1.30 Formal Cause Part 2: Chairs, Memes, Graham Harman, and Emergence

“Ecology does not seek connections, but patterns”

-Marshall McLuhan

“There is no simple linear cause and effect relationship in the emergence of an emergent system as the components that make up the emergent system exert an upward effect on the composite system (the parts creating the whole), and vice versa the composite system exerts downward effects on its components, which form constraints on the behaviour of those components. The interactions of the components that lead to the self-organization of the emergent system are non-linear because of that upward and downward causation. The lateral non-linear causation of the components of the system among themselves actually creates the emergent system. The emergent system then in turn acts downward on those components of which it is composed.”

-Robert Logan, 2017

"Technological change is neither additive nor subtractive. It is ecological. I mean ‘ecological’ in the same sense as the word is used by environmental scientists. One significant change generates total change. If you remove the caterpillars from a given habitat, you are not left with the same environment minus caterpillars: you have a new environment, and you have reconstituted the conditions of survival; the same is true if you add caterpillars to an environment that has had none. This is how the ecology of media works as well. **A new technology does not add or subtract something. it changes everything.** In the year 1500, fifty years after the printing press was invented, we did not have the old Europe plus the printing press. We had a different Europe. After television, the United States was not America plus television; television gave a new coloration to every political campaign, to every home, to every school, to every church, to every industry.”

-Neil Postman, 1992

“...there is a spiritual dimension to formal causality, as there is to all acts of creation. But for those who prefer a more scientific outlook, let me simply note that formal cause corresponds to the systems view of Gregory Bateson, to the dissipative structures of physicist Ilya Prigogine, to the fractal geometry of Benoit Mandelbrot and the metapatterns of Tyler Volk, to the autopoietic systems of biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, and in general to the systems concept of emergence.”

-Eric McLuhan, 2011

“From the very beginning of Western philosophy and science, there has been a tension between mechanism and holism, between the study of matter (or substance, structure, quantity) and the study of form (or pattern, order, quality). The study of matter was championed by Democritus, Galileo, Descartes, and Newton; the study of form by Pythagoras, Aristotle, Kant, and Goethe. Leonardo followed the tradition of Pythagoras and Aristotle, and he combined it with his rigorous empirical method to formulate a science of living forms, their patterns of organization, and their processes of growth and transformation. He was deeply aware of the fundamental interconnectedness of all phenomena and of the interdependence and mutual generation of all parts of an organic whole.”

Fritjof Capra, 2008

“[McLuhan's formal causality and tetrad] enhances media ecology, obsolesces content analysis, retrieves Einstein’s four-dimensional space time continuum and flips into the reversal of cause and effect.”

-Lance Strate, 2017

Sources: https://old.reddit.com/r/DilettanteryPodcast/comments/s437w4/130_formal_cause_part_2_chairs_memes_graham/?