Causality

Of course, the causal process is not just a large number of parallel sequences of discrete events, each event preceded by a single cause and succeeded by a single effect. Instead, many events are directly interconnected and thus all are at least indirectly connected. While typing this post, I am hearing a TV drama and remembering a telephone conversation. At any moment, the total cosmic state is an effect of earlier such states and a cause of later states although not necessarily with Newtonian particles interacting like miniature billiard balls. In Poul Anderson's Time Patrol series, both the continuum and the world lines within it are compared to "'..a mesh of tough rubber bands...'" (a phrase used twice) and the world lines intermeshed throughout the continuum are compared to a spiderweb. Everard thinks that coincidences can be more than accidents and wonders whether Jungian synchrony is a glimpse of the truth. A few days ago, I decided to google a teacher that I had known in Ireland in the 1960s. I discovered first that he had died in 2000 and secondly that, in March this year, it was finally publicly acknowledged that his colleagues had known that he was an active, manipulative paedophile, thus generating a lot of media coverage in Ireland but unfortunately not here. I had not known of this coverage so what prompted me to google his name when I did? Without the internet, I would probably never have known. Fantastic though the Time Patrol series is, it directly touches the complexities of human experience.