause-effect obsession syndrome. Once this Syndrome afflicts you, you cannot view the causes as effects and the effects as causes. But it is perfectly possible to run backwards in time and imagine decaying cells becoming alive and multiplying. If I am a scientist today, that is what caused me to study science in my school. If I am to die of cancer some eighty years later, this must cause cancerous cells to be hidden somewhere in my body much earlier.
G: You are saying the same thing as Science does but you are just interchanging the use of the terms cause and effect.
S: Yes, I am doing that but probably I am doing more than that. I am saying that it is today that caused yesterday and today is the effect of the future. I call this Cause-Effect Paradigm Inverse.
G: You have gone beyond fuzzy logic to funny, absurd logic.
S: Why do you call it absurd? Most of the time we do such funny things in real life. We first construct a future and then that causes us to think what we should do now. We wish to fly at a future date and that causes us to construct a device that would make us fly. It is the design of future that is the cause and the technological experiments that come before that is the effect.
G: You are wrong. What we construct or design about the future is the result of our past knowledge and experience. We design the future today when the future has not yet arrived. You must be careful about the way you deal with time.
S: Yes, we must be careful in handling time. If we say that we must live for a cause, the way we live now becomes the effect of that cause.
G: You are only playing with words. Such play will not help us progress.
S: We must be careful with words and time. Fine. But even noble laureate Rabindranath Tagore had composed a short story, titled IchhaPuran (Fulfillment of Wish), about how a father and son lived after they interchanged their position by a boon from the God.
G: That is a funny story for entertainment.
S: That is true but it is equally true that the story had important lessons to tell. But let us not distract from our main point. We classify time in such a way that some events of the later time can be ascribed as the effect of some other events of an earlier time. That is the natural process. But it is possible to look in an inverse way and some events of a later period had to cause some other events in an earlier period.
G: Why should we work with such inversion of cause and effect? How does this help us?
S: I agree that the normal cause-effect paradigm helps us to discover many natural laws. That is how the science has progressed. That is how even human civilization and the society have progressed over time. That is how even the concept of God, religion and culture have changed. We find out causes and effects and their relationship by observing the past happenings and, where possible, by doing experiments. But this method has still not helped us solve the problem of forecasting the future with certainty. Unless we are able to forecast the future with certainty all our knowledge remains incomplete in explaining the Universe or the Creation completely.
G: How does this issue matter? One day, science will discover all that explains the entire Creation and we will have complete knowledge.
S: It matters because we want to be certain that the progress of science is uniquely associated with a future state where we will all know the complete explanation of the Creation from time immemorial in the past to time immemorial in the future. Without the establishment of certainty, reliance on science will remain a faith no different from the faith in an ideology or a religion or the God. We cannot just wait indefinitely for science to reveal everything that we need to know. We also need to know how exactly science will discover all that we need to know. And, what happens after we get to know all that we need to know through science.
G: But has not the progress of science and technology already proved the capability of scientific methods?
S: If we have to have place complete reliance on science, we must be able to explain scientifically how the present is uniquely tied with the past. If the present could have come about also from a past different from the one we have witnessed, we have a problem. And, we have a greater problem if a present different from what we are witnessing at present was also possible given the same past that we have already witnessed. We need to establish that the past uniquely determines the future and the future is associated with a unique set of the past.
G: How can one do that? Future is unknown. We cannot predict the long-term future with certainty as yet.
S: If the future of science is uncertain, our belief in science and scientific methods is only a bet or a speculation or a faith that cannot be scientifically defended in a way that is stronger than the defense of faith in religion or God.
G: How do you propose to use the Cause-Effect Inverse to help us out of this dilemma?
S: First step would be to explore the uniqueness of present-past association. Once we get some confidence with the results from such exploration, the nest step would be to describe the desired ultimate state of complete scientific knowledge. Then, treating that State as the cause one would need to work backwards in time to see the effects of the cause and compare the actual past and present with the scenarios worked out as effects.
G: Assuming that this is feasible, how do we use that analysis?
S: If the worked out scenarios and the actual/ observed, present and past, tally, we could come to the conclusion that we could rely on science to attain Complete knowledge in finite time, not in our life time though.
G: That would be a great thing for the Superiority or rather Supremacy of Science. Does that mean that then Science becomes independent of the Destiny Principle?
S: No. Rather that would only prove completely that Science and its progress is explainable by the Destiny Principle. More interesting is the case where the reverse projection of the future in to the present and the past significantly differ from the observed ones. The most interesting possibility would be where the desired future state of complete scientific knowledge is consistent with alternative scenarios for the past.
G: What would that imply?
S: It could mean that Science may never reach the State of complete knowledge. It could also mean that Stochastic Destiny Principle works and that the progress of science is subject that Principle. All progress in science and technology is purely a natural process much like the process that generates rains, floods, volcanic eruptions, death of star, etc.
G: Your discussion is becoming too messy and abstract to the point of being bereft of sense. Can we not shift to some examples in real life?
S: We could try doing that in later sessions. But now we need to note that quite apart from this time inversion of cause-effect relationship, in real life we deal with time in many other inverse ways.
G: How?
S: When we discover light from a distant celestial body in a far away galaxy, we are dealing with the past in the present. When we listen to a disc recorded earlier a recoded DVD of Olympics we deal with past in the present. We capture the past and replay it in the present. We cannot capture the future in a similar way. But forecasts and predictions are probable images of the future. We do write scientific novels to project he future. If we work forward from assumptions and initial conditions to future state, why can’t we work backwards from a given/ assumed future state to the present and from the present to the past? Analysis of fossils found today helps us move backwards to paint the past.
G: But doing so is not necessarily an inversion of cause and effect relationship, as we normally understand.
S: You are right. But it might as well be an inversion if we simply could start thinking in terms of a dynamics that associate one state with another state with reverse ordering of the states in terms of time. We start with a 60-year-old just dead and work backwards in time or from a fruit to the tree to the sapling and to the seed. We may start from the current state of the earth to its state billions of years in the past. We can go back from the future to the present and to the past. We can go back from a desired future state to the present. This is only an analytical tool. Once you have the solution to a difference equation involving time, you have a time path along which you can move both forward and backward.
G: Let us end the session here to avoid further confusion.
S: I agree.