Origins and evolution of the idea of causality

Origins and evolution of the idea of causality
I believe the origins and evolution of the idea of causality to be as follows. This may be viewed as a hypothesis to be confirmed (in whole or in part) through empirical (psychological, sociological, and historical) studies.
On the individual level, the ultimate origin of our notion of causality is introspection: simple and direct awareness of oneself deciding, anywhere from very consciously to almost unconsciously, to do something – move a hand or foot, and so forth – and then actually doing it. This awareness is something all human beings have, and is the source of the notion of volition, which eventually (after more complex philosophical reflection) becomes the concept of freewill. Underlying this notion is the sense of self, so that the causality is spiritually based, i.e. logically requires a soul.
The self or soul or spirit is something non-phenomenal; that is, it has none of the phenomenal qualities (or qualia) which we apprehend through the senses of physical seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, or touching, or any comparable mental projections derived from memories of such sensory experiences. We know of the soul through self-consciousness, i.e. directly and not though consciousness of something else. Such consciousness turned in the direction of the subject engaged in it, i.e. himself/herself, may be referred to as intuition or apperception. Just as we cannot hear with our eyes or see with our ears, and so on, but must use the appropriate sense organ for each phenomenal quality, so the self cannot be found in any sensory or imaginative experience, and yet we are capable of apperceiving it. Possibly, self-awareness is a power granted only to humans, not to animals; but maybe some have it, too.
The idea of influence is closely allied with that of volition – that is, we are all somewhat aware, though to very different degrees, that the thought of something may make our volition easier or more difficult. People are mostly motivated by objects of desire or restrained by objects of aversion, and act on the basis of their ideas as to how to attain or avoid them. The behavior of people is also strongly influenced by belief in the values and disvalues, and virtues and vices, identified by sundry ethical doctrines. Volition does not function out of context but depends on our perceptions, be they rational or irrational. Influences are not determining; we are able to will as we wish in the absence of perceived incentives and in the presence of perceived disincentives. It is after such more advanced reflections that the concept of freedom of the will is formed.
Next comes our personal experience of interaction with physical objects beyond our own bodies. This includes experiences of pushing or grabbing and pulling some external physical body away from or toward one’s own. Such experiences are the source of our idea of causality in the sense of causation, as distinct from volition, because they occur beyond one’s direct agency. Here, the focus is not on our causing the external body’s movement, but on the interaction between our own body (put in motion by our willing) and the body external to it; so, it is a more materialist form of causality, in which we play no part other than having initially set the chain reaction in motion.
At a third stage, we look further out and assign causality to perceived events, such as the actions of other people, eventually of other animals (apparently also self-moving living things), regarding which we assume by analogy from ourselves volition (and consciousness and valuation) to be applicable; and the interactions of inanimate bodies, which we regard as subject to causation, and/or possibly to mere chance (natural spontaneity).
A later development is the application of the notion of volition to purely mental activity such as remembering, imagining, thinking, and so forth; this comes later because it requires a more advanced degree of introspection and reflection than awareness of one’s powers of physical movement. We also discover, upon reflection, that the notion of causation is applicable to the interactions between distinct mental events (for example, a memory of pain might cause a fear) or between mental and physical events (for example, a fear might generate certain unpleasant sensations in one’s stomach), because such events are usually not willed by us and in many cases evidently not under our power of will to produce or to prevent.
The important thing to note in view of the above sequence of events is that the notion of volition very probably historically preceded that of causation. I draw your attention to David Hume’s questioning of the existence of causation by arguing that we cannot discern any empirical ‘connection’ between cause and effect. What he had in mind, when he sought for such an underlying bond, though he would not have admitted it, was the sensations we commonly experience when we push or pull external bodies – movements which in fact proceed from volition. This shows that, unconsciously, Hume was placing our experience of volition as the model for empirical evidence of causation. But of course, both volition and causation are in fact abstractions – neither requires obvious material, or even mental, concrete tokens.
