The Causality Trap – Is Cause and Effect Just a Habit of Mind?

In 2022, the Nobel Prize in Physics went to John Clauser, Alain Aspect, and Anton Zeilinger for experiments showing that two particles, separated by vast distances, show instant correlations. Einstein once called this a ‘spooky action at a distance’. It is real, but not a message travelling through space. The universe, at least at the quantum scale, does not always act as if A must push B along a chain.

This investigation looks at the idea of an acausal language, a way of thinking or communicating that is not built on the simple rule of cause and effect.

The Crack in the Foundation

David Hume (1711 to 1776), a Scottish philosopher, argued that we never actually see causation.

Quick definitions: Causation here means a relation where one event brings about another, a directional push from A to B. Acausal means a relation or pattern that is not organised by such pushes, for example, a correlation that does not travel along a path.

What we see is one event followed by another, repeatedly, which Hume called ‘constant conjunction‘. The ‘necessary connection’ that our minds insist on is not visible in the world, it is supplied by habit. We learn to expect B after A, then mistake that expectation for a law of nature.

Hume’s billiard balls make the point. One ball strikes another. We see motion, contact, then the second ball move. We never see the ‘must’ that binds strike to motion. It is our brain that glues them together. Once you accept that, a doubt creeps in. How much of what we treat as causal law is expectation dressed up as fact?

He even offered two definitions of ’cause’. An external pattern in events, and an internal mental effect in us. That split opens a gap investigators can step into. If part of causation lives in our head, not out there, how safe are the conclusions we draw when we map blame, intent, or risk?

Hume’s unanswered question sits under every section that follows: if ’cause’ is a projection, how much of reality, as we claim to know it, rests on a habit rather than on something the world forces on us.

The Language Trap: Thinking in a Causal Box

Linguistic relativity is the claim that a language’s grammar and habits can steer what speakers pay attention to as they speak and listen. The strong form, ‘language determines thought’, is rejected. The weaker, supported form says language can bias attention and memory while we speak and comprehend, a view summed up by Dan Slobin as ‘thinking for speaking’.

A complex example helps. Speakers of Guugu Yimithirr are trained by grammar to use absolute directions, not ‘left’ or ‘right’. You do not say ‘the cup is to your left’. You say ‘the cup is north of the plate’. It forces constant orientation that English never demands. When grammar obliges, cognition follows the rule.

The Hopi time debate shows the risks of oversimplifying. Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897 to 1941), an American linguist associated with Edward Sapir, claimed Hopi grammar encodes time differently to English, focusing less on tense and more on aspect (how an action unfolds) and modality (how certain, possible, or necessary it is). Ekkehart Malotki, a German linguist, later challenged that, showing that Hopi has many time expressions.

The modern take is more precise… nobody sensible says ‘Hopi have no time’. The live question is whether their obligatory grammar shifts how time is habitually framed.

Another lever is evidentiality, a grammatical system that marks how the speaker knows something. Turkish, for instance, obliges speakers to mark how they know something, which shifts attention to the source rather than the sequence.

Slobin’s model is the bridge we need. When we prepare to speak, our language forces us to select some features and ignore others. English verbs and connectives make causal links cheap and default. If your grammar constantly marks tense, agency and connectives like ‘because’ and ‘therefore’, your default mental sketch of events is a line of pushes and outcomes. That is the ‘language trap’.

Constructed languages, often called conlangs, expose the boundary.

Lojban aims for logical clarity, including explicit causal link types. Ithkuil tries to encode very fine-grained causal dynamics, evidence, and perspective inside single words. Both refine causality rather than remove it. To design a truly ‘acausal’ language would mean inventing grammar that links ideas without tense or directional force, perhaps by marking correlation, resonance, or shared state instead of cause and effect.

Now, if grammar trains attention, a language that constantly encodes causality may make it hard to even imagine alternatives.

‘Spooky Action’ on the Record: The Physics Anomaly

If grammar can tilt thought towards cause and effect, does nature itself always play by that rule? Physics says not always.

Quantum entanglement is when two particles form a single system. Measure one, and you can predict the other’s correlated result instantly, however far apart they are. Einstein hated it and called it ‘spooky action at a distance’ because it clashes with local realism, the common sense that things only affect nearby things and that properties exist before you look.

In 1964, John Bell (1928 to 1990), a Northern Irish physicist, showed that any local realist model must satisfy an inequality. In the CHSH set up, two distant detectors each choose between two settings and produce ±1 outcomes. Combine the four correlations into S; any local hidden variable theory gives |S| ≤ 2. Quantum mechanics predicts values up to 2√2.

Tests from John Clauser in the early 1970s, through Alain Aspect’s 1982 time varying analysers, to loophole free experiments reported in 2015, found S > 2. The 2022 Nobel Prize recognised Clauser, Aspect and Anton Zeilinger for establishing those violations.

