Last Updated on August 20, 2026 by Rob Cashman

What if nature does more than simply obey the laws of cause and effect?

Modern science has become remarkably successful at explaining how the universe behaves. From Newton’s mechanics to Einstein’s relativity and quantum mechanics, our models describe nature with astonishing precision. Yet beneath those mathematical successes lies a deeper philosophical question that remains surprisingly unsettled:

Why does history unfold the way it does?

We generally assume the answer is based on causality.

The present exists because of the past, and the future will exist because of the present. Every moment is simply the cumulative result of everything that came before it.

But what if that assumption is incomplete?

This article proposes a speculative philosophical framework that introduces a missing ingredient into our understanding of time: homeostasis. If nature possesses a tendency to preserve stable states—not merely in living organisms, but as a more fundamental organizing principle—then our understanding of causality, history, free will, and even the meaning of past events may need to be reconsidered.

This is not an attempt to replace modern physics. Rather, it is an attempt to ask whether one of biology’s most familiar principles might have implications far beyond biology itself.

Part I — The Current Scientific Picture

Quantum Mechanics and the Observer

Few scientific theories have been as successful—or as philosophically confusing—as quantum mechanics.

Quantum mechanics demonstrates that even our most successful scientific theories often describe reality with extraordinary accuracy while leaving profound philosophical questions unanswered. Physicists continue to debate not the mathematics, but the interpretation. This raises a broader question: How often do successful scientific models leave out explanatory variables—not because they are wrong, but because they are incomplete?

A model can predict reality extraordinarily well while remaining philosophically incomplete.

Quantum mechanics teaches us something surprising. While the mathematics can be extraordinarily successful, like with the ‘observer’ debate, physicists continue debating what the mathematics actually means.

This is important because contrary to Feynman’s approach (with complete respect and deference to his contributions to my own understanding), deriving a theory based on measuring and predicting the data does not necessarily imply that the explanation for the existence of that data is complete.

This is also important to consider in other fields of science and non-science as well: Biology explains organisms; economics explains markets; artificial intelligence explains learning; history explains events.

But forming a model explaining measured data is different from asserting that the explanation provided by that model is complete. In this article, I am not asserting that the current models are wrong. I am merely asking how they might still be incomplete.

Our Assumption About Time

Although quantum mechanics challenges many of our intuitions, it usually leaves one assumption untouched.

Time flows in one direction.

The past produces the present; the present produces the future.

This assumption appears so obvious that we rarely notice we are making it.

Whether discussing planetary motion, chemical reactions, biological evolution, or human history, we instinctively picture reality as a chain of causes stretching forward through time.

Past
   ↓
Present
   ↓
Future

Every event becomes the inevitable consequence of previous events.

Even when randomness, a ‘black swan’ event, or an unanticipated outcome enters the picture, any of these random events merely change which future emerges. The future is still assumed to be generated exclusively from the accumulated conditions of the past.

But this assumption deserves examination because it makes an assumption that causality is the only consideration when thinking about time. But what happens if we add homeostasis into the understanding of time (or, the consideration that time might have within it something more than adding in a sum total of the past parts)?

Part II — Homeostasis Beyond Biology

The Quiet Principle Behind Living Systems

Biologists use the word homeostasis to describe one of life’s most remarkable characteristics. Living systems actively maintain internal stability despite constant external disturbances.

• Human body temperature remains nearly constant despite changes in weather.
• Blood glucose stays within a narrow range despite meals and fasting.
• Blood pressure, oxygen concentration, hormone levels, and immune responses all operate through intricate feedback mechanisms.

Physicists and physiologists have long recognized that homeostasis governs biological systems, and recent work has extended these ideas into network physiology and complexity science. But ‘borrowing’ the term and applying it to non-biological systems and other areas of science, this article asks a different question: could analogous principles operate at a much higher level of abstraction, even influencing the evolution of history itself?

The interesting feature of homeostasis is not merely that systems respond to change — it is that systems respond against change.

For example, when a disturbance occurs in the system:

1) The system pushes back.

2) Negative feedback restores equilibrium.

