Causality and Consciousness

Causality (/kô-zăl′ĭ-tē/)

Definition: The agency of a cause; the action or power of a cause in producing its effect.

Coming to the topic, you may be wondering how the hell “causality” and “consciousness” are even remotely related. Well, me too. I also have no idea why I thought this was a good idea to write about, but I wanted to see if I could correlate them. Now let's see.

If every decision and every thought I had or made had some prior conditions or initial variables set, then does that mean I am just reacting to the events? When are these initial variables set? Are they set at birth, the very second I am born? or later in life? Or are they changing with every experience I have? Consider this: even a minor shift in your surroundings could lead to significant consequences. Say you were born in summer; you never would have gotten a chance to celebrate your birthday in schools like many kids do. You never would have taken your best friend to distribute chocolates to the class. Maybe you never would have talked to someone that day. Maybe a friendship never happens. Maybe you never get a chance to properly talk to your crush.

Sounds ridiculous; just because of this single event, which was not in your control, you have been led to miss out on so many opportunities before you could even experience them. From the outside, these things look insignificant. But if tiny differences in initial conditions can remove entire future possibilities before we even encounter them, then in what sense are you and I truly creating our own path? But this assumes that these initial variables and conditions completely decide and fix your entire destiny. Maybe they don't. Maybe you had school in summers as well; maybe you had a chance to talk to your crush. The thing is, we could never know if the variables actually are a cause for an event to happen in 10 years down the line. Then how exactly do we identify what truly caused a decision? Was it the immediate thought before the action? A habit developed years ago? A random interaction? The environment you grew up in? Your biology?

Can you trace back any decision to its true/first cause or at least a decision you took a few minutes back? Try it yourself; take a decision you made right now and try to trace it back to its original cause. Now can you tell me that the cause you mentioned is actually the “First Cause” that resulted in the decision? You might point to a thought, a feeling, a memory, a habit, or something you saw moments earlier. But then what caused that? And what caused the thing before it? At some point, given enough time, causality stops looking like a straight chain and starts looking more like an endless web of interconnected events. And if tracing the true cause behind even a small personal decision becomes nearly impossible, then tracing the true cause of our existence itself becomes even more weird.

As I think about this more, I realize there are so many causal events that are causing a event to happen, so how the hell am I gonna find the “First Cause”? It almost feels impossible. Now let's go backwards, back in time. As you rewind time, the entropy start to decrease. Stars and planets collapse back into clouds of dust and fundamental particles. Galaxies disappear. Matter becomes hotter, denser, more chaotic. We are now at the early universe. A state where everything is compressed into conditions so extreme that our current understanding of physics starts breaking down - Singularity. This is where we have least entropy. Now beyond this all we have is hypothetical ideas, so for the sake of the argument we shall consider this point a “First Cause”.

You may ask, “Well, what's caused the 'First Cause'?” The problem with this question is that there could never be a true first cause. Every cause seems to require another cause before it, creating an infinite loop/regress unless the system is somehow cyclic—or unless something exists outside the chain itself (God mentioned??). Think of dominoes stacked upon each other endlessly; each of these dominoes itself cannot be the causation. They themselves are not capable of being the true origin of the motion itself.

So philosophy often introduces the idea of an external cause/entity—something that itself is not caused. Aristotle called this God - The Unmoved Mover. I know your next question is “What caused God?” But for now let's allow this and let us see where it leads us.

Since we’ve now established a First Cause, we could say every event that followed must have come from this exact point. In some absurd chain of causality, this exact post I am writing right now was already implicit in those initial conditions. So the problem is solved, right?

Not really.

This line of thinking works well within Classical Physics, where the universe is treated as deterministic. If you knew all the initial variables, you could, in principle, predict everything that follows.

But then in comes Max Planck with quantum mechanics, and later Einstein, Heisenberg, Schrödinger, Bohr, Dirac… and suddenly everything changes. At the fundamental level of reality, at the level of particles, the universe does not act like a precise machine that gives out precise outcomes. It behaves probabilistically.

