Can you articulate your most fundamental beliefs?

How do you answer the question: Who am I?

I do believe the above 2 questions are closely linked, for me at least. After all, I believe that 'I' is made up of the various choices that I make individually. These choices are made with some external influences, from the actions of other people, other events, and with some internal influences, my beliefs. Now, my beliefs are a choice too, because we cannot accurately say whether my beliefs are right or wrong. I simply chose to make those beliefs my own. On what reasons would I have those beliefs? Again, some could be attributed to my friends who have done their part to influence them, some could be attributed to the books I read for introducing new ideas and arguments, and yet some could be attributed to my own whims. Not everyone can articulate their most fundamental beliefs and even fewer can state concretely their reasons for having those beliefs, so the best way I feel, to go about doing this is through a series of introspective questions, philosophical ones that is.

For this post, well, I have decided to answer the question about cause and effect: Is change predictable and reversible? We can approach this by thinking about perhaps why does any change come about in any case. A change must apply to some 'thing' being changed, that is, we speak of 2 states of that 'thing' that are obviously different. The 'thing' was initially in this state, and then it was in that state. We can observe the 2 states and say they are different. Now consider a world, with nothing else, but only consisting of one object. It also seems extremely likely that this world is going to be constant, nothing is going to change. Because there does not exist a different state for these objects to move to, things are not going to change. We cannot even describe this object because we do not have something else to compare against. Now if several objects, all of them different, are introduced to this world, then things are likely to be more lively. Change is now possible, because there is something 'different' to change to. Therefore, things change because they are unequal. Of course, the assumption here is that they do that because they want to be attain equality. Things want to become identical, settle into equilibrium, they want to stop changing, and so they change.

So we can tell when change is going to occur on the basis that there is a possible immediate state that it wants to attain. In this sense, we could say change is predictable. But we often say for example, how the weather changes unexpectedly, or how the stocks in the market fluctuate unexpectedly. But perhaps that is due to our own limitations, for we are unable to identify all the possible states to change to, and their intermediate states. What about equally possible states? Like a pencil balanced on its tip, poised on either falling this way or that way, or perhaps a tossed coin that is spinning in mid air; which way is it going to land? If 2 changes are equally possible, then the object must be poised in an meta-stable condition. It would remain poised to change until something tips the balance, perhaps by moving it closer to one possible state than the other, or making one state slightly more possible than the other.

Now the question is whether changes are reversible? Now we need to careful how we think about 'reversible'. So far, we have a cause and it creates an effect. If by reversible we mean we start with an effect and we result in the cause that should have been the cause of that effect, then clearly this is not possible. A visual analogy to this confusing statement is 'running the tapes backward'. Broken eggs suddenly reassembling themselves or, dead people reviving suddenly after a fatal car accident. I should perhaps make this clearer by stating that when we talk about cause and effect, we are talking a pair of concepts that exist together, we cannot discuss one independently of the other. When I talk about a cause, I immediately imply that there is an effect, and when I talk about an effect, I immediately imply that there was a cause. There is a relationship: cause --> effect. And we cannot separate the 2 words apart, or try to do funny things to the arrow between them, like reversing it. Because 'cause-->effect' is a whole entity. An effect causing the cause that caused the effect is an impossibility. An egg fell of the table and broke. Breaking is the effect and falling off the table is the cause. Therefore automatically, when I say that the egg falling off the table is a cause, I imply that there is an effect. I may not have told you about this effect, but you know that an effect exists. Alternatively, when I tell you that the broken egg is an effect, you can infer that there is a cause, but you do not know what cause since I have not told you that. Moreover, given both the cause and effect, you could infer what happened, that the egg fell off the table and caused it to break, in that sequence. You do not infer that the egg broke so it fell off the table. Another way to think about this is why did a change occur in the first place? Because there was an impetus for this change. For the change to reverse itself, is to go uphill against the impetus, something impossible. If the change reversed itself, then there must been no impetus in the first place to cause the change, of which the object would have remained constant in the first place.

Now some of you will have the nagging irritation in the back of the mind, about effects without cause. I counter that by repeating that effects must have a cause. But, there's a big BUT, that something just is without cause or effect. Lets take the broken egg thing again. I can point to the broken egg, and say, that it was like that, or it just is, or that it was like that already. I am neither saying the existence of an effect, nor a cause. I am saying that it exists, just like that, without putting any question of its existence across to you. If you are confused, then consider this: things that 'just are' or that 'just exist' may have a reason for their existence, or they may not. We do not know, and cannot claim that we know everything about every object's reason for existing. We are free to wonder about their reason though, and sometimes we succeed in finding out their reason, and therefore find out the cause and effect chain. To stubbornly claim everything is an effect, and therefore must have a cause, is stupid if you do not know if everything really have a cause or not. We are free to think about the 'what if scenario' though; what if this thing was an effect, then what would be its cause? We may or may not find it, but we cannot continue to cling to this belief without a reason.

Now, lets think about 'reversible' in another way. An effect could become a cause, and therefore cause another effect. This effect may actually the first cause and therefore it appears we are back to where we started. Lets take a pendulum. When displaced from equilibrium position, say, to the left, there is a cause started. Gravity pulls the bob back towards the equilibirium position, and there is an effect. The bob ends up now on the right of the equilibrium position. The effect has set up a 'cause' Gravity pulls the bob back towards the equilibirium position, and the effect is that the bob ends up left of the equilibirium position, back where are started. In this sense, some changes are indeed reversible, because the chains of cause and effect apply to to the same state. That state could be both cause and effect. Now we need to be careful how we extend how chains of cause and effect, because of the way the arrow points between these 2. We can easily say effect causing another effect and so on and so forth. But we need to be more careful about how we say that a cause had another cause, and another cause. This represents the limit of our knowledge that we do not know whether the cause had a cause. To say an effect had an effect, is not such a limitation. Because even if an effect does not cause a effect, we can make it so, through external influence and thus state that the effect now has an effect. But unfortunately, we cannot make a cause have a cause, by any external intervention, thus we cannot insist all the time that a cause have a cause. Arguments about a first cause therefore have a flaw, if they insist that a cause have a cause, then why stop at a first cause? Why not extend the chain in that direction indefinitely?

天之道，损有余而补不足，是故须胜实，不足胜有余。天地之相分，阴阳之候列，变化之由表，死生之兆彰，不谋而遗迹自同，勿约而幽冥斯契。