Causality is often assumed to be fundamental. Whether imagined as the linear push of billiard balls or the probabilistic influence of quantum states, it is taken for granted that one event produces another.
But in a relational ontology, this assumption cannot hold.
1. Causality Is Not a Mechanism
Traditional accounts of causality come in many forms:
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Deterministic: Event A produces Event B, via laws of motion.
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Probabilistic: Event A raises the likelihood of Event B, per a statistical model.
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Interventionist: Event A is a cause if manipulating A changes B, under controlled conditions.
But all these accounts presuppose:
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a fixed ontology of events,
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a background temporal framework,
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and an observer outside the system.
In a relational ontology, none of these holds.
Instead:
What we call “causality” is a construal of dependence, enacted by a perspective, within a structured potential.
It is not what things do to each other — it is how we construe coordination between distinctions.
2. From Dependency to Construal
Let’s look more closely.
In quantum theory, so-called “causal influence” between measurements (e.g. in Bell-type experiments) is not mediated by any signal or force. Instead, what we observe is a non-factorisable structure of potential, made actual by entangled measurement cuts.
In relativity, light-cones define where events can be connected — but not how or why they are. Spacetime structure constrains coordination, but does not impose causes.
From a relational view:
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A “cause” is not a force.
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It is a relation of construed conditionality:
Within a given cut, if this, then that.
But this relation holds only in the perspective of the construal — not in any observer-independent sense.
3. The Cut as the Site of Causality
Where, then, does causality live?
Not in things, and not in time — but in the cut.
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A cut distinguishes potential from actual.
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It coordinates systems into a construal.
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Within that construal, one event may be seen as conditional on another.
This is causality:
Not what binds events, but how events are bound — in and by a cut.
This moves us from ontological causality to relational semiosis.
4. Becoming without Causation?
Does this mean anything can happen? That nothing is responsible for anything else?
No — quite the opposite.
Responsibility, coordination, emergence — all depend on relational constraints, but these constraints are not chains of cause and effect. They are fields of potential, shaped and narrowed by the cuts we make.
So we say:
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There is no universal causality.
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There is no law of becoming.
But there is:
Relational conditioning of what can actualise — and this is what we construe as causal structure.
In this light, causality is neither fiction nor force — it is an epistemic gesture, one way we orient to the pattern of possibility.
5. The End of the Causal Metaphysic
This shift has profound consequences.
We are no longer looking for the cause of events in the world. We are attending to how we construe systems such that causality appears.
And this, in the end, is the relational move:
Not to deny causality, but to relocate it —from the world “out there” to the act of distinction “in here”.
Closing
We began with the idea that time was not a continuum, but an effect of construal. Now we see that causality, too, is not a universal necessity, but a relational articulation: a way of navigating the possible through meaningful distinction.
In the next post, we’ll look at perhaps the most charged distinction of all: the subject–object divide. What happens to “the knower” and “the known” in a world where every cut is from within?
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