I recognise that, it's David Bentley Hart's latest All Things are Full of Gods. And he states exactly what I was about to write, which is the vexed relationship between logical necessity and physical causation. I've been drafting some material on this question, which I'll present below.,

Once again, I'll situate this historically. Pre David Hume, there was an assumption that the world was intelligible — that is, there was an intrinsic link between the order of nature and the order of reason. Causes were understood in terms of formal and final causes, which often carried logical or conceptual necessity. For example, water flows downhill because that is part of its nature — a blend of formal and final causation. More from Hart:

In the pre-modern vision of things, the cosmos had been seen as an inherently purposive structure of diverse but integrally inseparable rational relations — for instance, the Aristotelian aitia, which are conventionally translated as “causes,” but which are nothing like the uniform material “causes” of the mechanistic philosophy. And so the natural order was seen as a reality already akin to intellect. Hence the mind, rather than an anomalous tenant of an alien universe, was instead the most concentrated and luminous expression of nature’s deepest essence. This is why it could pass with such wanton liberty through the “veil of Isis” and ever deeper into nature’s inner mysteries.

David Hume broke this supposed relationship. He argued that causation is not something we can deduce from reason alone — it's only ever inferred from constant conjunctions: "We see A followed by B, and infer causation." Hence, causation is not logically necessary but contingent and habitual.

All reasonings concerning matter of fact seem to be founded on the relation of cause and effect. But... the connection between cause and effect is not a product of reasoning, but of custom. — An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

This cleaved the empirical from the rational, leading to the so-called Humean bifurcation: facts (contingent, empirical) vs. norms/logical truths (necessary, conceptual). And that is still writ large in so many of the dialogues on this forum. Many of the contributors I will talk to here - Apustimologist, Relativist, Philosophim, to name a few - assume that, as the brain is physical, and the brain is the source of throught, then thought too has a physical basis. In fact they can't even conceive of there being an alternative to that, it is so firmly a tenet of modern culture.

I think one way to address this rupture is through what John Vervaeke calls relevance realization — a contemporary cognitive science account that begins to heal the divide Hume opened between logical structure and physical causality.

Vervaeke argues that cognition — especially human intelligence — is not a matter of brute computation or mechanistic stimulus-response. Rather, it's grounded in our dynamic ability to interpret what is relevant in a given situation, from among an almost infinite range of possible inputs, actions, and interpretations. This isn’t something that can be fully formalized or predicted — it’s emergent, self-organizing, and constrained by the organism's goals, embodiment, and interaction with the world.

In this light, cognition is not just caused — it's structured. That is, our awareness of the world is shaped by a salience landscape, a kind of lived topography of what stands out, what matters, and what calls for action. And this is not imposed on a passive agent; it is co-constituted by organism and environment ('co-arising'). The world does not merely act on us through physical causes — it is disclosed to us through a structure of intelligibility that is tied to our biological, emotional, and social existence.

What’s significant here is that this structure of salience and relevance is normative and existential in character — it allows for truth and error, insight and illusion, precisely because it is not just reducible to efficient causes. Vervaeke’s insight is that intelligence is the capacity to realize what is relevant — and this is not simply a logical deduction nor a chain of physical causes, but an enacted form of knowing by being, to borrow Hart’s phrase.

This begins to undo the Humean bifurcation. Relevance realization is causal — grounded in the biological dynamics of neural networks, evolution, and interaction — but it also has logical structure, in the sense that it underwrites all higher-order cognition, including our grasp of concepts, categories, language, and truth itself. But the normative aspect recognises that for us, as intelligent rational agents, the fact that things matter cannot be captured in reductionist or physical terms.

In a way, it returns us to something like the Aristotelian sense of logos as both reason and structure — where mind is not a ghost in the machine, but the expression of nature’s capacity for self-disclosure. The very idea of a "veil of Isis" only makes sense if there is something behind the veil that is able to be seen — and something within us that is capable of seeing it. That is the intuition the pre-modern world preserved — and one that Vervaeke’s work is attempting to recover in post-cognitive-scientific terms.

