Circular causality

Macy Conferences, 1946

Causation that loops back on itself, so that an effect becomes, through the loop, a cause of its own cause. The organising idea of cybernetics.

In ordinary explanations, causes come before effects in a line: A causes B, which causes C. In circular causality, the chain closes: A affects B, and B, directly or through other links, affects A.

In cybernetics

Circular causality was the original name for what became cybernetics. The Macy Conferences began in 1946 under the title “Circular Causal and Feedback Mechanisms in Biological and Social Systems”. The idea united feedback loops in machines, reflexes in the nervous system, homeostasis in physiology, and patterns of interaction in families and societies.

Thinking in loops changes the questions one asks. In a linear view, one looks for the first cause or the person to blame; in a circular one, one looks at the pattern of mutual influence that keeps a situation going. Gregory Bateson used this to explain escalating rivalries (schismogenesis), and family therapists to explain why a problem persists even when everyone wants it to stop.

Self-reference

Second-order cybernetics took circularity further, applying it to observation and knowledge themselves: an observer describing a system changes it, and is changed by the act of describing. Heinz von Foerster and others treated such self-referential loops as a source of stability (eigenforms) rather than as logical paradoxes to be avoided.

Further reading

  • Steve J. Heims, The Cybernetics Group (1991)
  • Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972)

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