Part 2. Effect or Cause Jim DeLeo

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• Part 2. Effect or Cause?Jim DeLeo

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Chaos rules!
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• We find it difficult to accept the world to be
  chaotic.
• Physicists tell us
• cause and effect relations are not certain
• time might not run from past to present to
  future
• space is not infinite but curves hack on itself
• you can see the back of your head
• Yet none of this changes our everyday assumptions
  about our world and our lives.
• We continue to live as if effect follows cause.
• It may be assumed that the model of linear
  causality also accounts for the accidental
  concepts of responsibility, justice and guilt,
  morals, ethics, aesthetics, and above all
  objective truth and falsehood.

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• Chaos erupts when and where our constructions no
  longer fit.
• Closely associated with our experience of time is
  the idea of a linear, unidirectional movement
  from cause to effect and from the past to the
  present.
• In the vicious circle phenomena in which the
  sequence of events is not rectilinear but in
  which the effect may feed back on its own cause,
  e.g. marital arguments n which the starting point
  is beyond recall.
• Self-reflexity in the steam engine and in us is
  explored as is self-fulfilling prophecies.

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• Psychiatric criterion for sanity is the degree of
  reality adaptation.
• This assumes there is a real objective realty
  open to our scrutiny and understanding.
• Could we be after all descendents of Oedipus Rex
  as postulated by Freud?
• In Becketts novels subject and object ultimately
  interpenetrate one another
• If the invention and the inventor are inseparable
  then end and beginning merge into one a unity
  symbolized by the Ouroborus, the snake that eats
  its tail.

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Ouroborus
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Part 2.

• 1. The Consequence of Causal Thinking
• Written by Rupert Reidl
• Reviewed by Nada Vydelingum
• challenges normal view of causality
• 2. Self-Fulfilling Prophecies
• Written by Paul Watzlawick
• Reviewed by Chuck Selden
• examines self-fulfilling prophecies

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Part 2.

• 3. On Being Sane in Insane Places
• Written by by David Rosenhan
• Reviewed by Ellen Bicknell
• when diagnosis produces the pathology
• 4. Self-Reflexity in Literature The Example of
• Samuel Becketts Novel Trilogy
• Written by Rolf Breuer
• Reviewed by Izabel Goertzel
• Subject and object, inventor and invented,
  beginning
• and end paradoxically merge into one
  like the
• Ourborus, the snake that bites its
  tail.