Triggering Questions (Kent Palmer)

1. Is there meta-causality, i.e. do causes have causal affects on each other.
2. If causes cause each other, rather than effects on something else but themselves, how is this causality trasmitted from cause to cause?
3. What does it mean for a cause to cause another cause to do something or to be changed in some way?
4. Can this causation be transmitted across multiple causes of different kinds in a series?
5. For Holonic Circularity that you posit, is it possible for a set of causes to have causal flow between them such that the causation completes a circuit?
6. Does this causal circularity when completed make the four causes a whole, in the sense of a holon, and what does that mean?
7. What are the implications of this causal circularity for things outside that holonic system?
8. Is this causal circularity autopoietic, or self-bootstrapping, or does it come from outside the holon?
9. Is there some source of casuality of this kind, some fifth cause that causes this causation?
10. Does this causality of causation need to be mediated, or can it be direct. If it needs to be mediated what is the nature of that mediation?
11. What is the relation between this kind of causality and the concepts of possibility, necessity, potentiality, actuality, and in general the coming into existence of the holon and other things produced by the holon?
12. What is the nature of Emergence, of the holon and things coming from the holon via this meta-causation?
13. What is the ultimate nature of the holon itself. Is it pure meta-causality, is it something that is materialized in a system, in general what is the ultimate nature of the holon that allows it to have this meta-causality
14. What are some examples of meta-causality working in the world, based on Aristotle’s four causes.

I decided to deal with these questions as a set, and draw some fundamental answers from them, so I’ll take them in groups.

Question #1, 2, &3:  Meta-causality

The basic approach to causality in R-theory is that it refers to ways of understanding nature. I believe it was Aristotle’s idea as well, that the term ’cause’ refers to a means of ‘explanation’. No one can say what is ‘really’ in nature – we only have percepts of nature to deal with. Hence, anything we say is in the descriptive system. It is at most a pointer to something we make a leap of faith to believe is “out there”. For all we really know, our essence is alive in a jar in some laboratory being fed percepts of a body and a natural world. As Descartes said, all we can really know is that we exist; all else must be subject to inquiry.

A slight aside: Even Descartes’ justification of existence is questioned by philosophers and theologians, but Descartes’ point was that we have to make that much of a leap of faith in order to justify knowing anything, and the fact that we are conscious justifies the leap. History suggests that to him it was a form of faith. Reportedly, Descartes was quite spiritual and retained his deep connection with Catholicism (despite some books questioning that on slight evidence). His science got him in trouble with the Church, but he saw his work as non-contradictory. He apparently thought his famous quote “Cogito ergo sum” was a proof of the existence of God, because our own existence as suggested by mind must imply a conscious source. I believe he was philosophically on solid ground in that thinking; that awareness of existence implies origin that is causally rich enough to allow consciousness, whether it pre-exists in some ultimate form or is a principle that develops (or both, as in ancient Eastern philosophy that equates the ultimate with the essence of the personal, as Christianity also claimed to do more literally).  In Descartes’ time “le cogito” was a term that referred to conscious awareness of existence generally, not just analytical reasoning or information processing. It very much meant existence of the ‘self’.

Continuing ….

We tend to explain nature using the word “because”. In Rosen’s writings he says that causes are answers to the question “why” in addition to answering “how”. The supposed ‘higher’ causes of Aristotle, final and formal, are answers to “why”, so indeed our traditional sense of causality suggests that we should ask how the why (Kent’s questions about flow). That can be done, but it does not imply any explanation other than another layer of holon related causalities. They implicate each other going up the hierarchy, and they ‘mean’ each other going down the hierarchy (or my R-theory counter-clockwise around the cycle). Efficient cause ‘means’ necessary state change because that is the supposed organization of the material world.  That’s its definition and the efficient cause itself is just a label for its regularity. Material cause means a measurable pattern.  Final cause means a pattern that is an example in a context, because that is the supposed nature of context, to interpret, just as it is the supposed nature of the realized world to act and manifest. The “Old West” is an interpretation of the events and things that characterize it, and yet it was a natural phenomenon in its own right that also determined those events. It was a context. It is obvious in mental examples but less so in physical cases. A middle ground is in ecology, where it is near inescapable to consider the ecological niche, which becomes defined through adaptation by current distributions and acts through selection to constrain future ones, in some sense real (as real as genes, by the way). Formal cause means function because it gives contextual parameters to natural process. So water can flow due to gravity, but the force of gravity is constrained by the gravitational constant.

