Old Book: Chapter 2
Anti-jump muscles flexed
"You keep samin' when you oughta be changin'." (These Boots are Made For Walking)
"Heaven / Heaven is a place / A place where nothing / Nothing ever happens." (From Talking Heads' Heaven)
The Cloud of Not-Doing
When I was 16, the National Lampoon magazine did a parody of the National Enquirer. The headline for one of the stories was something like "Family of Five Spared as Oven Fails to Explode" (I haven't been able to verify the actual wording.) The doubly absurd concept of causation really appealed to me. It teeters on the brink of making sense. Surely if an exploding oven can cause a family's demise, then its failure to explode can be said to cause the family's survival.
Now, if we looked upon all of the things which could have caused something to happen and then use their non-occurrence as explanations for why things didn't happen (i.e. if we use one set of nonevents to explain another set of nonevents), then the world would be a much stranger place than we usually assume it to be. Duh! Think of all the nonevents that in the last second alone have caused me not to convert to Islam or caused you not to get a headache or to stop reading this sentence. Are these causes? Take them away and what happens? The spontaneous exploding of ovens? Mass conversion to Islam? If these nonevents are causes then there is literally an infinite number of them buzzing around everywhere, helping to hold the world as it is. We stand still because our anti-jump muscles are flexed. Conversely, things must happen by the suspension of these holding forces, by relaxing those anti-jump muscles. Obviously, this image really appeals to me. It has a spooky, quantum reality feel to it. But does this cloud of not-doing have a place in a theory of causation? I would say that it does—as long as we keep it separate from our usual version of causation. It's bound to work just fine if we just make a wholesale swap of this version of causation for that one. With that said, I feel compelled to point out that a full-fledged Cloud of Not-Doing, much like the infinite level hedge, is probably incomprehensible.
It's as if everything were trying to happen at once, but most of those things are held in check by the fact that their opposites are also trying to happen.·There are no things that continue. The phenomena of the world are remade with every tick of the cosmic clock.
In the standard version of causation that emphasizes change, reasoning is essentially instrumental. We try to isolate causes so actions can be taken, so we can do stuff. This alternative version for nonevents is, on first glance, the opposite of isolating. The Cloud of Not-Doing multiplies causes; the non-occurrence of infinitely many things are causing me not to get a headache. This embarrassment of riches may even obscure the paths to getting stuff done. It may well be, therefore, that this particular Assumption Switch does not make a commodious fit with the action-oriented human variety of thought. It explains but to no avail. The cloud almost seems more appropriate to some kind of passive vegetable consciousness. The quest for a correct epistemological stance, however, runs deeper than our biological blinders. We are free to muddle along as best we can to understand the implications of this caused stasis if that's what the situation demands.
My preferred approach to causation is broader and less instrumental than the one whose point is to get things done. Reasoning has the fundamental role not of helping us do things but of helping us to understand the way of the world in as deep a way as possible. It ought to shed light on being as well as doing. Each foreground-background choice that we make in order to extract meaning from our experience represents an artificial orientation imposed on an egalitarian world by the inegalitarian structure of language. Changelessness is no more the natural condition of the deepest reality than flowing change or abrupt cessation. No orientation is the natural one. There are no privileged frames of reference. Arkansas's license plates assert it is "The Natural State," but nothing else can legitimately claim that title.
If Only
The fact is that people use some sorts of nonevents as causes and effects all the time, although such reasoning is mostly weeded out of formal arguments. Any act of omission rather than commission, any explanation about why what-might-have-been didn't come to pass, any subjunctive of the form "If only I had..." presents a nonevent as a cause and/or effect. Let's look at a few fairly typical cases:
•I never became a world famous author because no influential people ever discovered me.
•I didn't fall flat on my face because I missed stepping on the banana peel by half an inch.
(In other words, I didn't fall because I didn't step on the banana peel. The non-event of not stepping on the banana peel caused the non-event of my remaining standing.)
•The only reason Prince Charles has become King of England instead of me is a mere accident of birth.
(My non-royal birth caused my non-ascension to the throne.)
•We lost the game because our star player forgot to eat breakfast and played sluggishly.
(This one is a little trickier. I think of forgetting as a passive thing, an anti-jump rather than a jump -- mustn't either forgetting or remembering be a non-event? -- but one can clearly make the contrary argument. Hard-headed, rational thinkers might say that the player forgot to eat breakfast because some brain cells died or because she was preoccupied with the coming game, and those would stand as the real causes. I can't fault that argument, but I can offer this amusing if slightly weaker version in response: We lost the game because our star player didn't invent her fantastic spin move until a few days later.)
