Of course things cause other things. It depends on the setting and the role interactions are playing in the development of a system.
All of the universe interacts with itself all the time and we are observing the time development of this.
In some special cases (of well isolated controlled subsystems say) it is easy to spot the concept of causing some particular outcome. For example a Geiger counter is set to produce a sound each time a particle triggers the detector's response mechanism (about 1 per 5 seconds on avg). (what triggers that response, but of course the presence of the particle). One can say after 13 sounds i will leave that room and go call someone. Now isnt it true that the decay of exactly 13 particles caused the phone call to take place later when it did (layers of causality) ? Yes and no. I mean if an earthquake had happened at count 6 you would run out anyway or if someone asked for help etc. Those things not happening also caused it. But in a well isolated system where all those other developments are unlikely or do not develop as fast you have a crystal clear understanding of what it is that caused/started the chain of events leading to the phonecall or exiting the room. It was those 13 particles.
I mean if you observe a shower of hadrons at a CERN detector its because a collision of protons took place a bit earlier. The collisions caused those hadrons to emerge in these numbers and such momentums etc. A different collision would have yielded very different results or nothing even if it was not a close enough scattering... in some low intensity beam say.
In more complex systems the causation is shared by a larger number of participants and is found in the total effect of all interactions. Some macroscopic causality phenomena (ie phenomena that their character is a matter of macroscopic structures and observations at some aggregate level) can emerge too eg a stone hits the water and causes waves and droplets of water flying all over. Or one can have an even less compact example that is still macroscopic but now the fine structure (microscopic nature) of the system plays a more prominent role. For example one can have a system (a room filled with gas) that when it reaches a certain temperature you do something with it eg open a door). Now the process depends on diffusion of heat for example if you start releasing heat in some point in the room and wait until the detector in another part of the room monitoring the temperature rise is triggered above some set level. Certainly the source of heat caused the outcome eventually but it derived influence by all kinds of other elements of the system playing a role in it (eg how dense the gas in that room and of what type etc).
In another sense imagine a classical model of billiard balls that start colliding with each other, a chaotic aggregate of collisions that resulted from initially releasing only a few well coordinated parallel moving balls say inside a table (imagine a huge table now and collisions that conserve momentum and energy) which went on to strike many other balls originally not moving placed in grid points. After a while if you observe the system and the distribution of the velocities you will see a particular distribution emerging eg like
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell...n_distribution , that is very different than the initial one ie a few balls with the same very big speed all parallel, the others 0, resting in the grid points). The feeling of pressure in the walls will become regular now (frequent collisions with the walls say that their rate has settled to some regular noise, that before was not there, is evidence of such pressure). What caused that development? But the original uniform beam released of course. Still the character of the distribution is universal and seems unimportant to it what the original beam was like. I mean it will always settle to the same form no matter how the game started (will depend only on total initial energy say and not the direction of the beam or the particular individual speeds. This classical system is in fact truly deterministic, a character however lost in real life when you start making measurements much later inside such a complex system that its practically impossible to decide its origins in a way that is useful - ie for all practical purposes the particles do indeed behave as if from some truly random distribution, although we know this is not true, in the QM world we live of course it becomes more true and chaos takes it there nicely, still the origin of that randomness of QM is evading us and might be explained itself eventually)
So in that last example what really caused that final form of the distribution? (Lets say that based on the form of the distribution some decision is made later to force this to be of material importance). The ergodic nature of the interactions (the long term aggregate development of them - in fact somethings as simple as collisions of balls and reflection conditions on walls etc). (see more for example and for other related topics ;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_equation,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-theorem ,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fokker%...lanck_equation). And yet you develop entire gas laws in such system
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideal_gas_law that appear to have nothing to do with those deeper laws dictating what happened. So now you may ask; can even individual isolated versions of causality be the result of something similarly "dense" at another level? Can it be that the decay of one particle was "caused" by some aggregate development of many (yet unrecognized) players that give it its stochastic character? In that sense not a single thing caused something but all of it together. The particle with its properties and the seemingly unpredictable decay it had didnt cause the outcome, because the properties of the particle themselves were derived from something else etc. The chain of influence can eventually become pretty intricate as one can imagine. So maybe you end up with a world that is very statistical in nature, very different at the fundamental level than it appears in other scales of observation, where large scale laws of cause and effect emerge because of the particular character of that fine structure of the system and the way it builds higher complexity in larger scales of observation. And yet such laws are never present at the fundamental level, they emerge statistically in other scales. They do not exist at a pure fundamental level and they are only effectively formulated (for example like thermodynamics out of statistical physics) when you study larger scale systems.
This is why i cant personally participate in such threads without feeling very ugly/uneasy and even sometimes amused at the existence of groups of people that believe one thing and not another etc with enough conviction to form debates about it without truly owning all the physics and math needed to have a somewhat more informed position on these issues (to a degree this is true for all of us of course but more true for those that discuss such philosophical issues without being scientists or with only basic science education and more classical education ie say many philosophers and their endless streams of definitions that may never realize that way in the world we observe). Since the character of physical law is still being investigated we are not allowed to play such games as the thread wishes to do. All we have to do is keep learning more and maybe we will know better what is the true root of the phenomena we observe and if there is a big collection of laws or just one (or dare i say none even?) because all these laws that are recognized at some observation scale effectively emerge as a result of self consistency of a very complex system in the final way it looks which is much simpler though at a deeper fundamental level (a level we still are not aware of). By that i mean for example the seemingly stochastic nature of the digits of Pi (imagine the landscape of endless digits and the stories they might appear to say) or the distribution of primes etc may appear complex/random/unpredictable enough but their origin is very simple and not random or complex at all. All you have to know to find the digits is that this is Pi or eg the nth prime number! So what is the law that gives you the billionth digit? Well that it is the billionth digit of Pi!
Last edited by masque de Z; 04-11-2015 at 03:43 PM.
, honestly, wtf is this?
. If I can 
