Monads, baby!

But the idea of cause and effect has been confusing me lately. In particular, what is the fundamental meaning of A caused B?

As to what is meant by the phrase 'A caused B' there are many options. Usually at a basic level what is meant is something along the lines of 'Event A was a cause of event B if and only if A occurred and B occurred and if A had not occurred then B would not have occurred'. This is normally known as the simple counterfactual analysis of causation. Now obviously this definition is going to have a few problems but it should be a decent enough jumping-off point.

There are alternative frameworks in which one can do mechanics (e.g. Lagrangian and Hamiltonian) which do not appeal to the idea of cause and effect, but rather a least action principle.

I think that instead of saying that they do not appeal to ideas of cause and effect I would say that the concepts of cause and effect are just less obvious. In classical mechanics its easy to see a cause because forces are sitting right there in your equations, but in a Hamiltonian system its harder to see because forces and physical paths have been converted into energy functionals and boundary conditions. I think it would be a mistake to to feel that cause and effect are not present just because there is not a corresponding mathematical object with a similar function.

Another question I have is the following: is the principle of cause and effect an objective part of nature, or is it more akin to a perspective through which we as human beings view phenomena?

This is a good question that most would admit is not definitively answered. There is quite a bit of debate over what exactly the relata are in the relation of causality. Does the notion of causality only make sense as a relation between two physical events or can it be a relation between facts, events, agents(people) or maybe some combination of those? There is also some debate over whether the notion of causality is fundamental or not because in many situations it seems to have an unavoidable dependence on context related to human views like you seem to hint at in your post.

For instance, take an example of an explosion in a student laboratory. If the explosion occurred due to a combination of an electrical spark and flammable gases, how we assign causation seems to depend on certain nebulous 'states of affairs' that occur in the vicinity of the explosion. If the explosion happens in an electronics laboratory we would likely be inclined to state that the cause was the 'presence of flammable gas', whereas if the explosion occurs in a chemical laboratory where flammable gases are common and expected, then we may be more inclined to say something along the lines of 'The explosion occurred due to an electrical short'. Now obviously in both of these cases the fundamental physical process of the explosion and the events leading up to it have not changed. What is different is our expectations and our sense of 'blame' for the event. Now certainly this does not does not mean that causation is totally a human construction but it should at least make us worry about how we use language to refer to causal relations and how we create causal explanations.

Maybe that helped a bit.

What kind of literature and works of philosophy grapple with questions like mine?

For basics of causality see: Davidson 'Causal Relations' (1967) and the whole of 'Causation' (1993) by Sosa and Tooley would likely be useful.

For more info about human perspective in causality take a look at J.L Mackie 'The Cement of the Universe: A Study in Causation' (1974).

Part of your question comes down to semantics: since a cause, by definition, causes an effect it makes no sense to ask whether there could be a cause without an effect.

Similarly, effects do not arise without a corresponding cause. We may come across effects whose cause we do not understand completely (or indeed at all), but this simply points to a gap in our understanding of the world, not some anomaly in the causality of the universe. And while it is true that causality as we understand it dictates looking at the world in a "lineal temporal sense" as you say, that's because we experience time linearly. If we could "zoom out" and view the universe as a static construct in four dimensions, our understanding of causality would be different, but the basic principle that anything that happens requires a cause would still hold true.

Now, this cause-and-effect business becomes interesting because when you take these principles to their logical extremes, you inevitably draw the conclusion that our universe is deterministic, and that free will is an illusion. Laplace had this interesting thought experiment where he argued that, if one were to know the position and velocity of every particle in the universe with precision, one could by extrapolation figure out where each particle would be one moment in time later, and then another moment in time later, etc., and so one would be able to predict any moment in the future.

In principle, this is a flawless argument, but since then our understanding of the world has changed. Quantum physics now tells us that perfect knowledge of the universe isn't just impossible, it doesn't exist. When you get down to really small scales, all knowledge becomes sort of fuzzy around the edges and so, even if we understand the cause of something, we can no longer predict its effect; we can only talk about probabilities that a particle will do either this or that. So in a sense, at these sub-microscopic scales, the principle of cause and effect breaks down a little. There is still a cause and a corresponding effect, but the mechanics of that relationship are no longer as clear.

Lastly, there's another area where our understanding of cause and effect is lacking: consciousness. We can't explain consciousness – we have great trouble even defining what consciousness really is. If free will really exists, then it must somehow be unbound by the laws of causality. In a purely physical universe, there is always cause and effect, so free will necessitates some sort of mind-body dualism, where our consciousness exists on some level that has different "rules" than the physical material world. But it's also perfectly reasonable to say that, while we do make free, conscious decisions, the idea of free will is still merely an illusion: you can "choose" to go to the fridge or browse reddit or whatever, but if you were going to make that decision anyway, no matter what, was it really a choice?

Hope that helps.

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