I’ll go over the four causes again, because it is so fundamental to relational theory and the R-theory synthesis. An easy example is a spaghetti dinner. The ingredients of the meal are material in the usual sense. They are measurable states of matter and energy, even as temporal sequences of states. The pasta, the tomatoes, etc. Material can be defined at any level. We can talk about the molecules the atoms or the whole vegetables or the substance after they are made into sauce, or the whole meal. At any system scale we are talking about material explanation, or material cause of what the meal is or consists of. The processes that resulted in those material states can also be an explanation of how the meal came to be as it is. This is efficient cause and it refers to reconfiguration of states. As such, it is incapable of explaining the origin of a material object except as a transformation of another pre-existing material object. Hence theories that employ only efficient and material cause (the standard category theory entailment map) cannot address the context of origin. We thus have a theory of dynamics in local space, motion of planets, formation of stars, chemical interactions in a test tube, etc.; but these mechanistic explanations run into trouble when the system it is used to describe involves some novelty or its own origin. That, most obviously, is the case with living systems via reproduction and evolution and “origin of species”, and it turned out to be the case in physics as well in the origin of quantum particles and the origin of the universe. None of these fields of inquiry can be adequately addressed by a mechanistic theory for that precise reason. But there is no question that we use this causal system of entailment throughout science. The equation F=ma is an entailment of efficient (the force) and material (the state variables) cause. Differential equations such as d/dt(position) = velocity define an efficient cause as a temporal change of state. Geometric construction is a procedure in space, and is also an efficiency defining a material object.

But continuing with the meal analogy, if we ask further of the Chef who performed all the cooking processes that transformed the material into a meal, how he knew what to do, we may get several kinds of answers. If he is a professional Chef he may say it was Divine inspiration. His creation has that certain ‘Je ne cest qua’! This was Aristotle’s final cause (as distinct from R-theory, note below) extending from God in a hierarchy down to the ‘lower’ material level. However, a down-home country mom might admit that she used grandma’s recipe. That is formal cause. Aristotle, or his later interpreters, gave different descriptions of formal cause, trying to explain it. One analogy was like this one, it provides the constitutive parameters of the efficient processes. The range of temperature during cooking that results in just this meal, the amount of tomatoes, the kind of mashing or slicing, the limits of force and shape that produce pasta, etc. It does not specify what those processes are, but what their constraints are. One may use a fork or a spoon to beat the eggs for the pasta or mix the sauce, or perhaps shaking it all together would work too, but somehow the processes must be selected and constrained in a certain way to get the right result.

A curious pasta lover might then ask grandma where she got the recipe. She got it from her mother, who got it from a neighbor, and on eventually to Italy and China. Perhaps many of these people were inspired, but they also had examples to work with. That was the key feature of R-theory holon construction; to take Aristotle’s hierarchy and turn it into a natural holarchy. Final cause is not the inspiration, it is the example. Now it could also be an exemplary thought if we are applying it in that domain, and indeed exemplary thoughts trace back to prior exemplars too, and perhaps ultimately to Divine inspiration, or at least one can say so. But even that follows from an exemplar which religions are quick to describe. The big question then, is where does the exemplar come from?

R-theory’s solution was that, certainly in the case of any natural analysis, it comes from prior states – that’s what an exemplar is, a set of previous measurable conditions. Those conditions are placed into a new context to produce a new recipe. The context went for China to Italy to neighbor to grandma to mom in many cycles of the holon and many versions of the recipe and many final results that were good meals and became examples. So, then the remaining question is what about Divine inspiration? Where does the theory say that comes from, if it is to be a complete philosophy not leaving out even conceptual systems? I’ll comment more on this in the future, but it is the four-cause holon itself; we are the inspiration that performs the loop, and so is nature. This could be called a fifth cause, but we can’t work with it in science because it is science happening, along with everything else. R-theory says up front that no theory can have a complete explanation without being the thing it is explaining, so this is where the buck stops. In the most ancient wisdom; “Tat twam asi”; “Your essence is that essence”, or later in more tangible terms, Brahman (ultimate existence) and Atman (personal existence) are the same — Descartes’ point.

