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ance, if c, that is, A s acquiring g, truly causes e, that is, B s
acquiring f.
But to return from this digression how can invariance
help us with the case at hand? Here our task is to identify a
cause of the simultaneity between my arrival in the agora and
my debtor s. And simultaneity is a relation, not a property.
Here event e has the structure simultaneous {my arrival,
my debtor s}.
Even so, it seems easy to identify relations that contrast at
first just mildly, then more and more sharply, with the actual
simultaneity between my arrival and my debtor s. That is,
it seems possible to identify relations that are proper con-
traries to the actual simultaneity between our arrivals. We
may imagine first my arrival s having been just a bit earlier
than my debtor s, or vice versa; and then that one of us
arrived earlier by an even greater margin, so that one of us
nearly missed the other in the agora; and so on.
So if there was a cause of the simultaneity between my
arrival and my debtor s, we now know what such an event
would look like. It must be some event previous to our
arrivals, such that variations on that event, first mild and
then sharp, must seem likely to have gone together with
arrival relations more and more different from simultaneity.
That is: to identify a cause of the simultaneity of our arrivals,
we must find some event that set up a relation between the
various background circumstances which were causally
responsible for my arriving at the agora, and the quite dif-
ferent background circumstances that were responsible for
my debtor s arrival; and this one event must have played
an indispensable part both in the former circumstances and
in the latter.
Mental versus Physical Causation 93
Here is an event that would meet our requirements if only
it had occurred! Suppose my debtor and I had simultane-
ously heard the town crier announce that nuggets of gold
free for the taking had been dumped in the agora. This event
would have set up a simultaneity between the starts of two
causal chains that led, respectively, to my debtor s arrival
and to mine. It would then have brought other relations
between me and my debtor into play, causally. Suppose, for
example, that my debtor and I live equally far from the
agora, and are equally fleet afoot. Then the one event of the
town crier s shout would have been an NS condition for our
arriving simultaneously at the agora. It would have topped
off two sets of background circumstances, involving me and
my debtor respectively, such that the two would yield simul-
taneity in the arrivals. (Or the crier s announcement could
have started out the chain that led to my debtor s arrival
later than it started my chain my debtor lives out of earshot
of the crier, but the cry was repeated by an excitable child
and then my debtor s being more fleet afoot than I could still
have led to simultaneity in our arrivals.)
But ex hypothesi there was no such event; ex hypothesi
the events and circumstances that got me to go to the agora
were unconnected with, disjoint from, those that got my
debtor to go. There existed numerous relations between my
debtor and me, but nothing brought them causally into play.
So our arriving simultaneously, like all accidents, had no
cause. No previous circumstance causally sufficed for its
occurrence. The causal processes of the world, to speak
metaphorically, did not grab our joint arrival by its simul-
taneity when they pulled it into existence. Rather they
grabbed our joint arrival at two different points, indepen-
dently, and pulled: the simultaneity just came along for
the ride.
94 Chapter 4
Now, at last, for the microphysical mêlée that realizes
James s arrival at Supermarket S. It too can be viewed as a
unitary, relationally defined outcome: microparticles that
compose into James s car move on top of microparticles that
compose the parking lot at Supermarket S while simultane-
ously surrounding, between them, microparticles compos-
ing into James. This may not indeed be the way of picturing
that microphysical mêlée which first occurs to one. It may
seem more natural to view that mêlée as an amalgam of
innumerable individual states of affairs, that is, as what I call
a coincidence that such-and-such a microparticle is under-
going such-and-such a motion at that precise location, while
such-and-such others are undergoing precisely that sort of
motion in precisely that other location, while yet another
microparticle is doing such-and-such there, and so forth. But
just as there is an objective question of what caused my
debtor and me to arrive at the same time as one another,
regardless of whether I arrived at exactly 4:03 and whether
he did, so there is a parallel question concerning the
microphysics of James s arrival at S. There is an ob-
jective question concerning, not what caused exactly such
microparticles as were present in that parking lot to undergo
exactly such motions and state changes as they did, but
rather why some microparticles or other, clustered together
in one of the ways that would compose into a car, were col-
lectively moving above some other microparticles config-
ured in one of the ways that would compose into pavement,
while collectively encompassing some microparticles that
composed into James.
But would this relationally defined microphysical devel-
opment be just another accident could it be said to have a
cause? To find a cause for the simultaneity of my arrival and
my debtor s, we looked for a previous relation-making
Mental versus Physical Causation 95
event, variations in which would have gone together with
variations in arrival relations. We had to identify an event
relating my past to my debtor s, which when added (as a
necessary element) to the background circumstances involv-
ing me and my debtor respectively, yielded a set sufficient
for my arriving just when he did. This we could not do. But
just so here.
For my opponent s aim, after all, is to use causal exclu-
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