This principle extends far beyond medicine. Chemical reactions settle into equilibrium. Ecological systems stabilize populations through predator-prey interactions. Climate systems exhibit numerous stabilizing feedback loops. Even engineering is built upon feedback control, from cruise control in automobiles to thermostats in homes.

Across science we repeatedly encounter the same pattern:

Stable systems resist displacement.

Homeostasis Has Mathematical Cousins

Although homeostasis is usually introduced in the context of biological systems, the underlying idea—systems moving toward stable states—is far more a general concept than merely applying to living organisms.

Many independent scientific disciplines repeatedly discover mathematical principles of stability, adaptation, optimization, and equilibrium. Across mathematics, engineering, computer science, and artificial intelligence, similar concepts appear under different names.

• A desired temperature set on the thermostat continually adjusts a home’s heating or cooling systems toward a set endpoint.
• An aircraft autopilot continually corrects deviations from its intended flight path.
• Machine learning algorithms repeatedly adjust millions of parameters while searching for a better solution.
• Chemical reactions settle into equilibrium.
• Physical systems often move toward lower-energy configurations.

Although these systems appear very different, they share a common pattern:

They do not merely respond to previous events. They continually adjust themselves toward stable configurations.

Scientists have developed different mathematical languages to describe this behavior.

Dynamical Systems

Dynamical systems theory studies how complex systems evolve over time.

Rather than viewing events as isolated causes and effects, it studies the evolution of entire systems and the stable patterns that emerge from their interactions.

Many systems eventually settle into predictable long-term behaviors despite having extremely complicated internal dynamics.

Control Theory

Control theory formalizes feedback.

Instead of simply allowing a process to continue unchecked, feedback continually compares the current state against some desired state and makes corrections.

Modern engineering depends on this principle.

Without feedback, airplanes become unstable; robots drift; power grids fail; the Internet itself becomes unreliable.

Attractors

Perhaps the most intriguing concept (in overlaying the ideas of time + stability) is that of an attractor.

An attractor is not a force pulling an object through space. Rather, it is a stable state toward which a system naturally evolves.

Imagine placing a marble inside a bowl. No matter where the marble begins, when released, it spins around and eventually settles at the bottom. The bottom of the bowl is the attractor.

Many real systems possess numerous attractors. Small disturbances disappear; large disturbances may push the system into an entirely different basin of stability.

History itself often appears to behave this way.

Long periods of apparent stability are interrupted by sudden reorganizations into entirely new “normal” states.

Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning

Modern AI offers another striking example.

Training a neural network is often described as a process of gradient descent.

The algorithm repeatedly adjusts billions of numerical parameters while minimizing error. Each adjustment moves the system toward a better solution.

Although this process is usually explained mathematically, it also illustrates something philosophically interesting:

The system is not merely accumulating previous computations — it is continually reorganizing itself while seeking increasingly stable configurations.

A Common Pattern

Whether discussing biology, engineering, chemistry, physics, or artificial intelligence, one theme repeatedly emerges:

This raises an intriguing possibility: If so many scientific disciplines independently discover mathematical principles describing stability, equilibrium, and attractors… could history (or time itself) also possess similar dynamics?

Every discipline discussed so far treats equilibrium as a mathematical property of evolving systems. The question explored here is whether history itself should be understood as another evolving system rather than merely a chronological sequence of events.

A Thought Experiment

Imagine extending the ‘borrowed’ concept of homeostasis to something as abstract as the movement of time.

I am not trying to assert that time has within it features that behave in the same way that the concept of homeostasis would apply to a biological system. I am merely asking a question from the point of view of time whether complex adaptive systems (or the desire for stability) exists as a philosophical possibility.

Suppose nature itself possesses a tendency toward equilibrium—not merely physically, but historically, as in the movement of time?

What if the timeline we experience as ‘reality’ is not merely a set of events which add together from the past to produce what we will experience as the future?

What if it also continually attempts to preserve its current state? Instead of history behaving like falling dominoes, what if time behaves with a proclivity towards equilibrium? Moreso, what if time and ‘mother nature’ acts more like a computer program with certain functions and conditions which instruct it to respond to changes that occur as that program is executed? What if it has variables (set values, or end points) which its programming continually adjusts to preserve in its unfolding?

