Philosophical investigations, their instigators say, reveal that cause and effect are embroiled children's putty, not the distinct arrow we feel.
Philosophically I understood this, but now I'm beginning to see this viscerally.
When I hit a billiard ball on a table, it goes into the hole. The cause seems the hit, the effect seems the score. Elementary newtonian physics that a child intuits by the age two. Or is it?
The fact that the ball will go into the hole is what caused me to hit it in the first place. So the score is not the effect, but the cause.
And this is a ball. An individual, a couple, a company, a crowd. A nation, its history. A marketplace, an economy, a classroom, a court of justice. If the arrows seem straight, you're not seeing the flow.