Association as causation: The fabric of meaning and existence itself

Reading | Systems Theory

Stephen Jarosek, BEng, MBA | 2026-05-22

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.

 

Association, the connective tissue of reality

There is a simple principle at play throughout the universe. It applies at every scale—from cultures and civilizations, down to the subatomic. It is not divine providence, nor panpsychism, nor mere accident. It has a name: association.

Association is not a new idea. Its foundations were laid more than a century ago in the work of Edward Thorndike and later by Ivan Pavlov. In semiotics, it features in the triadic logic of Charles Sanders Peirce. If association is so basic and pervasive, why then must it be explained at all? Should it not be self-evident? The answer is that association, while simple and pervasive, is also invisible unless we know where to look.

Association, as the silent grammar of coherence, runs behind the scenes, enabling life and order to arise at all. Indeed, you, the reader, are relying on association in this very moment. Words link to one another, forming sentences whose meaning emerges only through their arrangement. Our experiences—shaped by light, sound, sensation, and resistance—are themselves associations, combined into the ongoing synthesis of who we are.

The purpose of this essay is therefore to make association visible: to show how it operates across scales of existence, making it a life-critical principle integral to existence itself.

To appreciate what is at stake, it helps to see how science has traditionally explained coherence. Causation is usually framed in one of two directions. Upward causation explains wholes “assembled” from their parts, the familiar reductionist model. Downward causation emphasizes how wholes constrain and guide their parts, the language of systems theory. Both perspectives capture something true, but neither, on their own, explains how coherence persists in a universe tending toward entropy, or disorder.

 

Physicalism provides no answers

Upward causation is typically expressed in terms of physicalist (reductionist) models. Physicalist models struggle to explain how organisms, minds and cultures persist against entropy. Realizing the limitations of reductionism, researchers like Ellis & Kopel (2019) and information theorists like Hoel et al. (2013) and Rosas et al. (2020) lean towards an emergence narrative that factors in downward causation. Their syntheses, however, with their grounding in stochastic processes, remain physicalist and fail to support genuine downward causation (Christen and Franklin (2002)).

In a similar vein, contemporary cognitive science often models the brain as a prediction engine minimizing error (e.g., Bayesianism). Again, no solution is forthcoming here, either. None of the physicalist/reductionist interpretations are in any position to address the entropy problem. Organisms are not passive predictors but active association-builders, weaving webs of relation that determine what is salient, ignorable, or actionable.

Association offers a third view, beyond reductionism or chance, enabling coherence. It provides a dual-aspect monist framework where mind and matter are complementary aspects of a single reality. Our synthesis integrates across disciplines, including:

• Semiotics: Peirce(1931-1966) and von Uexküll (2010);
• Quantum contextuality: Kochen & Specker (1967) and Rovelli (1996);
• Neural and cellular plasticity: Merzenich(1983) and Watson & Levin (2023);
• The dynamics of scale: West (2017).

Association is integral to the agency that enables neurons, cells and particles to self-organize into functional collectives, aligning with Bernardo Kastrup’s idealism, redefining reality as a web of meaningful relations across scales.

 

Plasticity and living systems

Living systems encapsulate the principle of association as fundamental. Associative learning in neurons is integral to neural plasticity, enabling the brain to self-organize into functional specializations (Merzenich, et al., 1983). Experiences “wire” the neuroplastic brain, and for humans, those experiences are overwhelmingly cultural (Doidge, 2008).

Hebb’s law (Hebb (1949))—“neurons that fire together wire together”—captures how connections form meaning-bearing patterns, like “redness” or “longness,” in visual cortex neurons (Jarosek (2001)). Synapses adapt through associative experiences.

This principle extends to cellular plasticity: amoebae associate environmental cues with actions, like moving toward food sources, suggesting learning is not confined to neurons (De la Fuente et al., (2019)). Bacteria, like Escherichia coli, associate chemical signals with survival strategies, forming resistant pathways against antibiotics through molecular signaling cascades (Fernando et al., (2008)).

Michael Levin’s research extends plasticity beyond the brain, showing that bioelectric networks among cells encode pattern memories guiding development and regeneration (Levin & Watson, (2023)). Cut a planarian flatworm in half, and it regrows missing parts not by following a rigid genetic script but by re-establishing associative fields across tissues.

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.

Molecular biology reinforces these ideas. The same signaling molecule can trigger repair in one context and apoptosis [Editor’s note: programmed cell death] in another. Meaning arises from association: the relational network determines significance (Deacon, (2021)).

Association, then, is not merely incidental. It is life’s grammar. Organisms endure not by clinging to fixed structures determined in a blueprint, but by reweaving associations that keep coherence intact. This relates directly to the theory of embodied cognition: adaptive intelligence arises from the flexible recombination of associations, with mind-body predispositions framing the contexts (Jarosek, (2001), (2013)).