Einstein himself was uncomfortable with the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics, which is where his famous quote comes from: God does not play dice.

He later explored the idea of hidden variables — the possibility that quantum mechanics was incomplete, and that deeper deterministic rules still existed underneath. But later developments such as Bell’s theorem showed that any such theory would require reality to behave in fundamentally non-local ways. More about it — Link

Let’s take Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. It doesn’t just say that we fail to measure things precisely (there’s a common misconception that measurement itself disturbs the system and creates this uncertainty). Rather, the system itself does not possess exact simultaneous values of certain properties to begin with. So what we get is a range of possible probabilistic outcomes. So even if hypothetically you had complete knowledge of all initial conditions, you still wouldn’t be able to predict a single exact future. You could only describe a distribution of possible futures.

Well then, you might ask, “So causality disappears? It doesn't. Events still arise from prior conditions. But causality no longer guarantees a single inevitable outcome—it only constrains what can happen.

Now you might say, “Well, if the universe is truly random at the fundamental level, how the hell are we predicting the exact time we are going to reach the moon or when a star might die?” At larger scales in terms of planets, stars, galaxies, etc., things appear predictable again. Not because quantum mechanics stops applying, but because the sheer number of interacting particles averages out the randomness, giving rise to stable, classical behavior. So even if you knew the First Cause, the universe wouldn’t unfold like a perfectly predictable chain of dominoes. It would unfold more like a branching structure—a set of possibilities, weighted by probability, rather than a single fixed path.

So where does all of this leave us? We’ve established that at a fundamental level reality appears probabilistic, while at larger scales causality becomes stable and predictable.

Are our decisions part of this predictable chain—just another large-scale process unfolding inevitably? Or are they rooted in that underlying probabilistic layer? And if there really exists something like Aristotle’s “Unmoved Mover,” does it already see every movement unfolding before it happens?

But then where do we sit in this picture? We ourselves are part of the universe—part of the very system we are trying to understand. Every thought, every observation, every question I am asking right now is itself part of that same causal structure. If everything is part of a predictable chain, then what I call “choice” may simply be the illusion of inevitability. And if my decisions emerge from probabilistic processes instead, then they are not truly “mine” either—just randomness unfolding through me.

At this point, I seem to run out of options. Either everything is determined from the very first cause, unfolding inevitably as part of a chain we are merely witnessing unfold. Or at the fundamental level, things are probabilistic—where outcomes are not fixed, but neither are they truly ours. Or we push determinism even further, into something like hidden variables or superdeterminism—where even our sense of making choices is part of a deeper, pre-arranged structure. And in none of these can I really see the thing called “choice.”

Yet, despite all of this, I still cannot deny the feeling that I am the one choosing.

So what is this thing that experiences choice in the first place?

Consciousness (/'kɒnʃəsnəs/)

Definition: Being aware of something internal to one's self or of states or objects in one's external environment.

To even approach that question, we first need to understand what consciousness actually is. Not in the medical sense of being alert or aware of surroundings or able to respond to questions, but more in a fundamental sense of being here—thinking, questioning, experiencing, deciding. This is where things become even more unclear.

Broadly speaking, there are three common ways people try to explain consciousness.

Materialism

From a materialist view, consciousness is just another physical process—everything, including thoughts and decisions, emerges from matter.

If that is the case, then every decision I make is the result of neurons firing and chemical interactions unfolding. In other words, “my” choices arise from prior conditions: past experiences, learned behaviors, habits, and underlying biological states. Given the exact same conditions, the outcome would presumably unfold in the exact same way.

In that sense, a “choice” begins to feel less like a choice and more like the inevitable result of a chain of causes. One might try to escape this conclusion by appealing to quantum mechanics—arguing that if the underlying processes are probabilistic, then perhaps there is room for so-called “free will.”

But even if we introduce quantum randomness, something still feels off. Most of our actions do not feel random—they feel driven. When I wake up and immediately check my phone, is that really a conscious decision? When I feel thirsty and drink water, am I choosing—or simply responding to some biological condition that has been set prior?

