Jan Faye

As the theory of the atom, quantum mechanics is perhaps the most successful theory in the history of science. It enables physicists, chemists, and technicians to calculate and predict the outcome of a vast number of experiments and to create new and advanced technology based on the insight into the behavior of atomic objects. But it is also a theory that challenges our imagination. It seems to violate some fundamental principles of classical physics, principles that eventually have become a part of western common sense since the rise of the modern worldview in the Renaissance. So the aim of any metaphysical interpretation of quantum mechanics is to account for these violations

Bertrand Russell once pointed out that modern science doesn’t deal with causal laws and that assuming otherwise is not only wrong but such thinking is erroneously thought to do no harm. However, looking into the scientific practice of simulation or experimentation reveals a general causal comprehension of physical processes. In this paper I trace causal experiences to the existence of innate causal capacity by which we organize sensory information. This capacity, I argue, is something we have got in virtue of natural selection as can be seen from experiments with intelligent animals like crows and chimpanzees. So understanding the empirical world is impossible without the use of causal categories. The reason why Russell believed that modern science does not refer to causal laws is, I think, because he argued that the laws of mathematical physics give us a non-causal description of reality. In contrast to such a claim I hold that theoretical laws are prescriptive rules of description rather than descriptions themselves.

The paper discusses the regularity account of causation but finds it insufficient as a complete account of our notion of causality. The attractiveness of the regularity account is its attempt to understand causation in terms of empirically accessible features of the world. However, this account does not match our intuition that singular causality is prior in normal epistemic situations and that there is more to causation than mere succession. Apart from succession and regularity, the concept of causality also contains a modal feature which allows us to engage in counterfactual discourses about singular causal events and to claim that a particular cause is both sufficient and necessary for its effect in the circumstances. However, we may directly observe singular causes, but the modal element is not something we can possibly observe. Rather, this element is something we add to our perception of succession. Thus, the paper suggests that the modal feature of causality is a mental construction which was originally formed by our knowledge of certain structural features of similar events in other situations. It stems not from what we actually observe but from what we have observed or may observe under different but relevant circumstances. So the concept of causation has partly an empirical content and partly a constructed one

Sometimes also called retro causation. A common feature of our world seems to be that in all cases of causation, the cause and the effect are placed in time so that the cause precedes its effect temporally. Our normal understanding of causation assumes this feature to such a degree that we intuitively have great difficulty imagining things differently. The notion of backward causation, however, stands for the idea that the temporal order of cause and effect is a mere contingent feature and that there may be cases where the cause is causally prior to its effect but where the temporal order of the cause and effect is reversed with respect to normal causation, i.e. there may be cases where the effect temporally, but not causally, precedes its cause.