Circular causality: it matters

Warning: Dense thoughts on complexity and emergence here. The other day I was discussing a metaphor that a friend raised about “emergence.” Her idea is that a car exhibits a kind of emergence in that it does something as a whole that none of its parts can do. And while that is true, that doesn’t make a car a complex adaptive system. The car’s motion is a knowable and predictable outcome. It is engineered to do that. Mechanics understand the optimal state of motion that the car is designed to operate in and if it stops operating that way, the know how to fix it. In Cynefin terms we would describe most of this as Complicated. One of the things that is different about complexity is a phenomenon called downward causality. We understand that a complex system is something that is greater than the sum of its parts. A forest cannot be found just by looking at a tree. Or a fern or a slug. But taken together and at some level of scale, what emerges is “a forest” and anyone can see that. That’s…