It doesn’t mean reverting to pre-scientific metaphysics, but it does mean questioning the flattening effect of a purely mechanistic view of causality. In a salience-structured world, causation isn't just physical interaction — it’s also the enactment of meaning. And meaning, far from being a subjective gloss on an indifferent universe, becomes a central feature of how the world comes into presence at all.

the Aristotelian sense of logos as both reason and structure — Wayfarer

Everything you wrote about Hart and Vervaeke is fascinating and on point for me (though I don't see Hume as the diabolus ex machina they do). My particular m2m problem is a bit different, but can hardly be addressed without taking account of the perspectives you're describing.

I was especially struck by the quoted phrase. I've long held out for a difference between causes and reasons. If we can speak meaningfully about m2m causation, then I think causation has to be understood, or interpreted, as a type of reason, not a physical cause. And the logos concept has a lot to offer here. How can a mere structure also provide reasons that cause/influence/lead to mental events? And yet, when we entertain a syllogism, isn't this what happens? But the problem begins even before thought is seen as syllogistic: Somehow, what we call the "content" of a thought (be it propositional or imagistic) appears to provide causes (or reasons) for other thoughts. A reductively psychological explanation involving "associations" will not suffice, as I hope to argue.

You really need to have a look at Alicia Juarrero Dynamics in Action. The book starts with the question ‘what is the difference between a wink and a blink?’ and then proceeds to review ‘action theory’ in the context of that question. (I’ll add that I haven’t finished the book nor really assimilated it yet but it seems directly relevant.) Also see https://www.meaningcrisis.co/episode-6-aristotle-kant-and-evolution/

Thanks, on my list.

David Hume broke this supposed relationship. He argued that causation is not something we can deduce from reason alone — it's only ever inferred from constant conjunctions: "We see A followed by B, and infer causation." Hence, causation is not logically necessary but contingent and habitual. — Wayfarer

IMO, the Law Realists improved upon this by proposing that laws of nature entail a necessitation. They define a law of nature as a causal relation between types of things (AKA "universals"). Hume would notice the empirical evidence that every observed pair of electrons repelled each other, and label this a "constant conjunction", while law realists would say that electrons (a type of thing) repel each other - and this is constitutes a law. If A and B are electrons, then they it is physically necessary that they will repel, given that that this law exists.

So I'm curious if you agree that law realism is a better explanation of empirical evidence than constant conjunction?

the Law Realists — Relativist

Such as?

I’d say that “law realism” really just smuggles Platonism back in through the side door. It appeals to universals to ground necessity, but universals are not observable particulars — they are grasped only by reason. That makes them, in effect, intelligible structures postulated to explain phenomena, which is a Platonic move, whether admitted or not. Kant on the other hand accepted that these lawful relations are indispensable for science, but located them in the activity of the mind as a priori conditions of experience. They were not ‘in re’ but ‘in intellectus’

The difficulty is that law realists won’t acknowledge it, because it thinks mind itself is simply the product of those same physical processes which it situates ‘in things’. But that is circular: the only way we ever know about universals or laws is through the activity of reason, the mind’s ability to discern likeness within diversity and to infer necessity where the senses show only succession. To explain mind as product of the very processes whose necessity it is positing is to fall into a circularity. The scientific realist appeal to universals already presupposes rational relations that cannot be explained away as a physical mechanism, and it’s here that the Platonic and Kantian implications reassert themselves.

the only way we ever know about universals or laws is through the activity of reason, the mind’s ability to discern likeness within diversity and to infer necessity where the senses show only succession — Wayfarer

What's wrong with that? It's a metaphysical hypothesis with broad explanatory scope, and consistent with the success of science.

The difficulty is that law realists won’t acknowledge it, because it thinks mind itself is simply the product of those same physical processes which it situates ‘in things’. — Wayfarer

You're conflating law realism with physicalism. One could accept the reality of laws, while choosing to believe "the mind" is not the product of natural law - whether by faith (as religious scientists do), or by hypothesis - including whatever hypothesis of mind you are drawn to.

You're conflating law realism with physicalism — Relativist

From our previous discussions, I presumed you had D M Armstrong in mind, who is an avowed physicalist. Are the 'law realists' who are not physicalist? (Coming to think of it there would be.)