CAUSALITY (Limits to)
Charles François (2004). CAUSALITY (Limits to), International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics, 2(1): 377.
| Collection | International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics |
|---|---|
| Year | 2004 |
| Vol. (num.) | 2(1) |
| ID | ◀ 377 ▶ |
| Object type | Epistemology, ontology or semantics |
F. HEYLIGHEN states: “Causality appears to be a local concept, which can be used to describe certain aspects of certain processes, but which cannot be simply generalized in order to built an encompassing, deterministic and reversible theory, such as classical mechanics. In other words, general processes are only partially causal. They only conserve certain distinctions, perhaps only during a limited time interval” (1989, p.372).
We should first remember that past and present events have been univocally determined: they occured in one and only one manner, as a result of a concatenation of some or many concurrent causes.
Before their occurence, they were only partly and conditionally predictable, which is the case of all future processes.