Cause and world arise together as notions, when objects are recognized as entities mutually interacting and distinct from self. Causality is intimately bound up with the separation of subject and object. The process, engaged in by the sensory mind, of evoking an interaction among external objects to organize the flux of sensory patterns, has its intellectual counterpart in the scientific quest for entities and causal explanations of the laws of nature. The finding of regularities in nature gives the power of prediction, especially if they can be quantified. Over and beyond that, we still want to know what sense can be made of these patterns.
Explanation calls for a picture or story about reality beyond mere mathematical description.
For this reason, continuity in space and time have been essential to causal explanation in physics. Intelligible pictures of how the world works are based on metaphors of everyday experience in which continuity plays a key role. Various theories of gravity waves and gravity particles have attempted to bridge the gap. What is troubling about implications of the quantum theory is a similar causal discontinuity. Modelling the world in terms of causes is also, of course, an everyday experience.