Cause, Effect and the Human Mind

"The human mind is built to identify for each event a definite cause and can therefore have a hard time accepting the influence of unrelated or random factors. Random processes are fundamental in nature and are ubiquitous in our everyday lives, yet most people do not understand them or think much about them." -- Leonard Iodinos in The Drunkard Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives." Molecules fly randomly through space.

The first part of this quote made me think of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). "He asked if an object can be known to have certain properties prior to the experience of that object. He concluded that all objects about which the mind can think must conform to its manner of thought. Therefore if the mind can think only in terms of causality – which he concluded that it does – then we can know prior to experiencing them that all objects we experience must either be a cause or an effect. However, it follows from this that it is possible that there are objects of such nature which the mind cannot think, and so the principle of causality, for instance, cannot be applied outside of experience: hence we cannot know, for example, whether the world always existed or if it had a cause. And so the grand questions of speculative metaphysics cannot be answered by the human mind, but the sciences are firmly grounded in laws of the mind." Wikipedia