Granted, there is something strange about the above explanations, but each is a fairly ordinary expression of human thinking.
[The more familiar form these usually take is:
If only an influential person had discovered me, I would have been a world-famous author.
If I'd stepped on that banana peel, I would have fallen flat on my face.
etc.]
Each is something that our minds might formulate in response to our experience even if our logic has a hard time with it after that. That is, such thoughts are meaningful but ultimately rejected because they don't fit into a logical scheme. They sort of sound like lame excuses, don't they?
Survival
There is substance behind the whimsical examples above. The "occurrence" of a non-event is equivalent to the persistence of things as they are (and the persistence of non-things as they aren't). I want to be able to think about causes for the persistence of conditions and of mere being in general as well as for the usual causes for change. That is, I want to focus on nonevents as effects. Why do things "survive" from moment to moment? This is a very broad question which can be taken in any of several ways. The deepest philosophical interpretation asks why existence doesn't just flicker out, why, in the parlance of metaphysics, is there Something rather than Nothing. It is not the kind of question scientists tend to ask, nor is it one we can in all likelihood resolve, but that doesn't mean it isn't an excellent question to ponder.
We can also interpret the question more empirically as asking what makes systems stable or what constitutes organization—why do things keep going rather than falling apart? Complementary theories developed by Assumption Switching require some concept of causation, even if it is not the usual one. Because the idea of nonevents as effects is so strikingly odd, at least at first, it may require an equally strange notion of causation to make sense of it—perhaps even including the non-explosion of ovens.
The whole venture might strike some readers as silly or pointless. Our intuition does not seem to demand an explanation for things staying the same. One of our most deeply held, if unacknowledged, assumptions is that things won't change (and thus things will go on) unless something happens to them. If we could exempt anything from the need for explanation, it would be the simple enduring or continuing of objects, physical space, and certain processes. You don't have to worry that the chair you are sitting in will suddenly cease to exist. We tend not to think that things spontaneously begin or end. Thus non-events cannot be the effect of any cause. I will argue that withdrawing this assumption undermines our basic Western ways of thinking about the world. From the point of view of the Fully Automatic Model, the idea of causing families to survive comes down to a confusion of the background for the foreground. Causation can operate only against a natural backdrop of nothingness/changelessness. Things are caused to change. Staying the same, in other words, is not something that happens but something that just is. And as something that just is, it is without cause or explanation. I have repeated a number of times now that, at the level we perceive as deepest, where foregrounds and backgrounds achieve a kind of equality, all events and objects have the just is quality. At this level there are no causes or explanations.
Contrary to our intuition about stasis, however, certain kinds of stability or staying-the-same are quite obviously caused. The so-called far-from-equilibrium steady states of rivers and hurricanes and people must be fed in order to be maintained. They very clearly will not stay the same unless special conditions prevail, unless they get their food. Supposing a human gets all of the food, air, love she needs to maintain herself, however, we will expect all of her aspects to endure—her stubbornness, her ability at chess—even the ones for which it is impossible to say what feeds them.
A rock or a chair, as opposed to a person, seems to be thoroughly inert and self-contained—at least, that is, until you look to the stasis of its constituent parts. What keeps an atom or a proton or a quark, of which the chair is made, going? What binds these knots of energy together? Gluons? The closer we look at systems, at their structures and particles, the easier it is to accept or even demand caused stasis.
If we ask why things are the way they are, it seems to me, we must accept explanations both for how they got this way and how they stay this way. In the terms of the previous sections, changelessness seems to be an important aspect of the background against which we can reason or measure. But we have few intellectual tools for reasoning about changelessness. Our sharp cultural distinction between the active and the passive seems to contribute to our standard causal orientation, but there may also be a biological component. Apparently our attention responds to change. There are specific receptors in the eye that "see" movement but none that do the same for stasis. That is, when change happens our neurons fire, our brain works. When things stay the same we may even lose our ability to perceive them.
Big Tent Causation
The validity of this attitude toward stasis is, as I mentioned before, tied up with our standard notion of causation. Causation is an extremely troublesome and yet seemingly necessary concept. Philosopher's have debated its meaning for centuries and will continue to do so. My take on the idea here is not very sophisticated. I have set up a straw man called Standard or Coercive Causation against which I will contrast Passive Causation, the kind that might account for changelessness. Standard causation has to do with the Fully Automatic Model. Things happen because of force, contact, pushing.