But I don’t mean to say that the holon works because of its divinity. It is a system of explanation. It is not intended as a divine pattern any more than all of science attempts to discern patterns that are true descriptions of nature. If we are close to the mark, and if one chooses to ask the question of ultimate meta-causation, then perhaps we can say something like our theory (R-theory?) exists at the heart of nature….until someone finds a better description (better in terms of epistemological criteria, otherwise it may be ‘better’ for something other than science). The alternative is some other way of explaining nature that will have the exact same question of it; why is it a proper explanation? What makes it so? These are empirical matters, not ontological ones. We seek the best explanation meeting a set of knowledge criteria. There are six epistemological criteria (in the synthesis paper but also a future post in more detail). The meta-causality can be addressed only by testing these criteria; otherwise it is a direction into unknowable territory that can only be answered by faith. But we should be clear that there is no proposal that the R-holon is a natural object either; it is a formal object attempting to bootstrap knowledge as science must do, from initial assumptions. It is a means of causal analysis and synthesis together.

Another way to say this is that there is no more question if the causes are real than if nature is real – neither can be proven. Also the ideas did not begin with Aristotle, he acquired them from the Egyptian and Indus philosophies that were less dualistic. I am growing convinced that his four causes are reinventions of the “four faces of Brahman” from the Vedic civilization or prior. Interestingly this idea was carried into Buddhism as well, with Buddha depicted with four faces. It is far too trivial an interpretation of these extremely introspective traditions that talked about the most fundamental non-dual relation between existence and non-existence, and how that starts to manifest, to attribute this four-ness to cardinal directions, as is often done. However, with the Abrahamic religions the concept of a personal-impersonal non-dual systemic reality was lost and God became an external agent. Hence with Aristotle these causalities became hierarchical with God at the top and the world at the bottom. That was both appropriate and necessary theologically at the time. However, our current scientific and ecological separation from nature is a result of that basic philosophical split. Various attempts to return to Eastern mysticism are popular now, but fail to see it outside of the power of thinking and myths of oneness without separateness – just a spiritual ego as opposed to a material one, but not a true unification. The Vedic belief saw us as intimately part of the whole – and that was also changed in later Hinduism to develop a sense of fatalistic destiny. So, you get a split between fatalists and constructivists (not that these cover the territory). Some traditions describe this age of humanity as chaotically driven by dualism as we struggle to resolve that into a true whole.

So, in most of science causality is losing its popularity because of the failure of Hilbert and other’s attempts to formalize it as a complete 2 cause system. Efficient/material causes primarily, within an immutable, pre-given Platonic domain of formal laws waiting to be discovered. By not varying, the formal domain is not a natural cause, but a set of Divine or Anthropic parameters (raising the question of the Anthropic Principle). When our thinking is opened up to a four cause system, nature becomes self-generating and self-explaining, aside from its own necessary meta-level of origin, as discussed above.

Given the above understanding, the question of “transmission” of the causes, or how one cause causes the other, is clearly inconsequential. It is asking why and explanation explains. The answer is “because that’s what explanations do” and to such a question that answer too does not explain. It is simply the nature of explanation to create a descriptive system that seems to act, at least in our minds, like the system it is describing. The answer is empirical testing.

Questions #4,5:  Transitivity of causes

This was addressed in tutorial #1. The causes are transitive around the cycle as many times as an analysis requires, linking to elements in other holons as needed. There is, in a sense, “transmission” of information from material to final cause (encoding), and transmission from formal to efficient cause (decoding). But I would caution about the concept of ‘transmission’, as in Shannon-Weaver information theory, because it is not really a thing being transmitted. It is an induction between inverse systems. Unlike an efficient cause, for example, it may not be possible to associate an object with the act of encoding or decoding. For example, the shape of space-time is a formal cause with respect to dynamics. It is not necessary to consider space-time as a substance to discuss its formal properties as a coordinate system. We simply are looking for a mathematical description that fits the general constraint on behavior, then implicitly accepting there is some similar principle in nature. To search for every such principle in terms of material particles or patterns would lead to mechanical reductionism. In the case of efficient causes we already have accepted the idea that they can be discussed as causes without asking what causes them or how laws are transmitted to objects to make them move accordingly. While we may be able to discuss particle mediators for atomic forces, it is more difficult to discuss the particle mediator for laws of scale or geometry, for example. What ‘transmission’ makes nature aware of the Pythagorean theorem? It is simply a metric that describes whatever is there under certain conditions. We have to assume the ‘whatever’ in most cases.

Question #6: Do the four causes make a whole, a holon? What does this mean?

Yes, as in the diagrams. The four-cause holarchy defines holism, what we must mean by the word “whole”. It is a bit different from the usage as in “whole milk”, meaning nothing has been removed from the original, but analogously the same. The holon is a causal explanation of nature from which nothing natural has been removed, for example as we purposely removed final and formal cause to create more precise descriptions of material events as mechanisms. In the same sense, 2% milk is skimmed so that we won’t get fat or build up too much cholesterol; but as our thinking has been trained, we tend to want such material metaphors for non-material analogies.

