Consider the imaginary substance indifferentium, which always comes in uniform masses with no internal structure whatsoever. At some temporal intervals, regular or otherwise, indifferentium emits small particles called quiddons. We call this an emission because the quiddon forms at the surface of the indifferentium fragment and proceeds outwards from there. Whether the quiddons are made of indifferentium or not does not concern us, and we may specify further that neither mass nor momentum nor energy are conserved over quiddon-emission events. (This condition is there so that the mass of indifferentium emitting the quiddon will be exactly the same in every respect before and after the emission-event. Probably looser conditions of object-identity would allow for conservation principles to hold, but since we are trying to establish a conceptual point about causation we will keep everything exactly the same.)
What in this scenario is the cause of quiddon-emission events?
Ex hypothesi there is no event within the indifferentium mass which proceeds the emission. There certainly could be such: a buildup of etheric fluid meeting some critical threshold and coalescing around the indifferentium to form a new quiddon. But this is not the case; the case is just that, periodically, indifferentium masses emit or shed or throw off quiddons – they form at the edges of indifferentium masses and go their way – and there is no other event, process, etc. to be found proceeding this one.
This substance seems conceivable, and therefore logically possible. Indifferentium masses emit quiddons. But what is the cause of their so emitting?
We might specify the coming-to-be of the indifferentium mass itself as the event which causes it. But we can imagine cases where this sort of answer would not be available. Imagine universes with circular time with chunks of indifferentium that persist unmodified for the entirety of it; universes with time extending backwards infinitely, ditto; and perhaps even universes like ours, if certain Leibnizian interpretations of time offered by relativity theorists are correct, where time itself begins with certain initial material interactions, and where among the materials present at the very outset (and thus, in effect, ‘eternally’) are persistent indifferentium chunks. So there may be no prior event to consider in such cases.
If all this is indeed conceivable, the indifferentium’s emission of quiddons is very like something coming from nothing, in that there does not appear to be any prior event that causes it. But there is a difference, in that here something is coming from something.
Consider voidons, particles emitted spontaneously from the void with no prior event causing them. The void’s emission of a voidon is an event, but has no prior event-cause, and no prior object-cause, since the emission comes from the void.
When indifferentium emits a quiddon, we still may have no prior event-cause, depending on how and whether chunks of indifferentium come-to-be, but we do now have an object-cause: the indifferentium mass that emits the quiddon.
There hence seems to be a place in our conceptual scheme for object-causes that don’t entirely reduce to event-causes. This place is fairly clear when we have eternal objects, but even with temporal objects, there seems to me to be a point to talking this way. For suppose that indifferentium masses come to be and pass away. Even in this case, there is a great difference between events like the emission of a quiddon, whose prior event-cause is the creation of the object which emitted it, and events like breaking a window, whose prior event-cause is some other event in the window’s vicinity.
Of course all events causally depend on the existence and thus coming-to-be of the objects which feature in those events. But many events causally depend also on sequences of events involving those objects, and here we don’t have that.
We can attempt the following definition (though one can see various problems): x is an object-cause of e iff x is a component of e and x exists prior to e occurring. On this definition we can ‘pick out’ object-causes in series of event-causes just by tracing the object through the chain. But by the above argument, there are conceivable (therefore logically possible) events which have prior object-causes but need not have prior event-causes. Therefore, although the notion of an object-cause is (and must be, if it is to be relevant to our universe) intimately connected to that of an event-cause, it is false to hold that there is nothing to be said about causation that can be said in terms of event-causes alone. For there are conceivable events which have object-causes but no event-causes.
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