Enformy?

I've been thinking lately about the metaphor that all things are systems completely embedded in an environment which also comprises a system and so on. I read this article which proposes a universal principle which amounts to the opposite of entropy - enformy -:

http://www.enformy.com/$wsr02.html

..and found some interesting ideas which I'll come back to. Here is a snippet:

TES [Theory of Enformed Systems] explains the origin, fundamental properties, and behaviors of holistic systems at all ontological levels. TES does not displace the current scientific paradigms; instead, it forms their foundation. Four statements place TES in the context of the current disciplines: (a) A general theory of systems is necessarily a theory of organization; (b) because TES is a general theory of organization, it belongs to systemics—the science of holistic systems; (c) because organization per se is fundamental to all observable phenomena, systemics is the most basic branch of science; and (d) because TES is foundational to the prevailing paradigms of science, it is outside the prevailing Weltanschauung; i.e., it cannot be understood or interpreted in terms of the prevailing paradigms.

The prevailing paradigms address systems that are already organized, whereas TES addresses organization per se—its origin, elaboration, and maintenance. Organization per se is traditionally assumed to be a necessary precondition for scientific study, and not itself a subject of study. For instance, the standard model of the cosmos holds that the universe consists of (a) matter, comprising fundamental particles such as quarks, electrons, photons, etc.; (b) the properties of these particles, including charge, polarization, spin, etc.; and (c) mass and energy—two fundamental, conserved principles that determine the behaviors of matter. The work of science has been to discover and describe patterns of these behaviors. In physics, this work entails applying the organization inherent in mathematics to map the organization inherent in matter. As a result, the worldview of mathematical physics is blind to organization per se because organization is intrinsic to mathematics.

Systemics radicalizes this. It allows scientists to turn their attention to the question, "What is the origin of organization per se?"

Salient conditions

I spent a lot of time earlier on in this blog looking into causation and I want to briefly conclude the inquiry here. If, as I think is the case, any thing or event you can discern has potentially innumerable conditions and those conditions have their conditions and those conditions etc....then when you identify a 'cause' you are in fact selecting from a potentially unlimited number of related 'causes'. Clearly, not all conditions will usually be considered equally pertinent, and in any case it is neither practical nor desirable to include as something's cause the entire history and breadth of possible conditions. Generally speaking, it seems to be the case that some conditions will simply be more striking than others and will be the most likely to be described as a cause. Therefore, to avoid slipping into a deterministic or essentialist understanding, I prefer to think of causes as 'salient conditions'. The salience should be seen as dependent to some degree on the context of the inquiry and therefore different contexts may attend to other conditions.

The emptiness of causation in western metaphysics?

The Aristotelian conception of causality is a generative theory in that a specific cause generates a necessary effect by triggering an inherent potency. All effects are determined by the essence of the thing in which the effect occurs. So in consequence of their essence, entities follow certain laws of action and have no alternative to doing so.

This concept of causality as arising from the metaphysical essence of things dominated the west in one form or another until it was abandoned by Galileo (1564-1642) who reconceptualized causes and effects not as inherently determined properties of substances or things but as the consequence of the laws of motion. Thus, he disregarded the properties of the objects he was looking at and focussed instead on their positions as they varied across time. He connected cause and effect relationships only to the motions or states of things and consequently disconnected them from the putative essences of the things themselves.

In this model actions are conceptualised as necessary reactions to some previous action or motion or force. This position was stripped of its generative heritage even further by the Scottish empiricist David Hume (1711-1776) who originated the use of the term succession with respect to causality thereby heralding the beginning of a successionist theory of causation. Hume pointed out that we observe nothing but the regular succession of events and argued that the idea of a necessary connection between cause and effect is thus derived from habitually felt expectation and has no other foundation. Causes merely occur prior to and contiguous with effects. The relationship is not one between objects but between experiences. Causation to Hume, in other words, was no more than a predictive expedient.

Kant, Hegel, Whitehead and others attempted other metaphysical conceptions of causality but if I may be so bold as to say that, with Hume, we see causation effectively leaving the realm of significant metaphysical development whilst remaining woven into the development of scientific formulae and statistical probability, as well as into lay beliefs. If this is the case, then after over 2000 years of metaphysical development, causation effectively amounts to something like:

These give rise to those,
So these are called conditions.