The Fully Automatic Model uses the simple formula "causation = force" as if nothing would happen unless it were physically coerced, as if the world were made of inert, even sluggish and resistant components. Although physics no longer officially views force this way, our thinking is still very much under this notion's influence. Gravity, electro-magnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces push and pull the stuff of nature, controlling collisions and trajectories, orchestrating the entire show, including, some would say, your reading of this sentence. We can see the culmination of thinking in terms of forces in the sustained effort in the physics community over the last century to unite these forces in a Unified Field, one superforce that gives rise to them all. Once this unification is achieved we will have found the physical Prime Mover. It will embody the cause for all possible changes. Finding such a superforce has been called the ultimate goal of physics, even the end of physics.
These physical forces, however, can only be indirectly responsible for causing ovens not to explode, keeping people from becoming King of England or, I guess, maintaining the integrity of a proton. If caused stasis has any validity, there must be some analog of force that corresponds to Passive Causation which we cannot see. The physics of stasis needs to be much different from our current system. We can see right away one peculiar characteristic of the forces of not happening; they must act absolutely constantly, because any momentary cessation will allow change to occur. As soon as the nonexploding "force" subsides, the family perishes. As soon as I lose control of my appetite, no matter how good I have been every day for years, I gain weight. These holding forces "act" in the indeterminate spaces or rests between events, but, from the perspective of our switched view, they must constitute events in their own right. Gravitation, electromagnetism, et al. act more or less constantly as well, but we tend to associate them with fitful or punctuated action in a sea of stasis as in the sudden impulse imparted in the collision of billiard balls. The friction and inertia that damp out that action and make it appear a mere punctuation must have some close association with Passive Causation.
[Another thing we may notice immediately about Passive Causation is that it must somehow be an act of a thing on itself. The rest of the world causes us to change. In some sense we must be the agents that cause ourselves to remain the same. Presumably there is no external agent keeping protons from decaying. Whatever it is, it must act from the inside out. Self-causation, of course, gives rise to a chicken and egg problem. We need to have a system going to produce the process that keeps the system going. Where can it begin? How can a system and its persistence arise mutually? In what sense does the oven keep itself from exploding?]
It is difficult to find appropriate words to describe this idea of holding forces or Passive Causation in English. Our language has developed to serve the opposing point of view and my borrowings require quotation marks. 'Happen,' 'action,' 'event' all imply change against a backdrop of changelessness. Each concept has an obvious analog in this alternative world, but English offers no words for them. 'Not happen,' 'inaction,' and 'non-event' carry the wrong connotation. In general, the words at my disposal, verbs like preserve, hold, maintain, control and keep sound weak and anthropomorphic. We must remember, however, that "force" has anthropomorphic roots itself which we have slowly managed to deaden. The inadequacy of our vocabulary in itself is not a reason to reject this alternative version of force, but it does make statements seem stilted.
It is pretty easy to find problems with Standard Causation. First of all, there is no clear procedure for selecting the "real" cause of an event. What level of explanation is satisfactory? If, for example, we want to find the causes for winning a baseball game, are the answers going to concern talent, practice, strategy or chemical reactions in the muscles and minds of the players? Even working with the limited notion of the standard model, it is virtually impossible to meaningfully trace the overlapping sequences of contact for any but the simplest events.
More importantly, the free use of Standard Causation quickly leads to an infinite regress. In reply to each proposed cause, we can always ask "And what caused that cause?" Unless at some point it is possible to respond "That's just the way it is" or attribute everything somehow to a final cause in the Aristotelian sense, we can never extricate ourselves from this web. When my son was at that certain stage of development he frequently engaged me in the WHY game. Even with hours of practice, I never managed to get past the fifth or sixth "why?" without creating a circularity in my causal structure. I came to appreciate more than ever that causation is really an infinitely complex web of interdependence, interaction, and feedback. The regress leads us straight back to assumptions. Since causation is presumably a property of "egalitarian" nature and not of our "inegalitarian" theories, we ought not to be permitted a stopping place.
Linear causation is a kind of useful fiction, a simplification. Mutual interaction, simultaneous co-causation is the way of the world. Unfortunately, as I've said before, rational discourse is confined by its sequential, narrative structure. No one has found a way to perfectly express simultaneous interaction within the context of language. Art may be able to communicate such subtlety by inference, but scientific description can't.
