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According to many conceptions of causation, causes are local in various senses: First, causes are synchronically local: they are "smallish," spatially localized events-or at least their size is proportionate to the size of the effect under consideration. Indeed, that causes determine their effects is built into many philosophical accounts of causation, such as Hume’s regularity account. Within the descriptive project the claim is that it is part of our commonsense notion of causation that events only have a small number of causes. Perhaps the most influential argument for the claim that causal notions cannot play a legitimate role in physics appeals to the fact that the causal relation is generally understood to be asymmetric. Norton’s demand that any causal principle needs to be a universal principle may be on a stronger footing within the metaphysical project and in fact Norton himself calls his argument "the fundamentalist’s dilemma": If a metaphysical account of causation is committed to the principle "same cause-same effect" or even just to a probabilistic version of this principle, then the existence of genuine indeterminism in physics of the kind discussed by Norton would pose a serious threat to that account. If we demand locality in this sense, then this puts into sharper focus one of the horns of the trilemma posed by the dominant cause: we cannot identify the state on an entire time-slice S as the cause of an event in the future of S on pains of violating the locality constraint that causes be spatio-temporally localized.

The fact that a small set of particularly salient or explanatorily relevant causal factors, in a given context, are often singled out as the causes of an event points to a pragmatic dimension of causal talk. Maudlin (2007) points out that on reading (ii) premise 2 is false, since not all the fundamental laws of physics are in fact time-reversal invariant. It has also been argued that even when considering time-reversal invariance the argument applies only to deterministic theories, since theories with non-trivial probabilistic state-transition laws are inherently time-asymmetric. But even considered on its own the association between determinism and causation can be marshalled in support of an anti-causal argument. In analogy to the case of the determinism challenge, one can resist the conclusion of the argument by denying premise 1 and maintain that causal constraints can play a legitimate and useful role in physical theorizing even if they are not part of a universal principle of causality.

For example, one may accept steps 1-3 in the argument above, and be more agnostic in step 4, while still considering contemporary digital computers highly unlikely to be capable of mediating a unitary mind. This claim might be supported by pointing out that causal claims are used to assign responsibility or blame, to single out factors that are particularly amenable to interventions into a system and for control, or to single out factors that we may find particularly salient in a given context-functions that all appear to require zeroing in on only a small number of dominant factors as an event’s causes. The time-asymmetry challenge is sometimes raised in the context of discussing the interpretation of a theory’s so-called "Green’s function", which specifies how a system responds to a localized point-like disturbance. The determinism challenge can be raised as part of each of the three philosophical projects we distinguished: one might argue that our intuitive concept of cause is deterministic or that only a deterministic concept of cause could serve fulfil certain useful cognitive functions. Again, the challenge may be raised within each of the three philosophical projects, with subtle but important different in each case. Thus, the usefulness of deterministic causal reasoning might be restricted to some contexts-contexts that may include some theoretical contexts in physics-while there may also be domains in physics in which deterministic causal notions are not applicable.

As Woodward (2014) emphasizes, it is compatible with causal judgments playing an important cognitive role in some domains that there are limits to the scope of causal thinking and that causal concepts are not universally applicable. Even after a discovery is made, What are billiard balls made of there is a good chance that it will

not be put into operation until there is need for it due to rising cost. Within the functional project, the reply could concede that focusing on a small set of causal factors fulfills certain pragmatic and context dependent roles yet maintain that these are not the only functions of causal concepts and causal judgements and that there are other functions that are compatible with-or even require-a broader notion of what counts as an event’s causes. Norton (2003) argues that this defense is unsuccessful, since determinism comes under pressure even in what is often taken to be the paradigm of a deterministic theory, Newtonian physics. Darwin. Such ferocious selection pressure explains the emergence from quantum bedrock of gross, dynamically stable patterns - the quasi-classical, seemingly decohered neurons suggested by today's crude tools of neuroscanning. Yet if quantum mechanics were cited as reason for the failure of a principle of causality, one can try to rescue the principle by introducing a notion of probabilistic causation: causes do not determine their effects but determine the probabilities of an effect’s occurrence.