Nāgārjuna, Mūlamadhyamakakārikā (I:5)

Or in more words:

To assert the emptiness of causation is to accept the utility of our causal discourse and explanatory practice, but to resist the temptation to see these as grounded in reference to causal powers or as demanding such grounding. Dependent origination simply is the explicability and coherence of the universe. Its emptiness is the fact that there is no more to it than that.

(Garfield, Dependent Arising and the Emptiness of Emptiness, Ch.2)

Aontic metaphysics

I've coined a term to describe the type of philosophy I'm promoting here: aontic. It's an attempt to convey a repudiation of the Being/Non-Being division which is generally assumed to be the starting point of metaphysics. I think anti-ontological is more or less the same thing but aontic is not necessarily implying a dialectically opposed doctrine nor simply a critique of ontology but can also be just a philosophy with a different starting point to the question of Being.

Buddhism is aontic in that it neither affirms nor denies the 'existence' of the self and the world. Its starting point is the process of experience in the context of human suffering. The relative absence of aontic philosophy in the western canon is what I think has often led to an erroneous interpretation of Buddhism as a form of nihilism, which is, of course, based on the tacit assumption that existence/non-existence is a fundamental category. However, the Buddhist metaphysical* concept of the dependent origination of phenomena is not coextensive with a categorisation of phenomena into existing/nonexisting.

* Is aontic metaphysics an oxymoron? Certainly if we accept the Aristotelian conception of metaphysics as the science of being qua being it is a contradiction in terms. However, we can also define metaphysics as the elucidation of general principles and assumptions and in this sense there is no problem.

Rebel Without A Cause

These give rise to those,
So these are called conditions.

Nāgārjuna, Mūlamadhyamakakārikā (I: 5)

Pratītya-samutpāda (dependent origination) is the Buddhist alternative to a theory of inherent causality. It recognises the everyday experience of regularity and correlation without investing philosophical capital in an ultimately real force, or power, linking essential causes to necessary effects. In other words, causation, from a Mādhyamikan perspective, is empty; and as such we talk of conditions. As Garfield says in Dependent Arising and the Emptiness of Emptiness:

To assert the emptiness of causation is to accept the utility of our causal discourse and explanatory practice, but to resist the temptation to see these as grounded in reference to causal powers or as demanding such grounding. Dependent origination simply is the explicability and coherence of the universe. Its emptiness is the fact that there is no more to it than that.

(Garfield, Dependent Arising and the Emptiness of Emptiness, Ch.2)

It may be "simple" but I think the "explicability and coherence of the universe," and/or lack thereof, is the undercurrent that has pulled all the thinkers into an ocean of mythological, philosophical and scientific creativity. Causality is a major product of this creativity and before examining what it means to reject it, and how and why, I think it will be useful and interesting to investigate its historical development and variation to provide some background, shared and diverse, to the development of pratītya-samutpāda. This will be the main focus for the next couple of weeks.

Dependent Origination: A philosophical position statement

When I claim to be a (diet-)* Buddhist, what I mean is that for all practical purposes I take to be true the concept of pratītya-samutpāda (dependent origination) and the satyadvaya (“two truths”) through which it is explicated. In my opinion, in a philosophical sense, dependent origination is Buddhism. I find dependent origination to be a completely rational and adequate characterisation of reality which as far as I am aware precludes none of the presently accepted scientific truths about the physical universe whilst agreeing with a neo-pragmatist repudiation of essentialist metaphysics and the appearance/reality distinction which goes with it.

Dependent origination is a Buddhist technical term for the entirely conditional reality of phenomena. Reality is designated conditional in that not one aspect of it originates or exists independently of every other; everything is dependent on conditions. If everything is dependent on conditions, and an essence of something is just that which it has, or is, without dependence on conditions, it follows that nothing has, or is, an essence. Furthermore, if a thing exists inherently only by virtue of its essence, and if nothing has an essence, then nothing exists inherently. If nothing exists inherently then there is no “way the world inherently is” and thus no tenable metaphysical-strength distinction between appearance and reality. With no hard metaphysical distinction between appearance and reality one can make no philosophical sense of a hard correspondence of knowledge to independent reality.

So much for my metaphysical and epistemological position statement. There are naturally a lot of unsupported statements in such a brief summary of an entire philosophy and I intend to work through each claim in more detail.

* For example, I have never even visited a monastery.