Life and cognition are inherently circular dynamical processes, and people have difficulty understanding circular causation. We give case studies illustrating some resulting confusions, and propose that the problems may lie in failing to properly distinguish between similar concepts used in different levels of description of a system, typically local and global levels.

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© 2017 Massachusetts Institute of Technology Published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license
2017
MIT Press
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.