 

Semiotics and the logic of association

The significance of association to embodied cognition is examined in Jarosek (2001), as a general principle, from the Peircean-semiotic perspective. Semiotics makes the principle of association explicit. Charles Sanders Peirce described meaning as triadic: a sign connects an object to an interpretant in context (Peirce, (1931-1966)).

Jakob von Uexküll carried this into biology. His concept of the Umwelt describes the organism-specific world of significance (von Uexküll, (2010)). For a tick, the Umwelt consists of butyric acid, warmth, and orientation. For a human, it spans language, culture, and symbolic depth. Each organism inhabits a network of associations tuned to survival.

Terence Deacon extends semiotics into molecular biology. Molecules are not merely physical structures but signs, interpreted differently depending on cellular context. Their significance lies in associative cascades: a protein fold here triggers a pathway there, which signals repair elsewhere (Deacon, (2012), (2021)).

Semiotics clarifies what association implies: coherence and meaning arise from relational networks spanning physics, biology, and culture. Association is not merely a description—it is the logic of significance itself.

A wedding ring has no inherent value in itself. Its meaning is derived within a cultural context, from the associations we make in love, commitment, tradition, law. In the absence of our cultural associations, the ring is just a piece of metal. Association generates significance.

A national flag, as a rectangle of colored fabric, becomes a symbol of shared history, belonging, pride and sacrifice, in the associations evoked from the patterns woven into it—the patterns that tell a story.

Meaning—whether in biology, language, or culture—is not merely the incidental feelings that make a sentient being happy or sad. It is the pattern of associations that provides the fabric that holds reality together.

 

Quantum contextuality and relational physics

With association as fundamental and pervasive throughout living systems, what might this imply for the matter of which they are comprised?

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.

Werner Heisenberg (1958) and Fritjof Capra (1975) gesture along these lines when describing atoms not as things but as tendencies. Rovelli clarifies: those tendencies are always tendencies-to-relate. Even causality becomes relational, no longer a push from one object to another but the manifestation of associations across context.

Let us consider how RQM differs from the Many Worlds Interpretation (Everett, (1957)). Many Worlds multiplies universes to preserve object-based determinism: every quantum event splits reality into branches. RQM, instead, strips away unnecessary baggage. Properties exist only in association, avoiding the inflation of universes.

Consider also Bohm’s interpretation, which insists on hidden variables guiding particles. Bohm preserves determinism but at the cost of positing invisible machinery. RQM avoids metaphysical excess by treating relation, not hidden substance, as fundamental.

Quantum mechanics, far from being paradoxical, becomes self-evident when viewed through association. Coherence is not the persistence of objects but the resilience of relational ties.

 

Square-cube scaling as heuristic

Our intuitions falter at molecular and quantum scales because we carry macroscopic metaphors into regimes where they no longer apply. Galileo’s square-cube principle provides the correction [Editor’s note: the square-cube principle is the observation that, as an object grows larger, its internal weight and volume increase much faster than its outer surface area, meaning giant versions of creatures or machines must drastically change their shape or materials just to avoid collapsing or overheating].

The square-cube law explains why insects can lift many times their own weight, despite their long, slender limbs. At the subatomic domain, matter released from classical (Newtonian) constraints behaves very differently to anything we encounter in the real world.

At small scales, coherence depends less on bulk than on relation. Proteins fold and interact not because of sheer mass, but because of complementary associations of shape and energy.

This relational world is vividly illustrated in XVIVO’s Inner Life of the Cell (2011). Proteins (kinesin) walk along microtubules, their function emerging from associative contexts within cellular networks, like couriers navigating a bustling city’s intricate streets. Vesicles bud and fuse, receptors dock and release—all without central command. These interactions are consistent with the notion of molecules as signs (Deacon, 2021). Order emerges from associations tuned to scale.

Cities achieve coherence through networked interactions—roads, utilities, social networks—mirroring cellular systems, where information flows like lifeblood, like a city at molecular scale (West, 2017).

Virtual particles in Feynman diagrams are momentary associations in quantum fields, shaped by contextual constraints, like fleeting sparks in a cosmic fire.

Time is also relational, scaling differently depending on size and metabolism. Time is the meaning that an agent (mind-body) attributes to the passage of events. A visceral sense of how differently birds and humans intercept the passage of time is captured in the video Hand-feeding Birds in Slow Mo (Jocelyn Anderson Photography, 2021).

Square-cube scaling bridges physics and semiotics, unifying coherence across scales in a non-dualistic ontology where association is life-critical for cosmic order.

 

Association as axiom

Association is an irreducible principle unifying causation, coherence and meaning across scales, in both downward and upward causation. In biological plasticity, associative learning is integral to the agency of cells and neurons. And in cultural systems, the manifestation of association, in imitation, is the downward causation that wires human brains to societal norms (Jarosek, (2020)).

