Chaos and Causality

According to the theory of Cause & Effect, the occurrence (Dasein, that it is) and the character (Wassein, what it is) of an event are the product of past events. This is Determinism.  

A defining characteristic of Determinism is the system’s radical sensitivity to the smallest micro-perturbations. Because all fuzziness has been removed, minor fluctuations can cascade through the system resulting in major, often catastrophic, macro-differences. 

At the other end of the spectrum, it is conceivable that events occur randomly and have no relationship whatsoever to one another. This is what we normally think of as Chaos.

While Chaos and Determinism are connotatively opposite, they are denotatively synonymous, i.e. there is no way to distinguish one from the other experimentally. While A may or may not ‘determine’ B, there is no way of predicting B by observing A because variations in A, even those below detectable levels (hidden variables), can wreck huge, macro-phenomenal changes in B.

In the words of ‘60s Hippiedom, “Whatever happens, happens!” But in spite of our nostalgia for the Summer of Love, few of us live our lives today according to the Hippie creed. 

Between Determinism and Chaos, there are a variety of possible ways to account for perceived relationships between events; some of these alternatives even support some species of predictability. 

For example, many would argue for a version of causality that stops short of absolute determinism. Prior events predispose future events, but do not guarantee them. Unaccounted variables, noise, or God forbid, ‘free will’ can always disrupt the apple cart. ‘The best laid plans of mice and men’ and all that…but most often events do flow from A to B more or less as expected: 

If A, then B…with a probability of X.

However, such models are dangerously oversimplified. Life is not billiards; if anything it’s more like Craps. IRL, A and B are fields that fill spacetime; but both fields are often steeply focused into small regions of the Universe (e.g. inside the circumference of a sphere). Even then, however, perfect predictability is never achievable.

But back to billiards. While the momentum of B at T₂ may be overwhelmingly influenced by the momentum of A at T₁, the relationship is never absolute. Other factors may and do interfere, e.g. slight irregularities in the felt, an unexpected puff of air, a so-called ‘act of God’, and/or the intervention of an ‘intentional agent’ (e.g. you).

Furthermore, many As typically converge, and impinge, on B. Marx called this phenomenon, ‘Over-determinism’. These influences may be conflicting or reinforcing. In our earlier, primitive models, causality was all or nothing, depending simply on your point of view. Our later models are more intuitive…but still imperfect. 

In certain domains, the causal model of events works tolerably well. We’ve been to the Moon and back after all. But 500 years ago, the Ptolemaic model of the Universe was working…tolerably well.

There’s a vague sense that a more aesthetically satisfying model of relationships among events might be possible but what might such a model look like?

100 years ago, British philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead, faced the same dilemma. He developed an alternative model to account for the sense we have of continuity among events. Importantly, his model makes no room whatsoever for the classical notion of causality.

According to Whitehead, every event is causa sui and sui generis. In the spirit of Sartre’s Neant, events are totally free; in a departure from classically Western versions of theism, events themselves are solely responsible both for their Dasein and for their Wassein (above).

But while free, current events are totally immersed in a sea of prior events. (Each of Europe’s many wars occurs in the context of its prior wars and is, in a sense, merely an expression or an extension of that context.) Every event assembles itself but within guardrails that transcend it.  

Think of the Universe as a very large, very complex set of Legos. We’re talking 4 figures (dollars, pounds, or euros) for the Deluxe Edition. On the plus side, Junior will never tire of playing with this toy – no more than God tires of being ‘the maker of heaven and earth and of all things visible and invisible’. (Nicene Creed) On the flip side, he’ll still be playing with blocks and living over your garage…well into his 30s.

In this admittedly imperfect analogy, each Lego corresponds to the ‘superject’ of a prior event, the ‘objective immortality’ of a ‘settled matter of fact’. It is a hallmark of the Deluxe Edition that no two Lego pieces are identical but can be put together in innumerable configurations.  

These are what muggles call causes. Junior builds civilizations with these blocks, limited only by his imagination and by the available assemblies. 

Each block has multiple ports for other blocks to plug into and multiple ‘arms’ it can use to latch onto other blocks. A set of IKEA-like schematics accompanies the set and illustrates just a few of the various ways blocks may be put together to build coherent structures.

