Cause and Effect

Helena loves the bathroom sink.  I've mentioned that in other blog posts, but she loves it so much it bears repeating.  And in the last several days, to her surprise and joy, she has learned to turn the water on: she stands before the mirror, by the sink, and throws herself toward the mirror, as if to embrace her own image.  As her belly hits the handle on the faucet, the water flows on.  She looks toward the spigot, straightens up, and smiles as broadly as a girl can smile.

Though several times Helena has also been able to turn the water on with her hand, it seems that she thinks that the cause of the water flow is her lunge to touch her own image, a fact that inspired a conversation about magical thinking and the philosophy of David Hume.  As much as we might like to dismiss magic in current rationalist discourse, we can actually see it as an important precursor for modern science, because magic is basically an attempt to understand cause and effect.  I got sick, and I don't know why.  On the other hand, when I get a bruise, I know why: it's because I got in a fight and my enemy hit me.  Under the same logic, then, if I am hurt by illness, it must be because my enemy did it.  Magic serves as the connection to explain how my enemy was able to affect me at a distance.

Helena isn't thinking magically, but she is trying to connect cause and effect: Whenever I lunge at the mirror, the water turns on, so she thinks the lunge is the cause of the water.  To a certain degree, it is, but only when mediated by her belly striking the handle, the essential element she may not yet have grasped.  The point is that she is researching her world, and trying to find ways to test her hypotheses.  When she tries the same thing with another bathroom mirror, and the water doesn't turn on because the handle for the sink is somewhere else, she'll have to develop new hypotheses.

By seeing people's failure to connect causes and effects (or their recognition that they had the wrong cause for the observed effect), the Scottish philosopher David Hume developed a skepticism about the intrinsic connection between cause and effect.  We may assume that the lunge at the mirror causes the water to flow (or that the rotation of a key causes the car to start), but we never know if we are actually right.  It may be that we just haven't found the case where it doesn't work, or the intermediary step that is truly essential (turning the handle).  This skepticism did great things for philosophy and science, forcing Kant to develop his categories of apperception and bringing the scientific method of trial and error closer to its modern form.

At least that's why I explained to Helena Iara.  She wasn't that interested.  She just wanted to turn the water on again.