Mutual Causality

Mutual causality is the subject of Macy's doctoral dissertation at Syracuse University (1978), published as Mutual Causality in Buddhism and General Systems Theory: The Dharma of Natural Systems (1991). The framework traced the structural parallel between two traditions separated by twenty-five centuries: Buddhist dependent co-arising (pratītyasamutpāda) and the cybernetic concept of feedback developed by Bateson and Bertalanffy. Both traditions, Macy argued, had arrived at structurally identical insights about causality: things do not simply cause other things in one-directional chains but co-arise in reciprocal feedback loops. The convergence is diagnostic — it suggests that mutual causality is a deep feature of reality, not a cultural construct, and that the Western commitment to linear causality is a modeling simplification that fails for living systems. Applied to AI, mutual causality dissolves the authorship question that linear causality demands.