It's not just spatially multi-causal, like how numerous physical forces and objects lead to a car moving, or how many people's actions contribute to an outcome. It seems your suggesting mutlicausality along the time dimension too. In the time dimension, future decisions about what Alice or Bob do to resolve a problem can inform us about the cause of that problem. So, if Bob ends up making the decision after the fact to get headphones, then we attribute more causality for the externality problem to him. Therefore, perhaps we need to be careful about drawing boundaries in time concerning exactly what caused something to happen and when
Good point! I don't perceive any evidence for the traditional temporally linear view of causation where a previous event causes the next event to happen. I think it's all multicausality, our first person experiences of causality are not what's going on in third person terms, and it's entirely possible that the present wouldn't happen the way it does if it didn't have the future that it does to go into. But it's easier to figure out what's wrong than what's right here....
It's not just spatially multi-causal, like how numerous physical forces and objects lead to a car moving, or how many people's actions contribute to an outcome. It seems your suggesting mutlicausality along the time dimension too. In the time dimension, future decisions about what Alice or Bob do to resolve a problem can inform us about the cause of that problem. So, if Bob ends up making the decision after the fact to get headphones, then we attribute more causality for the externality problem to him. Therefore, perhaps we need to be careful about drawing boundaries in time concerning exactly what caused something to happen and when
Good point! I don't perceive any evidence for the traditional temporally linear view of causation where a previous event causes the next event to happen. I think it's all multicausality, our first person experiences of causality are not what's going on in third person terms, and it's entirely possible that the present wouldn't happen the way it does if it didn't have the future that it does to go into. But it's easier to figure out what's wrong than what's right here....