Every consumer becomes both a reflection and reflector, a cause and an effect. The Greek philosophers were obsessed with the chain of causality, how the cause of an effect should be traced back in a relay of hops until one reached the Prime Cause. That backward path is the foundation of Western, linear logic. In the realm of recursive reflections, an event is not triggered by a chain of being, but by a field of causes reflecting, bending, mirroring each other in a fun-house nonsense. Rather than cause and control being dispensed in a straight line from its origin, it spreads horizontally, like creeping tide, influencing in roundabout, diffuse ways.
Small blips can make big splashes, and big blips no splashes.
It is as if the filters of distance and time were subverted by the complex connecting of everything to everything. Computer scientist Danny Hillis has noted that computation, particularly networked computation, exhibits a nonlinear causality field. This allows us to study the motions of the Jovian moons without taking into account the motion of Mercury. It is fundamental to the twin concepts of object and action. Locality of action shows itself in the finite speed of light, in the inverse square law of fields, and in macroscopic statistical effects, such as rates of reaction and the speed of sound.