The impossibility of a linear description of a non-linear world is closely tied to the Both-and-Neither Model. The boundaries between things are fuzzy, and thus, among other things, the points of contact are blurred. Bart Kosco, a self-proclaimed "fuzzy thinker" calls the situation the Mismatch Problem. Standard causation and the standard logic it implies are inadequate. His way to mitigate the Mismatch Problem is to overturn Aristotle's law of excluded middle and replace ordinary logic with so-called Fuzzy Logic. In the world of fuzzy logic we assign fractional truth values (between zero and one) to propositions. Two or more simultaneously partially true facts split lines of deduction into several paths each of which will have limited or probabilistic validity. My problem with Fuzzy Logic is the assignment of values. Just as when we considered "averaging", competing ideas are not half true or 90% true-10% false. They are completely true in their appropriate contexts of assumptions and completely false under other assumptions. The Foreground-Background Switch is motivated by the same Mismatch Problem. Passive Causation, for example, can produce an alternative description and, in combination with the standard approach, overcome the mismatch. Both switching and fuzzing solve the problem by hedging one's bets, taking things simultaneously in two different ways.
The Natural
I believe we have imposed an orientation on causation through our choice of changelessness as the natural state or default value of the world. The choice of a natural state colors everything we see in a most profound way. The natural state gives an absolute orientation to our explanations. It determines what is interesting, what is real, even what counts as an event. Consider, for example, the question of the underlying human nature. Are we naturally good but subject to temptation or inherently corrupt and selfish? The position one takes on such an issue has profound ramifications in every area of life from politics to child rearing.
The closer we look at naturalness, however, the more it recedes, especially in the realm to which we have the best access—human psychology. Time and again I find that when some side of a dichotomy seems to be natural, upon inspection it will turn out to be a matter of choice. Many women tend, for example, to feel that the default state of a toilet is with the seat down, since from their point of view there is rarely an occasion for it to be up. They find it unnatural, I think, rather than merely rude when the seat is left up. To their vilified male companions, however, neither position is any more natural than the other. Okay, so maybe this isn't the most compelling example. There are others.
Maleness, for example, is often given automatic priority as the default gender, especially in certain areas. God, the source of all things, is, of course, seen as a Father in the popular imagination. Our dominant creation myth has the male as the temporally prior and thus more basic human variety. Women are derived from men (Adam's rib) and are thus secondary. It is clear to most people nowadays, however, that maleness and femaleness must arise mutually. You can't have one without the other. It seems to me always the case that when one side of a duality is looked upon as the natural side, it turns out to be that the pair arises mutually, that each half can only be defined in terms of the other.
We tend to equate ontological depth with temporal precedence—that is, being first implies being more natural, but, as with the chicken and the egg, it may be meaningless to try to assign temporal precedence to things that arise mutually. The book of Genesis holds that Non-existence and Chaos comes before creation and we therefore see the Void as undergirding reality. When we strip away the superficial strata of reality, the Somethingness gives way to an underlying Emptiness that was there all along. But you can't really strip away layers of reality. Perhaps the idea of layers is our own invention. It could just as well be true that all of reality is of a piece and arises mutually and that there is no nothingness under all the somethings.
In the current paradigm of physics, the underlying and essential unity of the forces of nature (the Unified Field) was manifest before its inessential and overlaid separation that occurred a fraction of a second after the Big Bang. In the fantastic heat of that first instant, particles and the four forces had yet to "freeze out" of the products of creation. Again, being more natural and fundamental has been equated with coming first.
A number of years ago, it was noticed that the deeper, interior layers of the human brain were structurally very similar to our supposed distant ancestors, the reptiles. As we evolved, apparently, rather than changing those primitive structures, we merely overlaid newer, more sophisticated ones. This reptilian brain in the core of the human brain appears to be responsible for, among other things, our most basic emotions—fear, anger, lust, etc. Some writers have used the fact that this part of the brain is older to support the argument that these emotions and the instinctual behaviors that go with them embody the true human nature. Older = deeper = more natural. Our "higher" faculties and capabilities are tacked on afterward and are thus more artificial and less basic and essential.
