Mr Swordfish you wrote it would be absurd say it was the other way around ie to insist that you are making the bus speed up by pressing on the back of your seat  Did you mean to say it would be absurd say it was the other way around ie to insist that you are creating a force on your back by accelerating   I think so  You were making the good point that simply reversing F and a in the cause and effect statement seems intuitively absurd in this case  But the F in statement  is the forward force exerted on the back not the backward force by the back and the a is the acceleration of the person not of the bus  If we make the reversal one of switching equal and opposite forces carefully we come up with The backward force of the back on the bus causes the acceleration of the bus to be lower than it otherwise would be which is different than the way you wrote it  In this case there is no intuitive absurdity at all  Both cause and effect statements are equally intuitive  Crowsfoot is right that Fma or its fluid dynamics equivalent doesnt by itself indicate an asymmetric cause and effect relationship  If causes must precede effects then we could even argue that Fma forbids a either causal interpretation since it refers to instantaneous values of both F and a and m    But its helpful to the reader I think to go with the intuitively appealing bias that net forces pressure differences cause accelerations of bodies or particles or for us of differential volumes of fluid  The real difficulty comes when the reader wants to know if the pressure field is caused by the flow field or vice versa  We must get himr to abandon this truly meaningless question I believe and understand that Newtons differential equation and the continuity and mass conservation constraints all have to hold at the same time  The infinite set of d velocity vectors and the infinite set of local pressures have to be consistent with each other and there is no intuitively meaningful way to say that one causes the other