causal asymmetry

Causal asymmetry refers to the idea that cause-and-effect relationships often have a preferred direction: causes lead to effects, not the other way around. For example, smoking causes lung disease, but lung disease doesn’t cause someone to smoke. This asymmetry helps us understand how events unfold and why some changes happen before others. It’s an essential concept in science and philosophy because it highlights that time and the structure of processes matter—causality doesn’t work equally in all directions, which affects how we interpret relationships between events.