I don't know how inspiring "no causation without reification" is as a rallying cry. Probably not very. But as a pithy description of an important insight, I think it's quite nice.

There's lots of reason to care about causation. In fact, it's hard to talk about much of anything without causation showing up. We need some way to talk about the fact that stuff happens, then other stuff happens, and that other stuff happens only because the first stuff happened, or so we hope to claim. The idea that one event causes another seems fairly fundamental to how humans perceive the world.

Formally, we often model causation as the action of one thing implying another, and we might formalize this with mathematical notation like $A ⟹ B$ to mean some event or thing $A$ causes some other event or thing $B$ to happen.

Hopefully that all sounds boring and obvious to you, and has you wondering when I'm going to get to the point.

My point is that the entirety of what we think we mean when we say $A ⟹ B$ is ontological, i.e it's in the map. Not once ever has causality existed in the territory.

Okay, I know, time to smash the downvote button, but hear me out.

Try to imagine what the world is like if you're not modeling it. Are you picturing atoms? Particles? Wave functions? Strings?

Wrong!

Those are all models we impose on the world to make sense of it. Useful ones, usually, but still models.

The territory, noting that the notion that such a thing exists is itself another model, is a kind of soup of stuff that's all mixed up and irreducible. You either have everything or nothing, for all time or no time. If you want anything else, you have to draw a map, make distinctions, and make choices.

Those distinctions are hopefully correlated with how the territory works, because that makes them useful for things like predicting what will happen (and we often call this correspondence "truth"), but they are not the territory itself. The territory just is; always has been, always will be.

This means that there's no aspect of the territory that is causality. There's no $A$ , there's no $B$ , there's no $⟹$ , there's just "is".

But if it's not in the territory, why is causality so useful that it's largely invisible to us, and why is it so hard for us to wrap our minds around what the world would be like if we didn't perceive its presence?

Well, there clearly is some featur...

Ontology