Modern philosophy, strongly influenced by the scientific study of physical processes, tends to regard causation as the primary form of causality, and volition as a derived idea, one which is (it is claimed) much more elusive and open to doubt, if not entirely delusive. What is true is that the idea of causation is easier to formally define than that of volition, and for that reason seems simpler and more certain, and logically prior. But they are very different forms of causality, and we cannot logically reduce either one to the other, but must treat them separately.
In truth, we will probably never be able to define volition with as much precision as we can define causation because it is something so fundamental and distinct that it is not reducible to anything else. Similarly, we will probably never be able to define consciousness or soul or even existence – this is not a problem that only concerns volition. In truth, even physical concepts fundamental to the physical sciences, such as (for example, at the present stage of physical science) the ‘forces’ of attraction or repulsion in gravitational or electromagnetic fields, must be taken as primary givens, for they are not reducible to something else. When dealing with concepts so basic, the very building blocks of our world, we can only offer roughly descriptive discourse dependent on analogy. Certainly, infinite regression of reduction is logically impossible; the buck must stop somewhere.
Now, looking more broadly at the probable collective historical development of the idea of causality, I would suggest the following. Primitive people were probably animists, believing that even inanimate material bodies were possessed of spirit – that was their explanation of causation among such bodies: they were conceiving causation as essentially volition by invisible spirits. Later, this notion was sublimated by regarding different classes of material bodies as moved by different gods – this was the polytheist stage. Eventually, the monotheist belief dominated that a single God actively controlled the whole world.
Later still, following philosophical reflection, this doctrine was mitigated, so as to claim that God could control everything but preferably chose (in principle, unless otherwise decided by Him exceptionally[1]) to allow human beings and animals to control some things (through volition) and enacted ‘laws of nature’ ensuring the orderly (or even spontaneous) mechanical process of inanimate objects. After that came the atheistic doctrine of volition and causation without God, and then the purely materialist doctrine of a world of causation without possibility of volition, though perhaps some natural spontaneity, and beyond that a doctrine denying all causality (causation as well as volition) and accepting only chance as conceivable.
It must however be pointed out that denying all causality is not possible without first defining what is meant by causality; such denial is meaningless if no meaning is granted to the concept of causality. The same remark applies to the more specific concepts of volition and causation, and even to that of natural spontaneity. The serious study of causality cannot be avoided by rejecting causality off the cuff.
I do not, of course, claim that this proposed sequence of events was exactly followed in history and everywhere. It is schematic, drawing broad lines of probable evolution in most cases. Looking at actual historical accounts, it appears that some stages were skipped here and there, and the order of things was not always as logical. But the above theoretical prediction is still helpful for evaluating historical stages.
Let us now consider how we may validate our concepts of causality. It should be said that, whereas in the individual’s and in humanity’s history, the notion of volition probably precedes and is used to understand the dawning notion of causation (and by denial of both of these, that of causeless happenstance), in a more sophisticated philosophical context, the concept of causation seems more basic than that of volition. That is because the idea of causation is logically inevitable, whereas that of volition is not so (at least, not at first).
Why is causation logical undeniable? Clearly, in a world of multiplicity such as ours, there cannot but be some regularity. A world where there is no similarity at all between any pair of things, is unthinkable. Indeed, it is self-contradictory, since any such claim is rich in assumptions of similarity. Without prejudice regarding what things are alike and which are not, we can say for sure that some fixed patterns are bound to be displayed in the diverse world we face. That is, some item X is bound to be invariably present in the presence of some other item Y and invariably absent in its absence; or the constancy may be more complicated, involving more than two items. The moment such holding patterns are found to occur, if only inductively by generalization, causative relations can be constructed and assumed.
To be sure, if this or that assumed causative relation is found upon further scrutiny of the facts not to hold in fact (in a specific case under consideration), then some other causative relation is logically bound to be found to hold – so, the existence of the causative relation as such is never in doubt. It cannot be claimed that the empirically evident regularities are mere happenstance, mere chance. They can credibly be so viewed at one level, avoiding intellectual reflection; but this view leaves open the issue of why this order of things occurred rather than any other. Whereas, once the idea of causation is introduced in our thinking, the empirically evident order of things is thereby explained as being ‘forced’ into being by the very nature of things, their de facto identities – it is acknowledged as the given order of the world[2]. So, the latter is a rationally more convincing approach.