Perfectly free and unconditioned, every event occurs in the context of a specific configuration of prior events, i.e. its own unique Actual World: “What is actual is actual only for one time and only for one place.” (Eliot, Ash Wednesday) 

The schematics lay out all the ways blocks may be put together. In our analogy, the schematics assume the role of Eternal Objects (or Values) in Whitehead’s system. These transcendent values include Beauty, Truth, and Justice. 

Every event is a reaction of the Whole to the Whole, driven by a primordial appetition for the Good, i.e. for Beauty, Truth, and Justice. But without Causality, how do we account for the remarkable uniformity we find in nature? I mean, a proton is a proton is a proton…for 10^32 years! 

Our overwhelming sense of continuity has several independent sources, none of them related to Causality. First, all events are motivated by the bundle of shared values (above) that lead naturally toward a convergent future. 

Second, while the content of all future events is entirely undetermined, the qualities of the Omega event are certain, i.e. the material realization of the conceptual Values. 

Solidarity does not compromise Creativity; it empowers it. Beauty, Truth, and Justice are served by continuity and the intensity of experience is massively enhanced by stability. Imagine Beauty without harmony (order), Truth without knowledge (wisdom), Justice without precedent (law)! 

The creative urge characteristic of the Universe as a whole seeks to realize Eternal Values (objective reward) while maximizing intensity of experience (subjective reward). God regularly attends motivational workshops. One of the best is co-hosted by Abraham and Job .

God knows all about ‘doing well by doing good’. Each event serves its own subjective interests (intensity of experience) as it meets the objective interests (realization of value) of the Wide World Web. The interests are not necessarily in conflict, but they are distinct. They both depend on stability. You can’t high-jump if you’re standing in quick sand. 

Therefore we assert the following proposition: “All events conserve as much of their inherited Actual Worlds as possible consistent with their overriding objectives of realizing Eternal Values and maximizing Intensity of Experience.”  

The Federal Reserve famously answers to a ‘Dual Mandate’ (jobs, inflation) but Gaia answers to a ‘Triple Mandate’ (intensity, value, solidarity). Events are not caused, they are motivated and curated - motivated by appetition for the Eternal Values and curated by the hierarchy of ontological imperatives (above). 

What we experience as Causality is simply the Curation of Novelty. Therefore there is a Prime Directive, a meta-ethic: “Accomplish as much as possible, experience as intensely as possible, but change as little as possible!” In this model, qualia are conserved without the phantasm of causality…and Occam’s Razor is respected in the process. 

Fourth, we treat events as though they were points in spacetime; they are not. They occupy regions of space and periods of time. (Note: Every event is a World Wide Wave but that wave is concentrated in a defined region of spacetime known as its ‘location’). At that location each event is holistic. If A is normally followed by B, then A and B are simply aspects of a single event. (Normal = always, absent external interference.)

But we don’t see things that way! We turn events into movie reels. We break them up into static frames scaled to the perceptual requirements of our human anatomy (frames are projected at a maximum speed of 10 frames per second). We practice ‘ontological vivisection’. 

Sometimes we affix labels like intention or tone, or cause and effect to various sequences. But these are all just facets of a unitary phenomenon, i.e. the event per se.

Finally, we are mesmerized by the concept of Causality itself. Events transform their worlds. It is possible to track the unfolding of events by following the trail of transformations, the gradual flow from lower levels of entropy to higher levels. There’s nothing wrong with this, as long as we don’t confuse ‘flow’ (Heraclitus) with ‘cause’ (Laplace). 

It is also possible to walk the process back, to focus on what is now and track through an imagined sequence of quantum changes, one following another, until you’re willing to say you’ve reached their ‘origin’. There’s nothing wrong with this either, again just as long as we don’t confuse ‘sequential’ with ‘causal’. 

Bottom line, we don’t need Causality to account for Solidarity. In fact, the notion just gets in the way. The ‘triple mandate model’ set forth here, and ultimately derived from Whitehead, provides an account that is a better fit, both aesthetically and empirically, than the clunky mechanics of cause and effect.

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William Blake’s The Ancient of Days (1794) shows a radiant, bearded figure—Urizen, Blake’s embodiment of reason—leaning from a glowing sunburst and stretching a giant compass to measure the dark void. The image blends biblical creation with cosmic geometry, portraying the act of shaping the universe as both a divine and a mathematical event.