As one last and more subtle example of temporal precedence implying ontological depth, let's look at Chomskian linguistic theory. It is proposed that the semantic level of thought, that is, its meaning, is deeper than and occurs prior to its syntactic expression. An idea first arises in a prelinguistic or metalinguistic form which must then be sent to the language organ of our brain in order to be transmuted into a particular grammatical and linguistic form. There are very good reasons for making such a split between semantics and syntax. It provides the beginning of an explanation for the universality of various syntactic structures found in all human languages. The translation to speech is the product of the same genetically inborn syntactic mechanism whether one is a speaker of Swahili or Hindi.
Indeed, we have probably all had the feeling that we had an idea which somehow we just could not express in words, so perhaps thoughts do, in a sense, precede their syntactic expression. On the other hand, the experience of "waiting to see what would come out of my mouth next," where expression almost seems to precede invention is equally universal. From the point of view of a theory of mind, the problem with this semantic/syntactic duality as an explanation of linguistic behavior is that it begs the question of where the metalinguistic idea comes from to begin with. In solving the problem of universal grammars, it just pushes aside the more difficult and more interesting question of the origin of meaning in the mind in the first place. Supposing, on the other hand, that meaning and grammar arise mutually, that we can't have one without the other, we lose the ability to make hard and fast distinctions between the two that temporal sequencing provides. (By the way, in so doing we also appease two extreme wings of the philosophy of mind who make very strange bed fellows—the holistic mystics who see all things as part of one unitary process and the supporters of so-called "strong" artificial intelligence who believe that meaning is just a side-effect of the playing out of formal and syntactic rules.)
When we try again to approach the apparent language-like structure of the M-T relationship, we will further discuss how meaning and its expression can be simultaneous and how language organs may not be necessary.
Be Yourself
Anyone who has ever tried to just be natural in an awkward or difficult situation knows what a paradox that presents. The harder we try the more anxious we become and the more stiltedly we act. On the other hand, there is a sense in which it is impossible to be anything but natural. Isn't our anxiety and stiltedness part of our nature? Is it unnatural to try? Again, the idea of being natural seems to be tied up with the idea of a default way of being to which we revert when free of outside influences. But we are never free of influences. We just exchange one set of conditions with another.
For years I have heard various athletes implicitly belittled because it is supposed that their talent is natural while others have been given credit for making it through hard work. Does that mean that hard work does not come naturally to hard workers? Perhaps hard work does come naturally to some but others have to work at it!
We are presumed to have default values for our states of mind or body that occupy very deep parts of ourselves, to which we have access and to which we will naturally return when we are free of external or situational influences. These values will come out spontaneously when the unnatural or artificial is let go (or is it held back?). I think, on the contrary, that there are modes of behavior, habits and patterns of behavior to which we fall back when pressed, but no natural or deepest behavior. There is probably no such thing as operating without external influence nor is there any inherent hierarchy to behavior that marks one behavior as deepest. We merely select which influence to become subject to, and simply behave differently under different conditions.
As mentioned a moment ago, there is a tendency to equate human nature with instinctual behavior. Does that mean the statistical tendency of men to seek sexual attention from women mark as unnatural or artificial (or "tacked on" or higher or lower) the behavior of men to sometimes behave toward women without regard to their sexuality? Is cooperation and sharing ontologically more or less deep that individualism and selfishness? The conservative wing of evolutionary thought has struggled mightily and with some success to explain apparent altruism in terms of a deeper selfishness in our genes, but I find their formulation of the question misguided. I see no particular distinction between the sides of these dichotomies which singles out one side as natural, no default value for what we call instinct. I can imagine that the vast list of human behaviors is somewhat circumscribed by our biology, but it is hard to imagine a net large enough to capture human nature. Explanations of human behavior based on instinct or on genes have a certain validity, but only when what remains of these explanations after any kind of naturalness for these behaviors is drained from the explanations, when they have been cast in complementary forms.
If mutual arising is the way the world works, then there are no hierarchies like from deepest to most superficial. We create the idea of deeper, natural states like changelessness precisely in order to linearize causation and communication and make them more clear cut. You can only begin arguments once the premises have been set. Ontological egalitarianism, on the other hand, obscures distinctions and leaves us with little to say. Mutual arising, once again, makes good philosophy but bad science. In order to make deductions we need an orientation. We need assumptions about temporal and logical priority. At the same time that we recognize the relativity of choices about natural states, we must appreciate that some idea of the natural must prevail, at least temporarily.