If equilibrium or the instruction to adjust continually to reach that variable is built into nature’s programming, any very significant change to the system would encounter resistance and adaptation by the program.

I wouldn’t form the judgement that this is because the change or unexpected event is immoral or wrong, but if within the passage of time maintaining stability (equilibrium, or staying within the range of possibilities so the end variable could materialize) is part of the program, nature would resist, adapt, or react to any changes from the baseline.

Causality May Be Missing a Variable

Traditional causality can be pictured as:

Past
   ↓
Present
   ↓
Future

The present is determined entirely by prior conditions.

But a homeostatic universe introduces an additional force.

Past
   ↓
Present
↑      ↓
Stability
      ↓
Future

Every moment wouldn’t just be the next moment based on the accumulation of everything that has happened until that moment. Rather, every moment would also be influenced by nature’s tendency to preserve existing equilibrium or reach a set outcome.

[Philosophy at this point would branch into questions of free will, fate, or a pre-determined outcome. Merely positing the existence of a tendency towards equilibrium and/or the existence of a set variable would not alter or erase a person or a society’s ability to choose one decision over another. Each choice whether to act and what to decide would still exist in the context of a surrounding environment trying to preserve a stable state or to reach an end goal. On the contrary, living within a hypothetical system that reacts to our decisions and/or our actions expands our “free will” to not only decide how we act or react, it expands our influence from governing merely ourselves to influencing history, time, and creation itself.]

Factoring in a desire for self-correction, history would no longer be simple motion, or even a result of a momentum from sequential events that occurred in previous time blocks; the unfolding of history would become a dynamic balance of past, future, and maintaining the stability of the system for whatever outcome (if any), purpose (if any), or variable (if any) programmed into the system of time.

Six Consequences

If both past events and complex adaptive systems participate in the passage of time (or otherwise phrased, in the unfolding of history), several familiar ideas begin to look different.

1. Change naturally encounters resistance.

Resistance to an event or some act is not necessarily evidence that the act or the occurrence should not happen. A system built to preserve a stable state would incorporate and adjust to each event or act that occurred within that system.

It may simply be evidence that stable systems resist rapid transformation.

2. Revolutions become phase transitions.

History would not evolve smoothly.

Long periods of apparent stability would be interrupted by sudden reorganizations into new equilibria, as we see throughout our history.

3. “Free will” becomes historically significant.

Individual choices based on ‘free will’ would not merely add another event to history.

One act or decision could displace an entire equilibrium, forcing surrounding systems to reorganize.

4. The meaning of past events would continue evolving.

A past event’s significance would not be fixed at the moment it occurred. Later developments could reorganize how earlier events fit within the larger historical pattern.

[I am currently analyzing this topic as it applies to how current models of Artificial Intelligence piece together and infer history. In my article on TorrentLawyer, I am arguing that the implications of past events could be rewritten by future events.]

History would not rewrite facts.

It would rewrite relationships between future events (as they manifest) and past occurrences.

5. Stability becomes creative rather than conservative.

Complex adaptive systems within time would not merely adjust or self-correct to preserve the past. It would preserve whatever new equilibrium has genuinely been established.

Thus, ‘history’, or ‘the new normal’ would not only materialize through one person’s decision, or one act. The act would need to change the trajectory of events significantly enough to overcome the resistance that complex adaptive systems (or the desire for stability) would impose on it. Nature would change with enough pressure in one direction or another. (And if was programmed with variables to resist moving away from one set of outcomes at all costs, we would see an exacerbation or irritation in the level of the response).

Either way, progress would therefore become cumulative (unless otherwise programmed).

6. The future becomes an attractor rather than merely an outcome.

Instead of imagining history as pushed entirely from behind by previous causes, we might also imagine that stable future states exert organizational influence over the unfolding trajectory of history.

This is not backward causation — it is teleological organization. The concept of an ‘attractor’ exists also in other areas of science, and so too, it could play a role in the passage of time.

Result: The destination shapes the journey because the system continually reorganizes itself around increasingly stable configurations.

Closing Reflection

Could history or ‘time itself’ possess homeostatic dynamics? I don’t know, but the question deserves asking.