As regards volition, it is (to repeat) not as inevitable as that of causation. But this is only true looking outward toward the material world without awareness of the fact that someone (oneself) is at that very moment looking out. For, as of when one becomes self-conscious, and seeks to include oneself, the subject of cognition, in the world, aiming at a fuller conception of the world which includes apparent mental and spiritual objects, one is inevitably pushed by inner experience to consider and acknowledge the fact of volition. Because it is quickly evident, if one is perceptive, logically-minded, and scrupulously honest, that our respective selves are, distinctively from mere material entities, ‘souls’ (‘spiritual’ entities) with three essential powers – namely, cognition, volition and valuation. These three core functions of the soul are intimately related in fact, so that one cannot have any one of them without the others.
One could imagine a soul statically cognizing the world (having consciousness), quite passively, without getting involved in it in any way (lacking volition) and without having any preference in relation to it in any way (lacking valuation). But this is evidently not the way things in fact are for us, i.e. for our souls. We are constantly interacting with the world beyond our self, and indeed active in our inner life. Such interactions require exercise of will and necessitate values. The will must be free to a certain extent, for it to indeed be an expression of the soul’s own desires and aversions. External and internal things might well affect the will, either by deterministically delimiting its scope, or by facilitating it or making it more difficult through the influence of various inner or outer objects of consciousness; but some willing must ultimately be free of any sort of coercion or it does not logically qualify as willing.
The concept of non-causality, i.e. that of natural spontaneity, is not excluded in principle by those of causation or volition. In a narrow sense of non-causality, this term has particular applications. Just as we can say that A causes B (whether through causation or volition), we must be able to say (when appropriate) that A does not cause B. It is unthinkable that everything is causally related to everything else in an identical way. For each causal relation that we do identify, there are a multitude of causal relations we have no basis for claiming and must therefore accept to deny. If everything was equally related to everything else, there would be no logical need for or thought of any concept of causality. Such concepts are based on the diversity in being and becoming evident in our world.
The wider and deeper concept of non-causality, i.e. that of natural spontaneity of a single event, is still conceivable. We can imagine something as having no causal relation, not just to some other things, but to all other things. Note well that our earlier argument that causation is an inevitable consequence of diversity is not affected by the assumption that some non-causality exists; our argument was that there had to be some instances of causality, not that it had to have universal scope. I see no logical basis for the traditionally formulated ‘law of causality’ in the sense of a total and a priori exclusion of the possibility of natural spontaneity. This is similar to pointing out that though volition is usually aimed at some goal, it can occasionally be entirely capricious.
Empirically, the existence of natural spontaneity seems suggested by certain events observed through various experiments by modern physicists at the deepest levels of matter (consider, notably, the ‘Copenhagen Interpretation’) – and therefore, we must needs include this concept in our ætiological arsenal, whether it ultimately proves applicable or not. In that case, we might as well for brevity’s sake expand the term ‘causality’ to include not only causation and volition (and influences on volition), but also the absence of both of these, i.e. natural spontaneity. That is, even though natural spontaneity is strictly speaking non-causality, we can include it as a subject-matter in the expanded sense of the term causality referring to the conceptual domain of causal issues.
Surely, natural spontaneity can be viewed as a sort of singular and unpredictable causation, in addition to the more commonplace plural and law-abiding form of causation. It is similar to volition in being singular and unpredictable; but it is distinguishable from volition in that there is no soul behind it, no purposeful will (except possibly God and His will). It is an aspect of nature – though one for which no ‘law’ of nature can be discerned or declared by us; it is, metaphorically, nature in its capricious moods. This is here discussed as a theoretical possibility, without denying that the claim might eventually one day be found empirically – and perhaps even logically – untenable.
 

[1]              Whence the expression ‘God willing’ – meaning that volition or causation (or even spontaneity) may be expected to run their usual course, unless God chooses to intervene exceptionally in the specific case under consideration.
[2]              There is no intent to appeal here to a thought, like that of Leibnitz, of a ‘pre-established harmony’. We just accept things as they are, no matter how easy it is for our minds to imagine how different they might have been.