Notes of people’s view on causal relationships
Leibniz: pre-established harmony. The created objects and God (the divine power) are the cause of objects themselves. (No causal relationship)
Hume: there’s no causal relationship. All we have is an observation of succession of events: A happens, then B follows. One will never be able to observe the necessity of such associations. It’s similar to the occasionalism that Leibniz rejected. (No causal relationship)
Kant: causal relationship is an a priori concept. The knowable realm of knowledge includes perceptions and objects of experience. How things really are in and of themselves independent of the imposition of our concepts and intuitions, we cannot know. “ The above empirical rule is now viewed as a law — and, in fact, not as valid merely of appearances, but [valid] of them on behalf of a possible experience, which requires completely and thus necessarily valid rules.” Causal relationship is universal and necessary because there is no such way via which we can undergo an experience without imposing causal relationships on objects of experience.
I wanted to summarize these two views because I was reading Ray Dalio’s online book, “the Changing World Order,” where he emphasizes that one’s ability to understand the future depends on one’s understanding of causal relationships, and one develop such understandings from studying the past. Indeed, it doesn’t really matter to most of us what the fundamental structure of reality is like, but rather, one only has to understand the human version of truth to do well in life. (just as Hume says himself)
