**Links to**: [[Feedback]], [[Repetition]], [[Becoming]], [[Process]], [[Self-reference]], [[Self-evidence]], [[Self]], [[Function]]. >Where does recursion begin? The search for the beginning is a search for the first cause. While in a circular loop, the beginning is only temporal, but not necessarily a cause.14 The cause is the totality of the loop. The prime mover or unmoved mover does not intervene from without, but rather the cause is immanent. > >Yuk Hui, _Recursivity and Contingency_, p. 15.   ### [[Postulate]]: Because we never witnessed the beginning, everything is recursive. Recursion, self-reference and feedback share the functional similarity that is most intuitively captured by the identity operator’s diagram: ```mermaid graph LR A((A)) -->|idA| A ``` They can and do, under specific conditions, function as distinct concepts with different applications and characteristics. We’re after the highly abstract, so the similarity is preferred over the differences here. Recursion, as a term, is has become more associated to computational processes (recursive functions), self-reference to linguistic-logical processes (paradoxes, syntax), while feedback is a broader systems concept with plenty of different versions and technical implementations. While none is a subset of the other, they seem to point to the same function; something coming to act on itself.   >Being organic is not merely maintaining part-whole relations, but also designates self-organization and autopoiesis, which we want to call _recursivity_. > >Ibid., p. 45.   ### Recursion as a fact of matter In thinking about recursion as an all-pervasive fact of matter—in cognition, computation, evolution, etc. and how it can be understood as a bootstrapping process/effect (or **function**): both _structural_ and _operational_—Yuk Hui proposes that the enduring opposition between being and becoming can be sublated. In thinking about historical proposals that deal with this opposition, Hui also asks why Leibniz did not “grant a window to the monad, and instead endow it with a mirror?” (2019, p. 14). His answer is that: “A window may allow connection like extension, but a mirror allows recursion—it reflects what other mirrors reflect.” (ibid.). But we may also ask: why didn’t he allow it for a one-way (or two-way) mirror. Might this simply be because the technological phenomenon was not yet there? The double-perspectivism had not yet been technologically refined/defined? A two-way mirror is a mirror, a window _and_ a limit. Structure _and_ operation. Perhaps in the words of A. Sloman: “Every intelligent ghost must contain a machine.” (see: [[02 Introduction to the Poltergeist]]). ### Recursion and the FEP See: [[Free energy principle]]. ### Recursion in language To be written. %% [[Recursivity notes]]