Association as causation: The fabric of meaning and existence itself

Association as causation: The fabric of meaning and existence itself

Stephen Jarosek, BEng, MBA

What if the universe’s coherence does not come from parts assembling into wholes, nor from wholes dictating to their parts [Editor’s note: “dictating,” in this context, is a systems theory term that means to exert top-down control, such as a body dictating the behavior of individual organs], but from something deeper—association itself? This essay follows that thread across scales: from Carlo Rovelli’s relational quantum mechanics, where particles exist only through interaction, to Michael Levin’s discoveries of cellular intelligence, to Charles Sanders Peirce’s semiotics of meaning-making. Even the subatomic world, when viewed through square-cube scaling, resists physicalist metaphors, to reveal a relational fabric instead. In dialogue with the Buddhist notion of śūnyatā—emptiness as creative openness—association emerges as the connective tissue of reality, the principle by which potential crystallizes into form, and form unfolds into meaning.

...Levin’s work suggests that cells “remember” not as individual units but as collective networks of association. His research demonstrates that the headless planarian that regenerates a new head accomplishes this feat through association. It is association, not preprogrammed code, that governs identity and repair.

Consider his experiments with frogs. By altering bioelectric signals in developing tadpoles, Levin’s team induced the growth of functional eyes in places other than the head. Genetic instructions alone could not explain this. Instead, cells associated bioelectric cues with structural possibilities, reorganizing themselves into coherent new forms...

...Quantum contextuality challenges the classical assumption that particle properties are intrinsic, showing they depend on measurement context (Kochen & Specker (1967)). An electron does not have a fixed spin waiting to be revealed; its spin becomes actual only in relation to a measuring apparatus. Position and momentum, wave and particle, are not intrinsic identities but relational expressions.

Carlo Rovelli’s Relational Quantum Mechanics (RQM) crystallizes this point. In RQM, the universe is not a collection of objects with pre-existing properties. It is a web of relations in which properties emerge only in interaction (Rovelli (1996), (2021)). This aligns with Peirce’s semiotic triad of sign, object, and interpretant (Peirce (1931-1966)) and challenges object-based metaphors. The classical image of billiard balls bouncing in the void fails at the quantum scale. A better metaphor is a conversation: reality is the ongoing interplay of associations...