Sinking Back to Our Non-being
Over the course of history the boundary between what is considered natural and what is caused (and thus in need of explanation) has shifted considerably. Before Newton, for example, the fact that objects fell to Earth seemed to be merely natural, as simple as the distinction between up and down. Aristotle's version of gravity depicted objects as moving to their natural levels in the celestial sphere with earth the basest and lowest and stars the most refined and highest. It may be possible to cast all great scientific breakthroughs as the peeling back of the idea of the natural. It is clear, however, that we will never get to a stopping place in the process of peeling back. There is always some portion of reality which serves as the natural background which puts the foreground into relief.
At least since the dawn of the age of science, we have typically considered changelessness to be natural. Newton's calculus gave classical science the tools for studying the causes of change and change only. The Fully Automatic Model has steadily conditioned us to think in terms of the movement of the essentially inert parts of the Machine rather than concerning ourselves with the nature and permanence of those parts, except to assume that the parts are themselves made of even more natural and permanent parts.
Over the ages, however, there has been a great deal of debate about which side of the dichotomy, permanence or change, is the more real and thus the more natural background. Zeno devised his famous paradoxes to prove that the deepest reality is permanent and immutable and that true change is impossible. Plato too saw the ultimate reality as consisting of immutable Ideas with our world of impermanent forms consisting in nothing but the flickering shadows of those Ideas on the walls of a cave.
Heraclitus, among others, took the opposite stance. For him the true reality resided in the great flux and fire of change. You cannot go to the same river twice, as he said, because neither the river nor you have any permanent aspects.
In a remarkable formulation of the naturalness of change, the Kabbalist Meir ben Gabbai, as quoted by Robert Nozick, says that the enduring qualities of the world are a result of the continual writing and speaking of the Torah. "Were it to be interrupted, even for a moment, all creatures would sink back into their nonbeing." The natural nothingness, the cessation of existence must be actively held off by the Word just as John's gospel claimed that the Word created the world to begin with. Once again the holding forces must act without let up. Later we will look closely at the notion that description of the world is the glue that holds it together.
Eastern thought in general and Hinduism in particular seem less bound by the dualism of foreground-background orientations. The Hindus have gods both for change and for persistence. Shiva (the destroyer) and Vishnu (the preserver) operate on equal terms, with neither taking priority over the other. They engage in mutual struggle, the tenuous balance of which is the phenomenal world. Brahma (the creator), the third part of the essential Hindu trinity resolves the actions of the two lesser deities. Creation embodies aspects of both persistence and change.
It is perhaps not too much of a simplification to say that this question about the natural background of reality concerns which of the pair -- things or processes -- has priority. Do things set processes in motion or are things nothing but the relatively stable patterns of pre-existing processes? Here is the Both-and-Neither problem again. Our theories seem to require a choice between these perspectives, but neither is adequate to understand reality in the deepest way.
The perspective of science has slowly been shifting away from essential priority of things and permanence toward the priority of processes (fields) and evolution. In many areas it is starting to make sense to ask how things stay the same. A succession of the most powerful and important scientific ideas in history have slowly eaten away at the naturalness of changelessness. A short list must include the notion of deep time in geology, biological evolution, entropy, radioactivity, relativity, quantum mechanics, the expanding universe, cybernetics, general systems theory, information theory and complexity theory. These developments show that it is sometimes in things' natures that they will change.
These ideas and discoveries have shown that evolution rather than equilibrium is the rule. The "sciences of stability" are taking their place among the sciences of change. In the midst of this slow shift, we see thinkers struggling with the new order. For example, Einstein, fixed on the idea of the essential permanence of the universe, could not accept the evolutionary aspects implied by his ideas. In one of the few blunders of his career (so it is said), he incorporated a "cosmological constant" into his General Relativity equations in order to maintain the basic structure of galaxies over time.
Changelessness has retreated from large scales down to small. From the time of Democritus until the discovery of radioactivity, the atom was taken as a permanent entity without an interior, and it was thus impossible to frame the question about what held it together. Atoms were thought to be as inert and passive as a rock and indivisibly small. We now know there is something to hold together within atoms and other particles, and with the knowledge we have gained about the inner workings of atoms it has now become possible to ask for a scientific description of the processes that hold them together. For example, what makes a naked proton permanent but a naked neutron ephemeral? Still, as a holdover from the earlier thought structures, science continues to be dominated by ideas better suited to describe change than persistence. If we apply only the standard conception of causation, staying the same will always appear to be a non-event with no cause.