Crucially, entanglement gives correlation without faster than light messaging. Outcomes at each site are random, so no signal can be sent, a result known as the no communication theorem. Entanglement is therefore a relation without a travelling cause, which is enough to show that the simple picture ‘A pushes B along a line’ is not universal.

Scrambling the Signal: The Causal Brain

Our heads crave the causal chain. In story research, events on the main causal backbone are remembered better and judged more important. Break the chain and you feel it immediately as confusion, then effort. That effort is measurable.

Take the film Memento. The reverse chronology forces you to build causes after effects. The form simulates amnesia. You work twice, once to place the scene in time, again to connect it to motives. The film Arrival goes further. Learning a non-linear alien language changes the protagonist’s experience of time. It is fiction, but it dramatises linguistic relativity. Alter the code, alter the perception.

Researchers sometimes show people films with scenes out of order. When viewers suddenly ‘get’ the plot, activity and connectivity rise in the brain’s Default Mode Network (DMN), which supports remembering and imagining. When understanding drops, activity shifts towards sensory networks. The brain flips between building a story and simply taking in sights and sounds, depending on whether a causal model is in place.

The takeaway is twofold. First, narrative coherence leans heavily on cause and effect. Second, form can push us outside that default. There is a threshold, though. Push acausality too hard and comprehension fails. That matters for any attempt to design an ‘acausal language’. People may simply be unable to process it as a story.

Subjective Glitches in Time

If form can bend causality from the outside, some states seem to bend it from within.

Déjà vu is the sense that you have lived a moment before, paired with the knowledge that you have not. Surveys show it is common, especially in younger people. Leading accounts put it down to memory or temporal-lobe glitches. The striking ‘I know what happens next’ feeling has been tested and, on average, does not predict outcomes. It is an illusion of prediction, not the real thing.

On the other end are altered states such as high-dose DMT (N,N-dimethyltryptamine). Reports consistently describe non-linear time, entity encounters, and torrents of ‘meaningful’ information that feel like a language beyond words. Neuroimaging under DMT reveals altered activity and connectivity in networks associated with high-level cognition, language, and semantics. The content may be ineffable, but the brain state is measurable.

None of this proves an objective acausal realm. It does show that minds can generate experiences that feel acausal. If you set out to build a language that captures those phenomenologies, you would probably need grammar for ‘felt familiarity’, ‘overlapping now’, ‘untranslatable information stream’, and explicit markers that separate ‘subjective time’ from clock time. That is a design brief, not a claim about reality.

What if A Doesn’t Cause B?

Those inner quirks are private. Our institutions, however, run on public causation.

Free will gets squeezed from both sides. Under hard determinism, every act is the last link in an unbreakable chain. Under full acausality, actions would pop without reasons. In either case, what becomes of responsibility? Our justice systems rest on mens rea (Latin for ‘guilty mind’, the mental element of a crime), negligence, foreseeability. All assume traceable links between choice, act, and outcome. Remove the links and the structure wobbles.

Decision-making in daily life is prediction: if I do this, that happens. Risk models in finance, safety cases in engineering, clinical decisions in medicine, all hang on causal structure. An acausal framing would not support the maths or the ethics those fields use to justify action.

There is also an AI parallel. Modern systems excel at finding correlations without building human-style causal models. They can sort patterns at scale while being blind to why a pattern holds. That gap is at the heart of alignment worries (whether a system’s behaviour can be steered to match human goals). How do you align a system that chases correlations with human values that assume causes and harms? The analogy is imperfect, but it shows what a ‘non-causal mind’ colliding with causal norms looks like.

Dismantling causality is no parlour game. It cuts into free will, justice, and the logic of choice. The fewer secure causal rails we have, the harder it is to steer.

So, does an ‘acausal language’ exist

Not in practice. There are languages that pull cognition in odd directions, and conlangs that encode causality with painful precision. There are brain states that feel acausal. Physics gives us real-world correlation without a travelling cause. Put together, they tell us this… our heads, our grammars, and bits of the universe do not line up neatly with a clean arrow from A to B. That is the live mystery.

Sources

Sources include: foundational philosophical texts, primarily David Hume’s ‘A Treatise of Human Nature’ on the nature of causation and constant conjunction; academic papers and analyses in the field of linguistic relativity, including the work of Benjamin Lee Whorf on the Hopi language and research into the spatial cognition of Guugu Yimithirr speakers; published works on quantum mechanics, including John Bell’s 1964 paper on his theorem, and official materials from the Nobel Prize committee regarding the 2022 award to Alain Aspect, John Clauser, and Anton Zeilinger for experiments on entanglement and non-locality; cognitive science and neuroimaging studies on narrative comprehension, the Default Mode Network (DMN), and the phenomenology of déjà vu; and peer-reviewed research on the neurological effects of psychedelics such as N,N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT).