PHI403 Lecture 14 — It All Started With a Big Bang

On causation at the scale of the universe, and whether causation is transitive. The causal-chain picture — if A causes B and B causes C, then A causes C — is implicit in many scientific explanations ("the Big Bang caused everything") and supports causal determinism: every event is necessitated by prior events.

Indeterminism comes in two flavours:

Stochasticism / chanciness — events happen without prior causes (radioactive decay is sometimes cited).
Dispositional tendency — initial conditions create potentialities; not anything could happen, but multiple outcomes remain possible.

The "Big Bang happening again" test: if the initial conditions were identical, would history repeat exactly? A determinist says yes, a dispositionalist indeterminist says other dispositions might have manifested.

Transitivity fails for counteracting chains: fire (A) → smoke (B) → alarm (C) → sprinkler (D) → fire extinguished (E). Clearly A does not cause E — the sprinkler's causal role is to counteract the fire. Causation is non-transitive: sometimes transitive, sometimes not.

The lecture sets up the probability-theoretic treatment in subsequent lectures: determinism + credence (L15), frequentism vs propensity (L16), conditional probability (L17).

Connections

Back-link: sources/2023-anjum-rocca-phi403-causation-in-science. Concepts: concepts/causation · concepts/dispositionalism · concepts/probabilistic-causation.