Reductionism with Command and Control

In hard sciences, we aim to describe causality from the bottom up, from elementary particles. Atoms form molecules, molecules form objects, and the reason objects bounce off each other is reduced to electromagnetic interactions between the molecules in their surfaces.

Molecules in DNA determine production of proteins which result in cell operations which construct organisms.

This is reductionism, and it’s valuable. The elementary particle interactions follow universal laws. They are predictable and deterministic (to the omits of quantum mechanics). From this level we learn fundamental constraints and abilities that are extremely useful. We can build objects that are magnetic or low friction or super extra hard. We can build plants immune to a herbicide.

Bottom-up causality. It’s science!

In Dynamics in Action, Juarrero spends pages and pages asserting and justifying that causality in systems is not only bottom-up; the whole impacts the parts. Causality goes both ways.

Why is it foreign to us that causality is also top-down?

In business, the classic model is all top-down. Command and control hierarchies are all about the big dog at the top telling the next level down what to do. Intention flows from larger (company) levels to smaller (division), and on down to the elementary humans at the sharp end of work.

Of course when life is involved, there is top-down causality as well as bottom-up. Somehow we try to deny that in the hard sciences.

Juarrero illustrates how top-down and bottom-up causality interact more intimately than we usually imagine. In systems as small as a forming snowflake, levels of organization influence each adjacent level.

We see this in software development, where our intention (design) is influenced by what is possible given available building blocks (implementation). A healthy development process tightens this interplay to short time scales, like daily.

Now that I think about how obviously human (and organization) intention flows downward, impacted by limitations and human psychology pushing upward; and physical causality flows upward, impacted by what is near what and what moves together mattering downward; why is it even strange to us that causality moves both ways?