Description Without Causation: A Cognitive Approach to Structural Universality

Philosophy has long sought to answer 'why' questions through causal explanation. Newton described gravitation without explaining why masses attract—and was criticized for it. Yet we experience causation constantly: objects fall 'because' they are dropped. We propose that this sense of 'because' arises from prediction error minimization: the brain labels highly predictable regularities as 'causal.' Causation may not be a feature of reality but a cognitive label. The Stuart-Landau equation, describing systems near bifurcation points, exhibits the same structure across domains—from coupled oscillators to financial markets—yet no causal explanation is required for this universality. Recent work demonstrates that this structural recurrence is part of a broader morphism network connecting 300 years of physics (Ishibashi, 2026a). More constructively, we propose that this structure can serve as an axiomatic foundation: causal explanations become theorems derivable from these axioms, rather than primitive facts. Crucially, these axioms are not posited a priori but discovered empirically—extracted inductively from centuries of convergent physical investigation. This transforms science from a search for causes to a project of proof, yielding the same logical rigor as mathematics while remaining grounded in empirical reality.