On the Nature of Causality Before the Invention of the Theory of Entropicity (ToE): From Substance, to Habit, to Condition
To place the claim of Obidi's Theory of Entropicity (ToE) —“cause and effect are one entropic source”—into the long tradition of philosophy, it helps to see how the meaning of causation has repeatedly shifted in Western thought. What looks, at first glance, like a stable notion (“A makes B happen”) turns out to be one of the most contested ideas in intellectual history. Each major turning point—Aristotle’s metaphysics of explanation, Hume’s critique of necessity, Kant’s transcendental reconstruction—redefines what causality is, what it does, and where it comes from. The Theory of Entropicity, as John Onimisi Obidi has formulated it, is best understood as proposing a new turn: causality is not a glue that binds separate events, but the internal grammar of an evolving entropic field, within which “cause” and “effect” are two temporal faces of one process.
Aristotle: causation as explanation grounded in form and purpose
Aristotle does not treat causality as mere event-to-event pushing. For him, “cause” (aitia) is closer to “that which answers the question why.” His famous four causes—material, formal, efficient, and final—are not four competing hypotheses but four complementary dimensions of intelligibility. The bronze is the material cause of the statue; the shape is its formal cause; the sculptor’s action is its efficient cause; and the end or purpose of the statue (to honor, to commemorate, to beautify) is its final cause.
This matters for ToE because Aristotle’s causality is not essentially linear. It is not only about “what preceded,” but about “what makes this the kind of thing it is.” In other words, Aristotle already knows that what we call “cause” might be less a separate event and more a principle of organization—a structure that explains why things behave as they do. If ToE says that entropy is the universal organizer, the universal constraint that shapes how phenomena unfold, then ToE resembles Aristotle in spirit: it treats causality as fundamentally explanatory, not merely mechanical.
And yet ToE also breaks from Aristotle decisively. Aristotle’s world is teleological at its core: nature tends toward ends; form is realized; potency becomes act. ToE, by contrast, is anchored in irreversibility and constraint resolution. If there is an “end” in ToE, it is not a purpose chosen by nature but a direction built into entropic dynamics: the arrow of time as entropic unfolding. In that sense, ToE looks like a post-teleological Aristotle: it keeps the idea that causality is about intelligible structure, but it replaces “final cause” with “entropic constraint” as the deepest reason why processes have direction.
Hume: causation as habit, necessity as projection
David Hume is the great disrupter. He asks: when we say “A causes B,” what exactly do we observe? We observe that A is followed by B, repeatedly. We observe constant conjunction and temporal priority. But we never observe a mysterious “necessary connection” binding them. The feeling of necessity, Hume argues, is not in the world; it is in us. It is the mind’s habit, formed by repetition, that leads us to expect B after A and then to project necessity onto nature.
This critique strikes directly at every theory that treats causality as an objective metaphysical chain. If ToE claims that cause and effect are one entropic process, it can absorb Hume’s critique in an unexpected way. For ToE can agree with Hume that “cause” and “effect” are not two metaphysically independent blocks connected by a hidden cord. The mind carves the world into “before” and “after,” and then imagines that these carvings are ontologically ultimate. In Obidi's formulation of ToE, the separation of cause and effect becomes an observer-dependent interpretation of an underlying entropic transformation.
But ToE need not end in Humean skepticism. Hume dissolves necessity into psychology; ToE tries to relocate necessity into physics—not as an occult link between separate events, but as constraint-based inevitability within an entropic field. On this view, “necessity” is not a metaphysical bond gluing A to B; it is the internal demand of the entropic configuration: given such gradients, such capacities, such constraints, evolution must proceed along certain admissible paths. The necessity is not seen as a mystical connector; it is a structural requirement of the entropic field’s permitted reorganizations.
So ToE can be read as a reply to Hume that concedes his best point—necessity is not an extra thing you can point to—yet insists that there is a real, mind-independent source of directional unfolding: irreversibility and constraint resolution. “Cause” is not what we perceive as a force; it is what the entropic landscape makes unavoidable.
Kant: causality as a condition of experience
Emmanuel Kant famously accepts Hume’s demolition of empirically observed necessity, but he refuses to conclude that causality is merely habit. He argues instead that causality is a category of the understanding, a rule the mind brings to experience. We do not first see events and then add causality; we must already apply causal structure in order to experience an ordered world at all. Without causality, there is no coherent sequence of events—only a blur of impressions.
Kant matters enormously for ToE because he relocates causality from the world-as-thing-in-itself to the world-as-appearing-to-us. In a Kantian mood, one might interpret your ToE claim “cause and effect are one” as saying: causality is not fundamental; it is a mode of organizing appearances. Beneath it lies a deeper substrate—here, entropy as the field of constraint. The “cause/effect” distinction is then not abolished, but demoted: it is a valid structure of experience for finite observers embedded in time, not the ultimate architecture of reality.
Yet ToE also challenges Kant by turning the tables. Kant’s categories are fixed features of human cognition; ToE suggests that what appears as causality may be shaped by the universe’s entropic regime. If physical “laws” can evolve under ToE because the entropic landscape evolves, then even the stability of causal regularities becomes a dynamical question. One can imagine a ToE-inspired Kantianism: the mind requires causal ordering to experience, yes—but the content, stability, and form of causal expectations are constrained by entropic structure, and could, in principle, shift across cosmological epochs.
