I’ll give a brief, with a hint at the new stuff:

Since Aristotle’s time there has been confusion about the order of formal cause. Is it between efficient and material cause, i.e., (a) someone makes a mold and casts a statue, so the mold is the “form” and thus the formal cause; or (b) someone chisels a statue of David removing everything that is “not David”, in which case the mental model of David is the formal cause.

In my analysis, (b) is the correct answer. Making a mold is describable with efficient causes except for the exact same kind of mental model involved in (b). Pouring the brass or whatever into the mold and the mold’s physical constraints are also fully describable using efficient processes. So that is efficient cause except for how you make the mold, which is formal cause.

Formal and final cause are contextual. Physically they are “non-local”. So the formal cause of the efficient world of actions is the idea of natural law. It is not that classical science and positivism gets rid of formal cause – you can’t – it is that they held it constant. If the natural laws don’t change then we can say it is just a given law of the universe and forget about what cause formal cause. But if it changes, or has multiple irreducible descriptions, like wave-particle duality, then we have a problem. There is no longer a unity, which there was under the idea of mechanistic law. And we have the problem of where the duality came from. So formal cause is there. It is also the shape of space-time, which is an irreducible variation in formal cause because as you compare two inertial systems in relativistic motion, you have different scales and thus different measures, and you can’t reduce those two descriptions to one because the roles reverse depending on who’s the observer. Some try to establish a preferred system based on prior acceleration, but I don’t think that makes them reducible. And acceleration itself has problems with its relative status with the universe.

So then if we accept the position of formal cause we have to consider final cause to explain formal cause variation. Nobody wants to do that because in the West we associate final cause with purpose and even God – it is outside of any natural system we want to describe. But that is because of another mistake after Aristotle, which was to think of the causes in terms of a hierarchy, with formal at the top and material at the bottom. When we do that, we have to draw a line, above which we can’t ask questions. At the bottom law-like action stops so that’s not a problem, its just death of the system energetically (heat death). It all works fine for mechanisms because they don’t have to reach above efficient cause for explanations. But uncertainty, complexity, consciousness, relativity, quantum behavior, dissipative systems, etc. all require higher causality to explain theoretical incompleteness.

It is easiest to think of the higher cause as context. Context, of course, has analogies in everyday experience and it is easy to get it confused with the material world too, but it is meant to be non-local in a general mathematical sense. For example the “Old West” is a context that has all kinds of events and artifacts in it, but it is not specifically those events and artifacts. The Old West can be in Berlin in a museum, or in a movie, or anywhere. Its a set of formal constraints on what can exist in its context and what they look like or behave like – a set of laws no different (in principle or by analogy) than natural law. Just as the principle of relativity has no locality by itself, but governs what happens locally, the Old West has no locality of itself but governs what exists or behaves locally. That’s what I mean by Context and formal cause.

So then, where did the “Old West” come from? What explains it, which we have to ask because it is different from “The Ancient East” and from classical Newtonian law in physics. The rules are different. So, its the difference that begs explanation in some other causality.

Clearly the Old West came from things that the cowboys in Western America had and did in the 1800’s. The wagon wheels, cowboy hats, boots, six-guns, etc. And not just the things but the way they were used. You can’t have a dude rancher parading around as a cowboy. Its not the Old West. So the formal cause came from previous material dynamics and objects. What?

Right. It didn’t come from immanent causation from the top of the hierarchy. Purpose has exemplars. In that case we can close the loop. Its not a hierarchy, but a cycle. That cycle is identical to the PAR cycle and many others, including the Buddhist/Hindu cycle of birth and death, Vedic non-duality, yin/yang, Learning Organization, DPSIR framework in EU Environmental assessments, the Caste system, and hundreds of others not normally related to each other, except that they are.

It is not anti-religious, nor is it religious. It places “self” inside the system and says there is no largest system, so there is implicitly an unknowable largest ‘self’, which in the East is known as Brahman. We call it the universe. It opposes Western theology in fundamentalist views in exactly the same way it opposes mechanism, but eliminating the idea of hierarchy and origins that are outside the system. The cycle is a system that entails origins. That is why it can describe life, which also entails origins.

The new stuff is the math of this. It turns out that in Rosen’s M-R diagram there is no depiction of context at all. It is entirely made of efficient entailments. But what it establishes is a cycle of efficient entailments. People are confused by that, thinking that is the full closed causal cycle, but it isn’t. Its what the material system looks like if it is living. Context is hidden. The fact that context is not represented in the diagram is obvious in the fact that he didn’t either represent the context of the organism that everyone is well aware of (hint) — the environment. He left it out, and he left the context between efficient entailments out too. Why? Because nobody believed in them in science, so he was showing what things look like in established science, and most importantly that if you do that, using only established science, you get a paradox. That structure can’t exist within mechanistic rules. It is like a space suit in the Old West. The paradox is established when he also demonstrates, but different logic, that such closed loops are absolutely needed to characterize life, because life creates impredicative internal models – it internalizes its own contextual laws. He gave further hints in the first chapter of Essays when he discussed Schroedinger’s question – when does an inertial object (dead material state at the bottom of the hierarchy) become an agent that can do things?

The answer is the cycle where efficient entailments are mirrored by context – the holon. When you put the space suit in the Old West, it will take on a different function than it had on the Space Station. When you put the kitchen knife in the garage, some bloke like me is likely to use it as a screwdriver. You get back a function when you put the material object into a new context. That reverses the efficient entailment. In Category theory that is called the “inverse entailment”. It defines the contextual half of the cycle. It would also be technically a final entailment. So the holon cycle is a complementarity between efficient and final entailments. That turns out to be infinitely constructive.