Hi Russell Standish According to Leibniz's idealistic metaphysics, nothing is causal, things just appear to happen by cause. Their motions instead occur according to a pre-established (a priori) harmony.
Roger Clough, [email protected] 11/6/2012 "Forever is a long time, especially near the end." -Woody Allen ----- Receiving the following content ----- From: Russell Standish Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-11-06, 01:01:59 Subject: Re: Detecting Causality in Complex Ecosystems On Mon, Nov 05, 2012 at 04:45:55PM -0500, John Mikes wrote: > Dear Russell, > > I have my doubts about "causality" as a *complete* term: our 'systems', cf: > ecosystem etc. include the up-to-date inventory of knowables as in our > existing "MODEL" of the world - which grows over the millennia > stepwise. (The 'cause' of the lightning is no more the "ire" of Zeus). > > Whatever we include as 'causing' a change (whatever) is the portion of its > entailments selectable from said inventory (of yesterday). This causes the > uncertainty and occasional mishaps in our "world". Besides: our terms are > proportionate, content and qualia (may be) incomplete restricted to said > inventory, so the partial entailment we observe may seem satisfactory to > the actual 'model-item' we carry. (((How's THAT with AL?))) Not sure I fully ingest what you're saying here. Causality has to do with explanations, whilst correlations needn't. I think some of the notions of causality - eg Granger causality, have to do with quantifying the information flow between time series - if timeseries A provides more predictive information about time series B than some threshold (not necessarily arbitrary, but usually theory dependent), then we say that A Granger-causes B. It is not correlation, as correlation is bidirectional, whereas Granger-causality is not. Also A Granger-causes B can be read as series A explaining something about series B. > ------------------ > We had a little exchange on "random" earlier when you resorted to the term > (as I recall): as *provisonal (or conditional?) random* that may occur *under > the given conditions only*. > ((I just wrote to Hal R. that a "random walk" in evolution could lead *us, > humans* (back???) - maybe - to *DE*-velop into trilobites. Why not?)) > > John Mikes > That would be surprising, given we're not descended from trilobytes in the first place! -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics [email protected] University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
