Volume I: Causality and Attraction
Begin with the series foundation.
Media / Series overview
Causality and Attraction: The Research Program
A tour across the research program from human enclosure and climate to physics, computation, and civic design.
The program follows a single recurring question across changing fields: what holds a system together while its contents change? Each volume becomes a new enclosure for testing, correcting, and extending the Three Laws of Nested Causality.
Terms in this film
Explore the same term in other films through the transcript glossary.
Continue into the research
Related work
Volume VI: Nested Causal Models, Maps, and Interventions
Read the formal synthesis and correction layer.
Causality and Attraction
Browse all twelve volumes and the series conclusions.
Read the video transcript
Published captions, with their original wording.
Have you ever looked at some massive global problem and just thought, "Why do our solutions
always seem to miss the mark?" Well, what if the very way we've been taught to look
at reality, you know, breaking things down into tiny, isolated little pieces, is exactly
what's keeping us stuck? Seriously, what if everything we think we know about cause and
effect is just incomplete? Welcome to this explainer. Today, we are diving headfirst
into a massive, frankly paradigm-shifting framework by independent research technologist
Cid J. A. Hubbard. In his incredibly ambitious, complete work, Causality and Attraction,
a continuum of steady states, Hubbard is proposing a completely new way of mapping reality itself.
We're going to look at how literally everything, from galactic structures to global climate,
all the way down to the streets of our own cities, are completely and fundamentally intertwined.
To ground us right out of the gate, I want to share this incredible quote from Hubbard's
second volume. He writes, "The sky does not need to be engineered. It needs only to
be allowed to participate. That right there is the core philosophy we're unpacking today.
Hubbard is arguing that the universe isn't some broken, clunky machine that we need to
constantly tinker with and fix from the top down. Actually, it's a self-sustaining, beautifully
nested architecture. It's built on these dynamic balances that just maintain themselves, provided
we don't disrupt their natural participation." Okay, so here's our roadmap for this journey.
First, we'll talk about moving beyond flat maps. Then we'll dive into the three laws
of this new blueprint, test the whole thing out on the Antarctic anomaly, rethink the
modern city, and finally, explore this grand continuum of states.
Section 1, beyond flat maps, the failure of reductionism. So, the core problem is basically
our geometry. We're actively trying to navigate a three-dimensional, nested universe, using
two-dimensional flat maps, which is kind of absurd when you really stop and think about
it. We take a complex issue, say, carbon emissions, or a person struggling on the street, and
we isolate it. We treat it as this disconnected anomaly that we just need to fix. But, as
Hubbard argues, nothing exists in isolation. Literally, everything is enclosed by something
larger. When we only focus on that one isolated variable, we become totally blind to the enclosing
conditions that are actually forcing that variable to behave the way it does in the first place.
Section 2, the three laws, the blueprint of reality.
Hubbard introduces this concept called nested causal modeling, or NCM for short. Think of
it kind of like a Russian nesting doll. Instead of just staring at a single object in a vacuum,
you look at a three-part formula. You have the outer thing enclosing it, the thing itself,
which Hubbard calls the departure, and the smaller things inside it. You literally have
to look inward and outward simultaneously to find the true actual chain of cause and effect.
This whole geometric architecture shows us that causality isn't just a straight, boring
line from the past to the future. It's vertical. Those wider, outer enclosures act as a really
strict boundary. They project what we call non-volatile or fixed causality inward. Meanwhile, the smaller
mechanisms on the inside are bubbling up volatile, unpredictable actions. And that focal point
right in the middle, it's held in perfect balance by both of these forces.
From this geometry, we get three laws. First up, nested causal enclosure. Basically, nothing
exists alone. It's always shaped by its container. Second, nested exchange. If energy is lost
in one place, it absolutely has to be deposited somewhere else. There is zero net loss. And
third, nested infinities. This nesting pattern we're talking about scales infinitely inward
to the microscopic level and infinitely outward to the very edge of the universe.
