A Causal Theory of Everything

A Causal Theory of Everything

Is language caused by reality? Is meaning caused by facts? Does the environment give rise to our talk about it? I want to say yes. Language is caused by what it is about, in conjunction with other causal factors. The explanation of the characteristic features of language is the world in which we live—our planet basically. We have the language we do because of the planet we live on. Language may be largely innate, but its ultimate cause is environmental. This is because everything about us is caused by our planetary environment. All animal life on Earth is caused by Earth; all aspects of life on Earth are causally explained by the physics (dynamics) of Earth. Life on other planets is caused by those planets, and any life created by some form of intelligence (divine or alien) is caused by that intelligence; but life as we know it on Earth is the causal upshot of our planet, including language. Its nature derives from the place from which it originated; it emerges from this particular celestial object with that object’s specific characteristics. We are what we are because it is what it is.

To see this, it helps to go back to the beginning. In some way we don’t yet fully understand, the first primitive life was caused by the conditions obtaining on Earth (perhaps thermal vents). The nature of this life was predictable from its earthly antecedents; you could infer the effect from the cause. The effect wasn’t some radically new entity or process. The elementary life form was like a book recording its causal history.[1] With the passage of time new life forms developed, also caused by earthly conditions—physical, chemical, geological, climatic. One thing led causally to another. Eventually bacteria evolved as a causal consequence of what existed before; we don’t know how or why exactly, but it happened. There was no infusion of help from outside. Whether to call this process “physical” is a moot point, depending on what that word is taken to mean; what is undeniable is that the process was insulated, internal to the planet on which it occurred. No miracles from on high, no extraterrestrial injections (save the odd meteor). In the fullness of time, plants and animals came along—life as we know it. Mutation and natural selection were the driving mechanisms, building on what went before. Bodies began, various and distinctive. Thus, living bodies were caused by planet Earth—by the terrestrial environment. This included other living bodies: each body existed in a world partly composed of other bodies. This fact shaped the production of new bodies: one body is as it is because other bodies are what they are. For example, the body of a predator is shaped by the bodies of its prey; the tiger’s body is as it is because the antelope’s body is as it is. That is what it chases, hunts, kills, and eats. Prey cause predators (and predators cause later prey by reciprocal interaction). The body of one animal comes to be like a book about another animal; you can infer predator from prey and prey from predator, down to fine detail (with some input from the bodies of other animals that prey on the predator or compete with them). The point is that it’s all causality working its magic (or non-magic): everything is ultimately an effect of antecedent planetary conditions. Everything is a reflection of something else. Nothing happens by chance or intentional design. Causality rules. Trees are caused by earth and light. Fish are caused by water and oxygen. Birds are caused by air and gravity. All animals are caused by space and time. The universe is one big causal machine lumbering along. Nothing exists but that it was caused by something. This is not a reductionist thesis but an historical thesis: history, including pre-history, is a causal process, obeying the laws of causality. Not chance, not divine intervention, but blind deterministic causation. Causality truly is the cement of the universe and its modus operandi (despite what some quantum theorists and mystics say). Surely, this is by now a truism.

The same goes for the organs of animal bodies: they too are caused and shaped by prior planetary conditions, slowly evolving over time. Hearts and kidneys are caused by the earth, rearranging planetary matter. Hydrodynamics and gravity play a role, as well as available biochemical components. They are literally parts of planet Earth. The brain is no exception: the earth caused the brain; the brain contains elements of the earth. The brain emerged from the earth, taking on its characteristics—shape, size, weight, chemical composition, water, electricity. It lies at one end of a long causal chain tracing back to rocks and H2O. The earth gave birth to the brain (its wrinkled baby) after a long gestation period. The brain is as much an effect of the earth as a volcanic rock formation, and it reflects its causal origins; its properties are derivable from earthly properties, though often mysteriously. Its study is part of earth science (“the extended earth”). The thinking organ might be physically different on other planets, being differently caused; but earthly brains have earthly causes. They have the earth written into them. They even look like the earth (round, hilly)!