Association operates in quantum contextuality, where properties emerge relationally, and Rovelli’s (1996) RQM shows reality is relational, with no “view from nowhere.” All existence is existence-for: a property is real only in relation to another observer or system. This echoes Peirce’s assertion that meaning is triadic—never a one-way relation, but always a contextual, mediated association. If reality itself is structured relationally, then association is not simply a cognitive convenience. It is the mode in which being manifests. RQM thus provides an empirical, physical, and philosophical bridge to our claim: that association is not the epiphenomenon of complexity—it is its ground.

 

Association and the tension between the known and the unknown

At the heart of association lies a deep ontological polarity—between what is known and what remains unknown. This tension, rather than being peripheral, is fundamental: it animates the emergence of structure, meaning, and life itself. It drives associative processes across scales, from quantum fluctuations to cultural innovation. The known/unknown tension is not simply an epistemological gap, but a generative condition under which coherence becomes possible.

The tension between the known and the unknown manifests at the subatomic level in the virtual particles of quantum field theory, depicted in Feynman diagrams as ephemeral fluctuations. We reframe them not as literal entities, but as momentary expressions of association arising from the interface of the known and the unknown. The vacuum is not empty but pregnant with potential, a relational field structured by constraints and context.

This idea finds deep resonance in Eastern metaphysical traditions, for example in the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, by Nāgārjuna, which is the foundational text of the Madhyamaka School of Buddhism (Garfield, 1995). Their notion of the creative void is expressed in the concept of Sunyata (śūnyatā, or emptiness). Here, the void is not an absence but a creative silence—an ontological openness from which form emerges. In this light, the quantum void and the cognitive horizon are both expressions of the same relational logic: association as the principle by which potential is shaped into meaning.

 

Sexuality as tension between the known and the unknown

Association’s imperatives in the known and the unknown are pervasive throughout living systems. As outlined in Jarosek (2005), we can ground our thinking about the known and the unknown, throughout the animal kingdom, more viscerally in the context of sexuality:

• The known as the predisposition of females to prioritize the known and that which sustains it, from nurturing and maternal love, to security, networks and traditions;
• The unknown as the predisposition of males to prioritize the boundary between the known and the mysterious unknown, from risk-taking and resource-control to competition, change, creativity and innovation.

Consistent with the insight that “bodies wire neuroplastic brains,” these predispositions are not fixed traits but emerge through morphogenesis and the theory of embodied cognition. This dynamic process shapes relational roles as organisms engage with their environments, prioritizing predispositions toward the known or unknown through lived experience, rather than any kind of genetically determined blueprint.

 

Association is the foundation of embodied cognition

The theory of embodied cognition (Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, Maturana, Varela) has been around for some time. More recently, it has begun a revival, becoming a leading mainstream theory in cognitive science. It is beyond the scope of this essay to give it the attention it deserves. We thus confine our discussion, here, to some examples of how embodied cognition relates directly to our axiomatic framework for association:

• The body’s structure informs the associations that a mind-body is predisposed to. Humans, equipped with hands and vocal apparatus, are predisposed to spoken and written language in culture; these are absent in non-human animals—for them, spoken language, along with the domains of experience that language enables, remain inaccessible;
• To ask “What is it like to be a bat?” is to recognize that qualia, as associations, are embodied. The structure of the body defines an agent’s predispositions, what it notices, and thus its experiences within the world;
• An agent’s embodiment delimits its horizon of options, the kinds of associations it is predisposed to making. Human mind-bodies are predisposed to engaging with culture, and so ours is a vastly extended horizon of options compared to that of a frog in a pond (Jarosek S. , 2020).

 

The axiom of association

To consider association an axiom is to center it as a first principle in any ontology that seeks to explain coherence, emergence, and meaning. It dissolves dualisms between mind and matter, nature and culture, symbol and substance—not by collapsing distinctions, but by showing their co-constitution through association.

Whether in the recursive loops of neural plasticity, the entangled relations of quantum states, or the interpretive webs of language and culture, association provides the connective tissue of reality. It is the ground upon which both the physical and the phenomenological stand.

 

Conclusion

The aim of this essay has been to propose association not as a mere correlate of complexity, but as its ontological root—a fundamental principle that operates from subatomic fields to cognitive behavior, from molecular semiosis to cultural discourse. Association is not a product of structure; it is what allows structure to emerge and persist. It is not generated by computation; it is what makes computation intelligible. It is not downstream of information; it is the condition of information itself.

Throughout this analysis, we have shown how association manifests in diverse domains: in quantum contextuality as a condition of measurement; in semiosis as the link between sign and interpretation; and in the developmental and adaptive plasticity observed across biological systems and scales. The conceptual power of association lies in its capacity to bind meaning and causation, context and emergence, constraint and creativity.

By reframing scale through square-cube dynamics and rejecting literalist interpretations in subatomic physics, we have argued that association provides a more coherent interpretive framework than either computational or mechanistic models alone.

We conclude that association is an irreducible, axiomatic principle: not subject to empirical falsification in the traditional sense, but foundational to the very act of testing and interpretation. It is a principle that invites us to rethink causation, emergence, and meaning not as separate threads, but as expressions of a deeper logic instead.

 

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