Questions #7,8, and 9:  What is outside the holon?

Nothing we can describe. All modes of description are included in the holon. The inside is more important – what is at the center of it. There you have some consciousness-like reality that cannot be described because it is pure happening. Also, at the center is the concept ‘now’. Nothing in normal science defined ‘now’. There are representations that suggest it, like t = 0, but every observation is of the past and probabilities are of the future; very little is said about ‘now’ – almost as if it is a myth. Some in fact believe it is. Our way of looking at reality has made past and future real, and ‘now’ unreal, along with our own experiences considered mainly myths or epiphenomenon, incidental and reducible to the happenings in the physical substrate. The center of the holon is “now-here” (as opposed to “no-where”). it is the essence of being and happening – best I can do with words.

Question #10: Is the holon mediated by anything else?

Of course it is. But we’ve exhausted our intellectual tools for describing natural causes with the holon itself, so what mediates it can’t be described, but is implicitly ‘real’. It can be experienced, however, and we do all the time. If one admits to experiential evidence, the holon is empirical. Philosophies vary, but in the ancient view it was described as Atman in the sense of a “Self” or Brahman in the sense of ultimate unknowable source of existence. Today it is described as the relation between measurable existence and the quantum vacuum. We cannot explain why particles pop out of nothingness of the vacuum, and then disappear again. But we have to believe, in that model, that something allows that to happen, because we observe it. In R-theory, that is represented as encoding and decoding between local and non-local reality; “existence with attributes” and “existence without attributes”.

Again, most scientists and others do not consider the idea of an efficient or material cause problematic because we are used to talking about them. But the effect of a recipe on dinner should not be a difficult concept either. In that transitive example, the recipe constrained efficient processes which transformed material states, resulting in dinner. The effect of being hungry should not be a mystery either, in evoking a pattern of behavior to apply a recipe for food. We have the capacity to interpret exemplars in our body that correlate with behaviors for obtaining food. At this gross level of explanation, it is a simple matching exercise between patterns felt as conditions of the body and patterns learned for addressing them, and in that case we are the mediators. But in proposing the exact same kind of entailment at all levels, we cannot clearly identify the agent. The truth is we don’t clearly know what we mean by us, either. The knowable facts are that it happens for these reasons (i.e., “causes” constitutes the way of reasoning).

Question #11: Coming into being: possibility, necessity, potentiality, actuality.

The non-dual identity is the Being. The four quadrants are its coming into being. Since we can’t include the Being itself in the four quadrants, we can’t describe it. Also, since the holon is both part and whole, the Being is both what is created and what does the creating. Best to just think of it as nature unless you prefer a religious view.

Question #12: What is emergence? Is it via meta-causation?

This was partly addressed in Tutorial #2. Emergence is normally thought of as the spontaneous creation of a new kind of system that cannot logically come from its ground of Being. For example, “emergence of life”. Rosen showed that life is indeed logically connected to predecessors in complex relations. R-theory proposes that the “Ground of Being” is relational complexity rather than mechanical simplicity. In that case, there is no mysterious emergence; it is now understandable. Also, there is no more necessary meta-causation than I discussed above. The holon itse

lf can explain how life developed from complex relations (see Synthesis paper for life-holon diagrams). Since it abandons the idea of a material ground (fundamental particles as building blocks), one can naturally ask where those ideas come from, since the existence of physical objects is pretty obvious in our world. R-theory does not say we should disbelieve in the material world. It says it is a reduction of the complex ground beneath it, just as life is a construction on that ground (note the top red arrow in the diagram does not point down from “mechanical”).

What we previously called emergence is now a phenomenon explained by the relational holon. I’ll be a little suspenseful and lead into it. Can there be true emergence in a mechanically defined domain, i.e., the left side of the holon when there is only one formal cause on the right? Is that possible? The answer is no. It is the same question as existence of Rosen’s closed loop of efficient entailment, or the 2nd-order holon discussed in Tutorial #2. It is a logical structure that violates the logic of the domain as defined by any single formal system. Is emergence logically possible on the right, in the contextual domain? The answer is yes. It is characteristic of that domain, as shown in this diagram below (repeated from Tutorial #2):

Non-local potentials for existence necessarily overlap because they are not distinct entities with separate location as we see in our sensory concept of the realized world. Also, they are not destroyed by that overlap but co-exist. We can think of them as combining in the same sense as Venn diagrams. In computer graphics it is easy to visualize. Take a partially transparent blue circle and overlap it with a yellow circle, and there will be a greenish region produced. If we try to do the quantitative addition of two systems we have the ambiguity that 1 + 1 might equal 1, 2, or 3!!  That is related to Godel’s incompleteness proof for number theory; the meanings (semantics) are necessary. For quantitative number theory to work we have to count discrete entities and think of them as objects or things. If they are not discrete, there is the possibility of different results, and emergence is one of them.

