Linguistically, cause and effect is easily expressed and easily expressed naively. For example, I might say that the reason I am craving cookies is because the environmental conditions tens of thousands of years ago made humans who craved sugars, fats, and salts more than other humans more likely to survive to pass on their genes. So the cause for my craving is my ancestors from so long ago we're all descended from them. On the other hand, I'm hungry. And when I'm hungry I crave things like foods high in sugars, fats, and/or salts. So hunger is the cause. But my stomach has connections to my peripheral nervous system and both are connected to salivary glands, cognitive-emotional regulation networks, etc., responsible for both producing signals that my stomach is empty and generating feedback loops that influence how hungry I feel and what I crave. However, each cell, electrical impulse, etc., is made up of things like electrons. So clearly everything is caused by tiny nonlocalized particles interacting with God-knows-what. As modern physics postulates that we cannot (even in theory) know with certainty particular aspects about quantum "particles", it could very well be that we will be forced to accept interpretations of quantum mechanics involving the postulation of quantum processes that are created by infinitely many universes. Such theories pretty much preclude any "ultimate" causal model in which we can explain anything and everything through particle physics.
So we have to rely on a different causal model. Namely, we wish to look at things like "cause" in terms of Events/Processes. The question "what caused the glass to break?" has only one verb that has tense: the verb "caused". The event in question, however, is the breaking of a class. The infinitive form of "break" makes this event atemporal: it is conceptualized not as occurring through time but as a singular "whole", an "event". We can't even really break down the event in real time. When did it start? When I dropped the glass? But it wasn't broken then. When it "hit" the floor? The moment the molecules of the glass first made contact with those of the floor, it didn't break. Very soon after, the vibrations of the matter of the glass were sufficient enough to begin the process of molecules dividing that would become visible breaks and eventually result in broken chunks of glass. But it is impossible to say when this start and probably even when we can agree to say the glass is breaking because of it.
In order to speak about causation, we need to understand that causes are conceptualized entities that do not correspond to anything that is necessarily identifiable as physical in the world:
"A simple representation of components to a system is the input/output block diagram. In this representation,
each block represents an agent that effects a change on something, namely its
input. The result of this interaction is some
output. The abstract way of representing this is
where
f is the process that takes input A into output B. Clearly B can now become the input for some other process so that we can visualize a system as a
network of these interactions. The relational system represents a very special kind of transition this way. Rather than break everything down in the usual reductionist manner, these transitions are selected for an important distinguishing property, namely their
expression of process rather than material things directly. This is best explained with an example.
The system Rosen uses for an example is the Metabolism-Repair or [M,R] system. The process, f, in this case stands for the entire metabolism going on in an organism. This is, indeed, quite an abstraction.
Clearly, the use of such a representation is meant to suppress the myriad of detail that would only serve to distract us from the more simple argument put this way.
It does more because it allows processes we know are going on to be divorced from the requirement that they be fragmentable or reducible to material parts alone...
The transition, f, which is being called metabolism, is a mapping taking some set of metabolites, A, into some set of products, B. What are the members of A? Really everything in the organism has to be included in A, and there has to be an implicit agreement that at least some of the members of A can enter the organism from its environment. What are the members of B? Many, if not all, of the members of A since the transitions in the reduced system are all strung together in the many intricate patterns or networks that make up the organisms metabolism. It also must be true that some members of B leave the organism as products of metabolism.
The usefulness of this abstract representation becomes clearer if the causal nature of the events is made clear...
the mapping, f...is a
functional component of the system we are developing. A functional component has many interesting attributes. First of all,
it exists independent of the material parts that make it possible. This idea has been so frequently misunderstood that it requires a careful discussion. Reductionism has taught us that every thing in a real system can be expressed as a collection of material parts. This is not so in the case of functional components.
We only know about them because they do something. Looking at the parts involved does not lead us to knowing about them if they are not doing that something. Furthermore,
they only exist in a given context.
Metabolism as discussed here has no meaning in a machine. It also would have no meaning if we had all the chemical components of the organism in jars on a lab bench. Now we have a way of dealing with context dependence in a system theoretical manner.
Not only are they only defined in their context, they also are constantly contributing to that context. This is as self- referential a situation as there is. What it means is that if the context, the particular system, is destroyed or even severely altered, the context defining the functional component will no longer exist and the functional component will also disappear...
The semantic parallel with language is in the concept of functional component. Pull things apart as
reductionism asks us to do and something essential about the system is lost. Philosophically this has revolutionary consequences. The acceptance of this idea means that one recognizes ontological status for something other than mere atoms and molecules. It says that material reality is only a part of that real world we are so anxious to understand. In addition to material reality there are functional components that are also essential to our understanding of any complex reality.
Mikulecky, D. C. (2005). The Circle That Never Ends: Can Complexity be Made Simple?. In
Complexity in Chemistry, Biology, and Ecology (pp. 97-153). Springer
