As I’m currently working on designing the interface specification to connect an artificial intelligence to a game engine, I had to think a lot about causality. And damn it, it’s a complex topic! Perhaps the most defining question in our whole life. We all start as children on the backseat of our dad’s car, permanently asking “Why is sky blue?”, “Why is the car driving?” or simply, but not less difficult to answer “Why does it take so long to arrive at the zoo?”. While those questions, or at least most of them, are rather philosophic or scientific, our early days are usually followed by a much less world-shaking period with questions like “Why did she break up with me?” or “Why the hell do I have to learn all that shit for a stupid exam?”. Following that little downtime, we usually start to ask us more general questions again, but they will now depend on our experiences in the past, as our brain will try to answer those nasty “Why”s based on our collected knowledge. Sadly, that also denies many ways of thinking to us. Those we never collected experience for.

Nonetheless, the “Why” accompanies us through our whole life. That’s quite remarkable if you ask me. But what do those “Why” questions really ask for? In the most general case, they ask for a causal relation, trying to identify the trigger of an action we just witnessed or heard of. But why should we want to know? Haha, there it was again. Nope but honestly, we should try to get a feeling for our need to asking the “Why” question, as the “Why of Whys” can teach us much of our way, and the techniques, we tend to use to solve those questions. This knowledge might open our view to new ways of thinking.

As with all questions, like “Who ate my breakfast again?” its best to start at the beginning: the big bang. At least for our universe, the big bang seems to be some point of root causality. The point to which we could all causality resolve. But the big bang itself seems to be an action without trigger. A broken causality. Why could that be (note the why again?). After the big bang, a lot of trouble happened, quarks, later atoms, and much later amino acids began to interact with each other depending on causal relationships and finally brought you together, reading this post. While we do understand a part of the rules these events follow, like forces causing atoms to fuse or to build chemical compounds, we have no clue about how those rules really work. A certain trigger causes a certain event. That’s perhaps the most basic law of our universe, as only this basic rule allows to compose more complex rules, like causing protons to catch electrons and becoming our precious hydrogen. But we don’t have an image of the cause of causality.

That being said, could we imagine a universe without causality? Events happening without being triggered?  That seems to be rather chaotic to us. To continue my thoughts of an earlier post on time, an interesting idea popped into my had. Is there really a difference between time and causality or are they closely related to each other? Is our sense to feel the passing of time just a wrapping to feel causal events? To help us identify that a roar in the forest might be followed by a saber-tooth cat jumping at us? If so, we did the most simple technique during evolution, that could be employed to write a simulation software: We divide causality in slices. We add a clock which will just repeat a very basic trigger-action relation, to work as a large measurement for relations of other events me might observe. That’s the way we recognize time! It always moves into one direction for us, as that seems to be the pattern of causality. Therefore it was an evolutionary advantage to recognize this most basic pattern and put it into a larger relation, to reuse similar causal events in the past as expectations for events we did just observe the trigger for. Could that be the basic and perhaps elemental pattern of the evolution of intelligence on our planet? Because it was an advantage to have a measurement for causality? Is that perhaps even the root of science? Our constant struggle to predict events, just given the trigger, as every event could be one of those damned saber-tooth cats?

Well, let’s skip these questions for a later date, and return to the root of all evil: the big bang. This seems to be the point where causality kicked off. The very first trigger. But what is a trigger in general? Well, an action, that causes another action to happen. But basically, a trigger requires another trigger to be triggered. At the end of the day we end up with just a giant chain of actions, with the big bang – or better said its unknown cause – being the sole pure standalone trigger. Could there be chains of causality that did not follow our direction? Perhaps causality chains where – from our view – events are followed by their triggers, as, pinning the big bang as a center for causality, they moved into the opposite direction. Could we perhaps even think of a “wave” of causality, that emerged the big bang and we just ride on one of those chains in the wave of potential causality configurations? A lot of question I won’t be able to answer. But one thing I’m quite sure about know is, that causality is one of the basic forces that make our universe tick. I will have to spend more thinking on it, but know I have to go back on designing that AI interface.

Just have a bit more respect about that poor “Why” once you use it next time.