What about the mind—is it too caused by the earth? Of course it is. It bears the marks of the earth, though this is less obvious. If panpsychism were true, it would be infused with earthly micro-minds. We don’t understand the causation involved (the mind-body problem), but it must have such a causal history. The earth caused our emotions, our thoughts, our knowledge—what else could cause these things? Not God, and they didn’t happen by chance. Geo-genesis is the correct doctrine. Somehow the laws of nature allowed the mind to emerge from the earth. Among the causal powers of the earth is the power to become mind. Other planets in our solar system lack this power and remain psychologically sterile, barren. Then what of language? One might well say that language is trivially caused by the earth, because it arose from it like bodies, brains, and minds—it had to. But we can ask a more interesting question: is there anything about language that resembles its cause? Specifically, does language resemble the part of the earth that constitutes its subject-matter? Does the external environment both cause language to exist and intricately shape its nature? If it does cause language, we might expect that it shapes its nature, though perhaps in transmuted form. Does the environment configure the brain and hence the brain’s linguistic contents? Is language in any way a record of the long causal history that led up to it? Is it a kind of fossil of the earth that produced it? Take sound: spoken language, as we have it, consists of sounds, but that is only possible because planet Earth permits the production of transmissible sounds in virtue of its atmosphere. Sound waves need a material medium through which they can propagate—such as air. No air, no sound. There also must be physical mechanisms that can cause sound waves—falling water, explosions, collisions. It’s a sound world. Thus, Earth contains the resources with which to create sounds; in a world without atmospheric disturbance there cannot be spoken language (though there could be a sign language made possible by light). Spoken language owes its existence to a naturally noisy environment (as sign language owes its existence to the sun’s light). We thus know that pre-linguistic earth was a sound earth, because we make sounds now. Phonology is a result of terrestrial sounds—the pushing around of air molecules.

But the influence of the earth goes deeper into the make-up of language; it forms language’s very structure and content. The world consists of objects and properties, the instantiation relation, events, processes, pluralities, facts, space, and time—all these are reflected in the architecture of language. To put it baldly, objects and properties cause (causally explain) subjects and predicates (nouns and adjectives), instantiation causes predication (“is”), events and processes cause verbs, facts cause propositions, space and time form the very framework of meaningful sounds and marks. The sentence “snow is white” means that snow is white (expresses that proposition) because it is a fact that snow is white (these things really exist on Earth). Ontology causes and forms semantics. Where else could meaning come from? You say the brain or the genes; true enough, but where do they come from? They come from the earth (and earlier from the cosmos more generally). The whole machinery of language is caused by antecedent states of the universe, going back to the Big Bang. But language on Earth (“Earth-Speak”) owes its existence to the planet itself—that unique celestial object in all its singularity. We will not find examples of spoken language like ours on planets in which life develops differently—a soundless planet made of pure light, say. Even a purely liquid or gaseous planet will not produce our kind of language; for that you need solid objects with persistent properties. Our linguistic scheme is constrained by our geological and biological environment, our world of rocks and plants and animals. Our language is partly shaped by the existence of living bodies; they cause it to mean what it does. Proper names exist because there are things to be named—persisting substantial things. Spatial terms exist because space exists. Mental vocabulary exists because minds exist. The environment must be thus and so in order that talk about it should exist. That environment incorporates the reality of planet Earth, which is both an instance of something more general and a unique planetary formation. Language is one of Earth’s many effects, along with mountains, plants, animal bodies, and minds. Earth is a potent cause; not every chunk of matter floating through space has its protean power. A world of formless gas lacks such powers; it creates no languages, no bodies, no minds. As far as we know, only planet Earth has the power to produce these (to us) familiar things, including the ability to talk about itself. Earth is the cause of its own story. We are the vehicles of this story. We are the book in which Earth tells its tall tale. It took a long time, but eventually it learned to speak, with us as its vocal apparatus. We are Earth’s mouthpiece. Evolution is the earth working out its causal potential. Life on Earth is Earth’s causal history.[2]

[1] See Richard Dawkins, The Genetic Book of the Dead (2024).

[2] It is worth reminding ourselves that what I say here would have been considered the height of blasphemy only a couple of centuries ago. The idea that the earth could be the cause of all things human and animal, and not a divine being, would seem preposterous—isn’t the earth mainly mud? But Darwin’s causal theory of species creation put paid to that point of view; yet it lingers on in our ordinary thinking. A “Humean” theory of causation as constant conjunction (not the actual Hume’s position) also makes it hard to see how the earth could be so causally fecund, since it denies the productivity of causation. We need to appreciate how creative (yet conservative) causation can be; the earth has remarkable constructive powers. We should treat it with the awe and respect it deserves. Earth, we salute you!