Every Stirring Thought Creates Cause and Effect: The Causal Web is, within Beyond-the-Algorithm thinking, a thesis about the relation between the movements of the Awaring and the structure of the world. It holds that every time a thought stirs in a person, it sets in motion the countless units that the senses have divided out, and in so doing creates cause and effect; these causes and effects then act upon one another and breed further causes and effects, layer upon layer, so that the whole world shows itself as a single, mutually entangled “causal web.” Its original formulation runs: “The stirring of your thought is in fact setting in motion the countless units divided out by your senses; you create cause and effect, and then cause and effect act upon one another and are cause and effect again.” The thesis places the stirring of the Awaring at the very origin of the causal chain and understands the world as one integral network in which causes and effects vibrate against and condition one another. It is therefore at once a claim about the mechanism of creation and a picture of the ontological structure of the world.
The Stirring of a Thought Is the Origin of Cause and Effect
In this thesis, cause and effect is not an objective chain external to the person, running of its own accord; it is set going by the stirring of the Awaring. The formulation names the prime mover unambiguously: it is “the stirring of a thought.” A thought arises, and at once it “sets in motion the countless units divided out by the senses.” Two strata are at work here. First, the world’s “countless units” are themselves divided out by the senses—absent the cutting and encoding done by the senses, the world is not natively parceled into discrete units that could be set in motion, a point of one piece with The Senses Are a Finite Survival Decoder, and the World Is What They Render. Second, the trigger that sets these units in motion is the stirring of the Awaring, not a physical act. The source of cause and effect is thus drawn back into the Awaring itself: the world is first “divided” out by the senses, and then “moved” by the stirring of a thought. This is the extension, into causal terms, of Everything Is Manifested by the Awaring: if all appearances are manifested by the Awaring, then the interplay among those appearances is likewise set off by the Awaring.
Cause and Effect Act Upon One Another and Are Cause and Effect Again
The second stratum of the thesis is the self-propagation of cause and effect. The thesis does not rest content with the single-line model in which “the Awaring creates one cause and yields one effect”; rather, “cause and effect act upon one another and are cause and effect again”—the result produced by one set of causes and effects immediately becomes the condition for the next; effect turns into cause, cause breeds effect, and the two interlock, cycle, and recur.
The stirring of your thought is in fact setting in motion the countless units divided out by your senses; you create cause and effect, and then cause and effect act upon one another and are cause and effect again.
Cause and effect, then, is not a chain that can be counted from one end to the other, but a feedback structure with no terminus, nested within itself. Every effect is at the same time a cause somewhere else; every node is both moved by others and moving others. This stipulation of “acting upon one another” is the decisive step from single-line causation to network causation, and it furnishes the inner mechanism for the “web” discussed below. It mutually confirms the line of thought in When the Awaring Stirs, It Weaves the Web: Yin and Yang as Binary Code, where “the stirring of the Awaring is itself the generating of the web.”
The World Is One Vast Causal Web
When countless mutually acting causes and effects interweave, the world as a whole shows itself as a web. The direct formulation is: “This is like a vast causal web.” The image of the “web” carries the entire conclusion of the two preceding sections: the nodes are the units divided out by the senses, the lines are the mutually acting causes and effects, and the scale of the whole web is “vast”—so vast that no single node can exist independently of the rest. In this sense, “web” is not a rhetorical figure but a description of the ontological structure of the world: the world is not a heap of mutually isolated things, but a connected whole woven out of the lines of cause and effect. This picture springs from the same root as the claim in No One Escapes the Causal System: Goodness Is the Largest Vector that “no one can place themselves outside the causal system”—since all things share one web, no one can stand off the web.
The Causal Cotton Candy: A Single Thought Moves the Whole
The integral, all-at-once responsiveness of this web is conveyed by the figure of “cotton candy.”
The causal web is also like a great big piece of cotton candy. A single thought of ours changes the shape of the whole piece of cotton candy, and the thousand and one threaded events within it all vibrate—yet seen from another vantage, it is again a single whole.
The cotton-candy figure supplies what the “web” leaves unsaid: the web can mislead one into thinking the nodes are merely discretely linked, whereas cotton candy stresses continuity and oneness—it is soft, entangled, threaded through and through, and the moment force is applied anywhere, the shape of the whole changes with it. Thus “a single thought changes the shape of the whole piece of cotton candy” means that the influence of a thought is not local and isolable but instantaneously pervades the entire web: once a thought stirs, “the thousand and one threaded events all vibrate.” This pushes the first section’s claim that “the stirring of a thought sets off cause and effect” to its limit—what a thought sets in motion is never some single unit, but the deformation of the whole web. This mechanism, in which “a single thought moves the whole,” answers to the nonlinearity of cause and effect described in Effect Precedes Cause: The Event Casts Its Blueprint Backward.
One Whole, Two Vantages
The cotton-candy figure also conceals a reversal of vantage: “yet seen from another vantage, it is again a single whole.” A moment ago there were “thousand and one threaded events vibrating”; shift the vantage, and these countless vibrating threads are once more the same single, intact piece of cotton candy. This means the “causal web” holds two ways of seeing at once. From the vantage of “division,” it is the countless units and countless causes and effects cut out by the senses—intricate, turbulent, a thousand threads at once. From the vantage of “the whole,” it is from the first an indivisible unity, and the so-called “countless” are merely different facets of one and the same thing. This double vantage—“divided, it is the myriad appearances; joined, it is one whole”—connects with the line of thought in The Present Creates Past and Future: Spacetime Is Observed Into Being, where “the whole splinters into parts only when it is observed,” and it raises the thesis from a mere account of causal mechanism to an ontological judgment about “the one and the many”: the world is at once the countless interacting causes and effects and an undivided whole, depending on the vantage from which one looks. How the two vantages are to be unified is not argued further here; the thesis is left open at this point, not forced shut.
Sources
- Manuscript —“The stirring of your thought is in fact setting in motion the countless units divided out by your senses; you create cause and effect, and then cause and effect act upon one another and are cause and effect again”
- Manuscript —another record of the same formulation
- Manuscript —“This is like a vast causal web”
- Manuscript —the cotton-candy figure: “The causal web is also like a great big piece of cotton candy … a single thought changes the shape of the whole piece of cotton candy … seen from another vantage, it is again a single whole”
See also
- Everything Is Manifested by the Awaring
- When the Awaring Stirs, It Weaves the Web: Yin and Yang as Binary Code
- Effect Precedes Cause: The Event Casts Its Blueprint Backward
- No One Escapes the Causal System: Goodness Is the Largest Vector
- The Senses Are a Finite Survival Decoder, and the World Is What They Render