In 2003, the Antarctic anomaly, a physical case study.
Let's look at a really specific, fascinating historical window. The world was already cooling
down from the massive lack eruption back in 1783. Then, in 1815, Mount Tambora erupted,
throwing this colossal veil of ash across the entire planet. That triggered 1816, which
is famously known as the year without a summer. I mean, crops failed all over, rivers were
freezing in July. And then, mysteriously, just a few years later, in 1820, three separate
expeditions suddenly cited the massive ice fields of Antarctica, for the very first time
in recorded human history. Now, notice this multiplier, 1.7. During that year without
a summer, places like Moscow sought precipitation and snowfall run 70% above normal. Remember
that law of nested exchange we just talked about? All that global cooling and condensation
in the atmosphere had to go somewhere? It actually forced a massive, incredibly rapid
dumping of water and ice straight toward the southern pole.
Hubbard uses this exact event to show that Antarctica breaks our normal pattern of continental
discovery. There were no ancient myths about it, no slowly improving maps over centuries.
It essentially just appeared. Why? Because the ice sheet didn't just slowly drift into
a polar position over millions of years inside some static vacuum. No, it experienced a rapid
powerful shift in its outer atmospheric enclosure. The atmosphere tightened up, precipitation
was forced south, and the final frontier of our map physically revealed itself to human
awareness. Honestly, it is a completely mind-bending way to look at the history of our planet.
Section four, rethinking the city, a human case study.
Now, let's bring it back home. The standard, flat map view tells us that homelessness is
a broken person, right? It's framed as an addiction, a lack of willpower, a personal
moral failure. But the nested causal view completely strips away all that judgment and
just looks at the geometry. It plainly states that homelessness is simply a missing civic
enclosure. If we have two citizens standing on a street and one has a home and one doesn't,
the difference isn't their moral worth. The difference is the causal conditions that are
physically reaching their bodies. So, the absolutely crucial question is, what exactly
is missing? Well, Hubbard identifies these very specific civic projections. Think about
it. A private home projects water for hygiene, it projects sanitation, a safe place to prepare
food, clean clothing, a locked boundary for protected sleep, and a secure address. For
the housed person, the city delivers all of this right to their front wall. But for the
unhoused person, the city's projection literally just stops. Because of this, the person is
not the homeless object in this model. The city is. The exhausted face, the dirt, the
guarded bundle of belongings. These are really just the physical relief images of a city that
has withheld an enclosure. Hubbard argues that if we just extend these civic enclosures,
universally providing public showers, locked sleep pods and civic addresses, the visible
state of homelessness inherently closes. And it does it without requiring us to fix or
judge the person first. It's a total game changer. This ripple effect perfectly captures
how causality radiates out. It always starts from a central point of cognitive awareness,
or observer state, and projects outward. Once we realize that the city is actually the
broken enclosure, our awareness ripples out to create real world civic interventions,
which completely changes the reality for the human beings caught inside it. Section five,
a continuum of states, the cosmic conclusion. Hubbard's ultimate conclusion in this complete
work is that reality is an unbroken continuum. Everything. And I mean everything is a scaled
departure from a state of perfect balance, which he calls the vector equilibrium. From
the smallest microscopic atom all the way up to the largest galaxy, every single steady
state is constantly being pulled and guided by nested enclosures. And this stretches all
the way out to the immense cosmic gravitational pull of the great attractor. So what happens
when we finally adopt this equilibrium shaped view of reality? Well, for starters, we stop
seeing a universe full of isolated, fractured anomalies that we have to constantly fight
and control. We stop trying to engineer the sky from the top down. And maybe most importantly,
we stop blaming individuals for the failures of the enclosures surrounding them. I want
to leave you with this final profound thought from the text. There may be dragons under
the ice, but we are participants in an unbroken hole, weeding only for us to see it. We aren't
just random passengers floating in a cold, empty void. We are active vital participants
in a deeply connected, self-sustaining architecture. The only question left is now that you finally
have the map, how will you choose to participate?