I re-visited the contextual emergence diagram because in the other tutorial I said I would address the claim in the diagram about “entropy reversal”. While entropy increases in the realized world according to the 2nd law of thermodynamics, it decreases in the contextual world. This is part of the “inverse” entailment of going from structure to function in the contextual world, as opposed to going from function to structure in the realized world. Because contexts are indiscreet (non-discreet?) and thus overlapping there are many functions that could result from placing some structural pattern into them (final cause). In the usual concept of entropy, it is negatively equated with order. Full equilibrium that exhausts all usable energy is equated with high entropy. But if there is a non-random distribution, that represents order and decreased entropy. So organisms reduce entropy by establishing internal order that is balanced with a corresponding increase in entropy in the environment. That internal order is accomplished by closure contextual combinations. Hence, just as the 2nd law applies to mechanically closed systems only, its inverse applies to contextually closed systems. R-theory proposes that these two domains actually exist as complementarities at every level, so our previously idea that the universe must eventually run out of energy, reasoning only from the mechanical side, is not supported when we consider the combination.

Question #13: What is the nature of the holon?

It is a model, and therefore an explanation for natural complementarity, also referred to as duality. Because of its closures, however, it provides for both dual and non-dual descriptions of nature. It is both epistemology (the vertical components) and ontology (the horizontal components). The most ‘real’ aspects about it are the four causal quadrants, because they implicate the four elements sitting between the causes as their beginnings and ends, and they establish the cycle of causes that is self-generating. The holon is a meta-model for science and nature. It does not, however, objectify the causes themselves, it objectifies the relations, and the causes are the descriptions of those relations. For example, the formal/efficient relation refers to the relation between what is allowed in nature and what happens – our usual concept of natural law. The material/final relation refers to the relation between what did happen and what that enables as future possibilities. As far as its meta-causality, which I addressed above, the best we can say of it is probably that it is consciousness.

Again, we have been moving away, in science, from concepts of causality in favor of heuristics and statistics, because the implications of adopting a fully causal view are seen as unpalatable. My aim in explaining it is to help demystify it so people don’t think it is an more religious than current science, perhaps even less so. But it does force us to consider some very deep questions about our own reality as well as nature

Giving up on causality, many physicists today argue that we can’t know, for example, Quantum reality, and ultimately any reality; we can only have calculations that seem to work. It has been proposed as a “model based realism”. R-theory goes a step farther and adopts that as a realistic model. Nature models in the same way we do, and we are seeing the results. The alternative is to simply say we can’t know, but there are mathematical procedures that seem to get right approximately answers. I’m not aware of anyone who is comfortable with that, and I am certain we would not be getting answers anywhere near as good as we are if we had abandoned realism earlier. Somehow, chasing the carrot is good for the rabbit.

Do the causes ‘flow’?  I know what you mean but that is obviously not a proper description of it. Flow is an efficient/material concept. Is there a fifth cause that makes them work?  I’m not sure that matters to science, because the four causes are already more than science wants. But for fireside chats, yes, I think there is a fifth cause or fifth element as you wish, but it can’t be described. Its the genie in the lamp, the prime mover, the eternal Being in the Upanishads, Brahman – behind everything without any knowable attributes at all. Such a background must exist for any view of nature. Once we have a system of knowing, we automatically imply a source, or at least the possibility of the question. But why saddle this theory with that problem? We already accept that causes do things without asking why. That’s what the word means, the buck stops with the cause. Cause is explanation of how/why <something in nature>.

Question #14: Examples

The claim is that everything is an example, so the better question is what is not an example, and preferably something that is so elegant in its construction that it can point out a weakness in R-theory itself. I employ various examples all through the Tutorials and the papers. See a recent example in the R-theory interpretation of Learning Organization, on this website. The Tutorial examples are to support the argument, but the examples addressed more thoroughly in papers, such as space-time theory, are meant to test the extreme application of the view to see if it can hold up.