Constraint and Causation: 4 Collapsing the Cause/Law Distinction

Having established that causation is emergent from relational dependencies, and that explanations are retrospective narratives over these networks, we arrive at a crucial insight: the classical distinction between cause and law is itself a cognitive convenience, not an ontological fact.

---

Classical Assumptions

Traditionally, physics and philosophy present:

• Laws: Prescriptive, eternal rules governing events

• Causes: Localised triggers that bring about effects

This framework implies a hierarchy: laws dictate events; causes transmit them. But within a relational ontology, this hierarchy is unnecessary — and misleading.

---

Events and Laws as Co-Emergent

From a relational perspective:

• Events occur where compatibility and minimal-cost re-cutting allow

• Laws are summaries of these regularities, abstractions over observed sequences

In other words, laws do not dictate events; they emerge from the patterning of events. Conversely, events are intelligible because the architecture produces recurring patterns, which we then recognise as laws.

---

Example: Planetary Motion

• Newton’s laws describe the orbits of planets.

• But the planets do not obey the law; they traverse paths determined by mass distribution and relational constraints (as discussed in the gravity series).

• The law is a retrospective summary of the patterns of low-cost re-cutting within that architecture.

Thus:

Law and event are two sides of the same relational coin.

---

Why This Matters

1. Removes metaphysical prescriptivism: Laws are descriptive, not dictatorial.

2. Unifies explanation: No need for separate categories of “force” or “trigger”; both are emergent from constraints.

3. Prepares the ground for patterns without pushers: Once we see law and event as co-emergent, sequences of change are intelligible without invoking agents or hidden forces.

---

Visualising the Collapse

Imagine a dependency network:

[Event A]───┐
                      ├─> [Event B]───> [Event C]
[Event D]───┘

• Events: actualisations at nodes

• Patterns of repeatable sequences: what we call laws

• No hierarchy: the network contains constraints, not prescriptive rules

The law is simply the map we overlay on the network to summarise its regularities.