These actions seem to arise from habits, conditioning, biological drives, past experiences, and learned patterns.

So even if randomness exists at a fundamental level, at the level of everyday experience my actions still depend on prior conditions. Randomness may introduce multiple possible paths, but the system still responds according to its structure and history. Does that really escape determinism or merely complicate it? Even moments that feel like deliberate decisions—thinking, weighing different options, choosing—are shaped by the same patterns, preferences, and tendencies.

Which brings me back to the same question: in what sense am I actually choosing?

Dualism

Dualism proposes that mind and matter are fundamentally different—meaning consciousness is not fully reducible to physical processes. In this view, there exists a “mental” domain that is distinct from the physical brain, yet somehow capable of influencing it.

This raises a question: if the mind is non-physical and the brain is physical, what exactly connects the two? How does a mental intention translate into physical neural activity that results in action? If the conscious mind is treated as the “chooser,” then it seems to operate independently of physical causes. But then the question becomes: what determines its decisions?

Is it influenced by prior states of the universe in a super-deterministic way, where even mental events are pre-specified? Or is the conscious mind something that exists continuously, without a clear beginning or end, acting as an independent source of choice?

If that is the case, then what exactly determines its decisions at all? Without physical causation, the mechanism of choice becomes unclear; there is still a missing explanation for how decisions arise or why they take one form rather than another.

Non-Dualism

Non-dualism proposes that the distinction itself (dualism) is flawed—that everything, including mind and matter, is part of a single underlying reality. In philosophical schools like Advaita Vedanta, reality itself is consciousness, meaning consciousness is not something produced by reality—consciousness itself is the ground from which reality appears.

So according to this view, all the material, physical things are part of consciousness itself. Like when we dream, we dream of self, people, objects, and situations—all of which appear separate but are actually part of the same consciousness. In that sense, everything in the dream is not outside consciousness, but within it.

But then the obvious question becomes: who — or what — is dreaming? and why the hell is it dreaming like this? Why can't this entity dream of something more entertaining, like maybe magic powers, Power Rangers, flying cities, or literally anything else? And why is it that if the universe is emerging from consciousness, it still seems to follow such fixed, rigid physical rules?

One way this is answered is with the “why not” argument—basically, why not this? If there is even a possibility for something to exist, then it can exist. So whatever form reality takes, including this one, is simply one of the possible expressions of that underlying whole.

Okay, maybe we are deviating a bit.

Coming back to the main idea: in non-dualism, there is no individual chooser. There is no separate self sitting inside the brain making decisions. Instead, what we call “choice” is just an expression of the whole—like waves in an ocean, where the wave doesn’t really decide its path; it is just the ocean moving in a certain way. So then what is happening when I am choosing something? Where exactly in all this is “me” making a decision? Is there even me?

Is the causal structure of events created by consciousness? Or is consciousness itself just something that arises inside that structure? Or is consciousness just the result of biological processes, learned behavior, and physical laws interacting over time? Or is it something else entirely—where every conscious being is just a wave in a larger ocean, temporarily appearing as an individual while never actually being separate from the whole?

Maybe consciousness is not separate from causality at all. Maybe what we call consciousness is simply an extraordinarily complex causal structure — matter interacting with matter for billions of years until, eventually, the chain becomes capable of observing itself. In that sense, consciousness would not stand outside causality observing it—consciousness itself would be another expression of that same unfolding structure.

Conclusion

This is what I currently believe.

Even if everything is fully deterministic—or even if it is fundamentally probabilistic—the structure of events does not seem to remove the experience of choice. We might be waves in a larger ocean, fully dependent on its motion, without control over its direction.

And yet, from inside the wave, there still seems to be movement that feels like deciding—small shifts that appear to matter, even if they are fully part of the same underlying flow.

Maybe that is an illusion. Or maybe that is the only kind of “choice” that can exist inside such a system. Or maybe consciousness is simply a name we give to a problem we still fundamentally do not understand.

No matter how deeply we trace causality outward into physics or inward into consciousness, we still arrive at the same strange fact: something is experiencing all of this.