Causation: chicken, egg, chicken, egg...

So causation. Cause and effect. In a science experiment we see that one variable when increased and everything else stays constant effects another variable. Cause and effect. Nice. When I broke my leg, the cause is that my friend accidentally hit it with a Baseball bat. Cause and effect. Seems nice and cool. You have a clear picture of what happened and why. Man I'm glad life is so simple sometimes.

Because the rest of the damn time there is no way to tell. Even those situations could be made ugly by some jerk asking the right questions. Like, why did your friend accidentally hit you with Baseball bat and break your leg? Well, because you accidentally slashed his tires and he didn't think it was an accident. But he accidentally slept with you mother and that is why you slashed his tires. Wait, so where is the cause now. It's that your mother is hot and seduced your friend, resulting in your broken leg.

In science, time stops while we observe the causal relationship of two things. Also, we observe within a given time window and space window that allows us to come to meaningful conclusions. Outside of that, this cause and effect thing gets real ugly real quick.

But maybe the ugliness is in what you are trying to do in finding the cause. You are trying to take the scientific method and use it on a non-scientific world. One where the variables can't be controlled. Therefore conclusions can be suggested but none can be known. The dude with the right questions can just about always knock down your theories. People make strong assertions about causal relationships all the time. Like, that dude cut me off because he is an asshole. Or, my teacher gave me a B because I didn't proofread it. Really, you can't know that until you have written a number of papers with proofreading and a number without proofreading, control the variables of the teacher, the teacher's state of mind at the time, the paper assignment, the time of year, the weather, and how much cocaine you are in-taking per day.

Point being, searching for causal relationships is like circular reasoning. It just goes around and around and around and the search methods you have will never stop the train. You just have to stop it yourself. In this world, everything is interwoven. The universe is holistic, every moment impacts every moment and every action every action. With this in mind, our brains can never wrap around the whole and true universe. We have to invent constructs and definitions and then we can start to operate. But without inventing some sort of structure of truth (like geometry or music theory), little meaningful can be said in the way of cause and effect. The web is too widespread and the patterns too dense and complicated.

This is all very confusing and I can't seem to wrap my brain around it. I start down this path and the whole issue seems to wrap itself around my brain.