Originally Posted by Terumoto

OK. Lets think of an effect as an event, in regards to the concept of cause and effect. One example of an event is the birth of a baby.

You could regard the cause of an event as its beginning. So when did this event, the birth of a baby, begin? What caused it? Does it begin the moment the mother goes into labour? It could begin the moment the child was conceived. It could have been caused by the hormones in the father that caused sexual lust, or the production of the sperm or ova in the parents. It could have been caused by the parents' birth, or their parents birth, or their parents birth, or theirs. We don't know what REALLY caused the event at all.

Howbout another example... A war. The first world war. This event, when did it begin (when was it caused), how long did it go for, and when did it end?

Well, you'd say that the cause of the war was this country doing this, and the regime of this or that country, and so on. You'd say that the war began in 1914 and ended in 1918. When in fact, all the things that led up to the first world war started long before 1914, and the repercussions of that war have continued long beyond 1918. How are we to distinguish an event from its repercussions? The time that we slapped onto the war and called it's duration is purely random. They chose two of the many aspects of the event and labeled them the start and finish.

Cause and effect is a flawed concept, because it regards every event in time as a seperate event. In reality there is no seperate events.

Lets say I was sitting down and looking through the slit of a fence, and a snake slithered past. Through the slit, first I see it's head, then its body, and then it's tail. You cause and effect guys go "ah! the head is the cause of the tail!" But that is purely a misconception. What I can see through the slit, is the present, right? I see the beginning of the snake, and then the whole snake until it ends at the tail. This doesnt mean that the head is the cause of the tail, the snake is one whole.