Is it possible to truly differentiate a cause from an effect?
As I sit and ponder about these existential questions, I’ve come to realize that the line between cause and effect is not so clear. Say you’re ordering an ice cream cone, for simplicity reasons we’ll say there’s only two options, chocolate and vanilla. You choose chocolate. Now what seems like a simple choice becomes a lot more complicated when dissected. We need to take into account action potentials, neural summation, conditioning genetics, environmental factors, past and present contexts, and probably millions of other factors that would be impossible to list.
So that choice, that critical moment when it’s decided chocolate and therefore can never be vanilla since choosing otherwise via identical circumstances is effectively a violation of physics, was that a cause or an effect?
Think about it. The answer is not so simple.