Against Causation: A Formal Argument That Causality Is a Compression Artifact of Bounded Observers, Not a Feature of Reality

This paper argues that causation is not an intrinsic feature of mind-independent reality but a relational structure emerging at the interface between a system's conditional independence structure and a bounded observer's compression requirements. Drawing on Woodward's interventionist semantics, the algorithmic independence of causal conditionals (Janzing & Schölkopf 2010), Price's perspectivalism, and the time-symmetry of fundamental physics, the paper develops a three-level ontology: (i) the territory supplies undirected conditional independence structure via locality and symmetry; (ii) the observer contributes directionality, scale, and system boundaries; (iii) causation is the product of (i) and (ii) jointly — real at the relational level, absent at either level alone. The central premise (P3, Exhaustion) is argued in detail: once the territory's undirected structure and the observer's perspectival contributions are specified, no residual causal fact remains. The paper provides a sustained engagement with Woodward (2003), Janzing and Schölkopf (2010), Price (2007), and Ladyman and Ross (2007), and explicitly disambiguates the ontological commitment into three readings — defending direction-dependence (reading c): without observers, the world contains dependency structure but no directed causal facts. Consequences include mandatory causal pluralism, loss of metaphysical privilege for the fundamental level, and partial (but explicitly qualified) dissolution of the problem of mental causation. The paper identifies the residual hard question — why conditional independence structure exists at all — and connects it to locality in physics. A formalization research program is outlined, linking to work on causal emergence (Hoel et al. 2013), causal abstraction (Beckers & Halpern 2019), and the formal conditions for closed dependency structures (Kriger 2024). Related identifiers: Is Supplemented By: Kriger, B. (2024). Cyclical Hierarchical Systems: A Modal Analysis of Self-Sufficient Structures. doi:10.5281/zenodo.18317628 Keywords: causation, perspectivalism, causal compression, bounded observers, interventionism, conditional independence, causal pluralism, philosophy of causation, information theory, relational ontology Authors: Boris Kriger (ORCID: 0009-0001-0034-2903) Affiliations: ¹ Information Physics Institute, Gosport, Hampshire, United Kingdom ² Institute of Integrative and Interdisciplinary Research, Toronto, Canada