This is a delicate philosophical move, and a potent one. It suggests that ToE does not merely add a new physical field; it proposes a new relationship between metaphysics and epistemology. The mind’s causal categories may be constant, but the universe’s entropic conditions determine which causal patterns can be reliably instantiated and observed.
Modern physics: from forces to fields, from determinism to constraints
Philosophy’s debates become sharper when placed beside modern physics, which has repeatedly changed what “cause” can mean.
Newtonian mechanics is the classical stage for naïve causality. Forces cause accelerations; the world is a great clockwork of pushes and pulls. Here cause and effect are cleanly separable: the applied force is cause, the resulting motion is effect. But even in Newton, the clarity is partly purchased by not asking deeper questions. What is a force? How does it act at a distance? Newton famously declined to feign hypotheses. The “cause” in Newton is operationally defined, not metaphysically transparent.
Field theory—especially electromagnetism—begins to soften the old picture. Causes are no longer localized pushes but distributed field configurations. The “cause” of a charged particle’s motion is not another particle striking it, but the field value at its position, which itself has a history and a propagation rule. Causality becomes less like a billiard collision and more like a lawful unfolding of a continuous medium. This is closer to the ToE intuition: what we call “events” are manifestations of an underlying field’s configuration.
General Relativity (GR) pushes this further. Gravity, in Einstein’s mature conception, is not a force that causes motion; it is geometry that conditions motion. Bodies follow geodesics not because they are pushed but because the structure of spacetime makes those paths natural. Already here, the line between cause and effect blurs. Is the curvature the cause and the trajectory the effect? Or are they two aspects of a single dynamical system governed by field equations? In a deep GR reading, curvature and motion are co-determined by the same field structure. ToE’s proposal that “cause and effect are one entropic process” can be seen as an entropic analogue of this geometric unification: not geometry but entropy is the conditioning field, and what we call “causes” and “effects” are patterns within its unfolding.
Quantum theory complicates causality even more. At the level of measurement, the old picture becomes strained: events are probabilistic; the role of the observer becomes conceptually significant; and certain correlations (as in entanglement) resist any simple classical causal story. Many interpretations retain locality in a subtle way, but almost all agree that “cause” cannot be naively equated with “deterministic antecedent.” The quantum world invites a move from causal pushes to informational constraints, consistency conditions, and selection rules. This is precisely the terrain where Obidi's ToE framing becomes philosophically fertile: if ToE treats entropy as a field of constraints that selects admissible paths (the ToE Vuli-Ndlela Integral language points in this direction), then causality is not so much “A makes B” as “given the entropic constraints, only certain evolutions can occur.” That is a modern, non-mechanical sense of necessity, one that fits quantum practice better than the old billiard metaphor.
Thermodynamics, finally, introduces a crucial asymmetry that classical mechanics lacks: the arrow of time. Many microphysical laws are time-reversal symmetric, yet macroscopic phenomena are not. Entropy growth is the signature of this asymmetry. For ToE, this is not merely an emergent statistical fact; it is the heart of ontology. Once irreversibility is fundamental rather than derivative, the classical cause-effect schema becomes secondary. “Cause” is often just “earlier,” “effect” just “later,” but what makes earlier lead to later in a directed way is the entropic structure itself. If the directionality of time is entropic, then the very distinction between cause and effect is entropic before it is logical.
So are cause and effect the same in ToE?
In the strongest ToE reading, therefore, the above and other related questions are answered with a qualified but profound “yes.”
Cause and effect are not identical in the trivial sense—one still precedes the other for an embedded observer—but they are identical in substance. They are two phases of one entropic reconfiguration. The “cause” is an entropic gradient or constraint imbalance; the “effect” is the entropic redistribution that resolves or transforms that imbalance; and both are expressions of the same underlying field dynamics. The separation is real at the level of experience because the observer’s access is sequential and limited. But the separation is not ultimate at the level of ToE ontology, because nothing occurs outside entropy’s constraint-governed evolution.
This also explains why, in ToE, we call the separateness an “illusion.” The illusion is not that sequences don’t happen; it is that we misinterpret the sequence as a chain of independent entities connected by an extra metaphysical glue called “causation.” ToE thus proposes that what truly exists is entropic structure unfolding irreversibly; causality is our way of narrating that unfolding from within.
The deeper philosophical consequence: a new kind of necessity
Aristotle sought intelligibility through forms and ends. Hume dissolved necessity into habit. Kant made causality a condition of possible experience. Modern physics transformed causes into fields, constraints, and symmetries. The Theory of Entropicity (ToE) proposal can be read as gathering these threads into a new synthesis: causality is not an external linkage between separable events, but the internal necessity of an evolving entropic field, which generates time’s direction, conditions what can happen, and thereby makes “cause” and “effect” two interpretive slices of one reality.
As we have earlier developed this premise carefully, the “great implications” we have found as a result are not at all rhetorical exaggerations. In physics, we see that it reframes forces and laws as emergent constraints. In philosophy, it reframes metaphysical necessity as structural constraint rather than hidden connection. In religion and metaphysics, it invites a rethinking of agency, providence, and “first cause” not as a primitive push but as boundary-setting or constraint-setting at the deepest level. And in all domains, it replaces the picture of the universe as a chain of pushes with the picture of the universe as an irreversible unfolding of entropic order.
