(ii) Does backward causation mean that a future cause is changing something in the past?
1 One of the greatest concerns is patients with multimorbidity, who are commonly excluded from RCTs. 2 Observational studies can address some of these shortcomings, but the lack of researcher control over confounding variables and the difficulty in establishing causation mean that conclusions from studies using observational approaches are generally considered to be weaker.
According to Spinoza's account of causation, this means that existing substances exist in virtue of conceptual relations to whatever explains their existence, and, similarly, conceptual relations explain the non-existence of non-existing substances.
Despite apparent differences, in part due to very different ways of presenting them, these two approaches share some important characteristics: both are "closed to efficient causation", which means that they require nothing from their environment, and in particular not catalysts, apart from "food", or chemical species that allow for the production of energy.
These observations may implicate HIV/AIDS as a more important factor for mortality than TB, though paucity of death causation data means this assumption is difficult to make.
For some factors, such as performance, it is often difficult to distinguish between correlation and causation, which means that one has to be careful when drawing conclusions from survey results.
Reciprocal causation merely means that A is a cause of B and, subsequently, B is a cause of A. Of course, we are particularly interested here in biological systems and reciprocal causation is feature of evolving systems, for example, when the activities of organisms modify selective environments or modify the variants subject to selection, thereby influencing evolutionary trajectories.
Reverse causation would mean that PAD influences the polymorphisms, which can practically be excluded.
If, as many people now believe, the fundamental laws are probabilistic rather than deterministic, this doesn't mean that there is no causation; it just means that we have to revise our theories of causation to fit the facts.
