Causation and its Basis in Fundamental Physics

Douglas Kutach is a philosopher of physics who has published on time's arrows, time travel, and more general metaphysical issues. He is the founder of Empirical Fundamentalism, a philosophical program dedicated to addressing traditional philosophical problems using a distinction between fundamental and derivative reality.

1 Empirical Analysis and the Metaphysics of Causation ; 1.1 Empirical Analysis ; 1.1.1 The Distinctive Features of Empirical Analysis ; 1.2 Empirical Analysis of the Metaphysics of Causation ; 1.2.1 Effective Strategies ; 1.3 Empirical Analysis of the Non-metaphysical Aspects of Causation ; 1.4 Causation as Conceptually Tripartite ; 1.5 A Sketch of the Metaphysics of Causation ; 1.6 Fundamental and Derivative ; 1.6.1 The Kinetic Energy Example ; 1.6.2 Some Constitutive Principles of Fundamentality ; 1.7 Abstreduction ; 1.8 STRICT Standards and RELAXED Standards ; 1.9 Limitations on the Aspirations of Empirical Analysis ; 1.10 Comparison between Empirical Analysis and Orthodox Analysis ; 1.11 Summary ; I THE BOTTOM CONCEPTUAL LAYER OF CAUSATION ; 2 Fundamental Causation ; 2.1 Preliminaries ; 2.1.1 Events ; 2.1.2 Laws ; 2.2 Terminance ; 2.2.1 Causal Contribution ; 2.2.2 Trivial Terminance ; 2.3 The Space-time Arena ; 2.4 Classical Gravitation ; 2.4.1 Galilean Space-time ; 2.4.2 Terminants in Classical Gravitation ; 2.4.3 Overdetermination in Classical Gravitation ; 2.4.4 Instantaneous Causation ; 2.5 Relativistic Electromagnetism ; 2.5.1 Minkowski Space-time ; 2.5.2 Minimal Terminants in Relativistic Electromagnetism ; 2.5.3 Classical Unified Field Theory ; 2.6 Content Independence ; 2.7 Continuity and Shielding ; 2.8 Transitivity ; 2.9 Determinism ; 2.10 Stochastic Indeterminism ; 2.10.1 Stochastic Lattices ; 2.10.2 A Toy Theory of Particle Decay ; 2.11 Non-stochastic Indeterminism ; 2.11.1 Newtonian Indeterminism ; 2.11.2 Contribution Extended ; 2.12 General Relativity ; 2.12.1 Spatio-temporal Indeterminism ; 2.12.2 Closed Time-like Curves ; 2.13 Quantum Mechanics ; 2.13.1 The Quantum Arena and its Contents ; 2.13.2 Bohmian Mechanics ; 2.13.3 Spontaneous Collapse Interpretations ; 2.13.4 Other Interpretations of Quantum Mechanics ; 2.14 Summary ; II THE MIDDLE CONCEPTUAL LAYER OF CAUSATION ; 3 Counterfactuals and Difference-making ; 3.1 General Causation ; 3.2 Counterfactuals ; 3.3 Goodman's Account of Counterfactuals ; 3.4 The Nomic Conditional ; 3.5 Comparison to Ordinary Language Conditionals ; 3.6 Prob-dependence ; 3.7 Contrastive Events ; 3.8 Summary ; 4 Derivative Causation ; 4.1 Influence ; 4.2 Prob-influence ; 4.3 General Causation ; 4.4 Temporally Extended Events ; 4.5 Idiomatic Differences between Promotion and Causation ; 4.6 Aspect Promotion ; 4.7 Promotion by Omission ; 4.8 Contrastivity ; 4.9 Transitivity ; 4.10 Continuity ; 4.11 Shielding ; 4.12 Partial Influence ; 4.13 Summary ; 5 The Empirical Content of Promotion ; 5.1 The Promotion Experiment ; 5.2 Insensitivity Considerations ; 5.3 Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics ; 5.4 The Asymmetry of Bizarre Coincidences ; 5.5 The Analogy to Thermal and Mechanical Energy ; 5.6 Broad and Narrow Promotion ; 5.7 Inferences from Empirical Data to Claims of Promotion ; 5.7.1 Simpson's Paradox ; 5.8 Why There are Effective Strategies ; 5.9 Mechanistic Theories of Causation ; 6 Backtracking Influence ; 6.1 The Direction of Influence ; 6.2 Proof of Causal Directness ; 6.3 A Search for Empirical Phenomena Behind Causal Directness ; 6.4 'Past-directed then Future-directed' Influence ; 7 Causal Asymmetry ; 7.1 The Empirical Content of the Causal Asymmetry ; 7.2 Causation and Advancement ; 7.3 An Explanation of the Advancement Asymmetry ; 7.3.1 Prob-influence through Backtracking ; 7.3.2 Directly Past-directed Prob-influence ; 7.3.3 Summary ; 7.4 Pseudo-backtracking Prob-influence ; 7.5 The Entropy Asymmetry and Causal Directionality ; 7.6 Recent Alternative Explanations of Causal Asymmetry ; 7.6.1 The Albert-Kutach-Loewer Approach ; 7.6.2 The Price-Weslake Approach ; 7.6.3 The Fork Asymmetry Approach ; 7.7 Fundamental Influence Asymmetry ; 7.7.1 Fundamental Influence Asymmetry by Fiat ; 7.7.2 Fundamental Influence Asymmetry by Happenstance ; 7.8 Summary ; III THE TOP CONCEPTUAL LAYER OF CAUSATION ; 8 Culpable Causation ; 8.1 The Empirical Insignificance of Culpability ; 8.1.1 Part I: Singular Causation ; 8.1.2 Part II: General Causation ; 8.2 Culpability as a Heuristic for Learning about Promotion ; 8.3 Culpability as an Explanatory Device ; 8.4 Culpable Causes as Proxies for Terminants and Promoters ; 8.5 Commentary ; 9 The Psychology of Culpable Causation ; 9.1 The Toy Theory of Culpable Causation ; 9.2 Culpability1 ; 9.2.1 Salience ; 9.2.2 Irreflexivity ; 9.2.3 Asymmetry ; 9.2.4 Significant Promotion ; 9.3 Shortcomings of Culpability1 ; 9.3.1 Precise Character of the Effect ; 9.3.2 Overlapping Causation ; 9.3.3 Probability-Lowering Causes ; 9.4 Culpability2 ; 9.5 Shortcomings of Culpability2 ; 9.5.1 Saved Fizzles ; 9.5.2 Early Cutting Preemption ; 9.5.3 Late Cutting Preemption ; 9.6 Culpability3 ; 9.7 Culpability4 ; 9.8 Summary ; 10 Causation in a Physical World ; 10.1 Summary ; 10.2 Future Directions ; References