GENIUS FORUMS

I've been doing a study of causality in Western and Eastern philosophy. To give an idea, Nagarjuna's Negative Dialectical, of eastern philosophy. Here is a short list of some references:


David Hume (1739) A Treatise of Human Nature

John Mackie INUS - Cement of the Universe (1974)

Bertrand Russel (1922b) "at-at" theory

Zeno's Arrow

Phil Dowe (1992c) "conserved quantities"

Ted Honderich Causality or Causation

Causation & Explanation Stathis Psillos

Causality and Explanation Wesley Salmon

Making things happen: a theory of causal explanation By James Woodward

Explaining explanation By David-Hillel Ruben

Laws in nature By Stephen Mumford



Then I came across this idea by Douglas Hofstadter, wikipedia cites Hofstadter as saying:

In I Am a Strange Loop, Hofstadter defines strange loops as follows:
“ And yet when I say "strange loop", I have something else in mind — a less concrete, more elusive notion. What I mean by "strange loop" is — here goes a first stab, anyway — not a physical circuit but an abstract loop in which, in the series of stages that constitute the cycling-around, there is a shift from one level of abstraction (or structure) to another, which feels like an upwards movement in a hierarchy, and yet somehow the successive "upward" shifts turn out to give rise to a closed cycle. That is, despite one's sense of departing ever further from one's origin, one winds up, to one's shock, exactly where one had started out. In short, a strange loop is a paradoxical level-crossing feedback loop. (pp. 101-102)



I think this idea is similar to materialist autopoeisis or dialectical materialism. The dialectical is usually shunned in Western philosophy but plays prominently in the East (as in Nagarjuna's Negative Dialectical). I think these ideas provide a causally sufficient basis for "self"-organization (though not strictly self-organizing).

Also, if anyone knows of unlisted works on "Causation" or "Causality" please post them!