Ask a philosopher what causation is, and you open an enormous can of worms. When a perfectly struck cue ball knocks the eight ball into the corner pocket, why do we say that the cue ball causes the eight ball to travel across the table and drop? The dirty secret is that although we all have an everyday sense of what it means for one thing to cause another, and despite endless debate in the fields of physics and metaphysics alike, there is little agreement on what causation is. Fortunately, we don’t need to know in order to use the notion of causation. In practice, we are usually interested in
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