Phil,
I dont think I denied anything off the sort. You sure can point at a hammer;
you sure can point at a nail. You an even point at the hammer in contact with
the nail. I would even stipulate that you can point at the hammer hitting the
nail. What you cannot point at is the hammer causing the nail to enter the
wood, because causing is not the sort of thing that can be pointed at. .
Nick
----- Original Message -----
From: phil henshaw
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED];The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; caleb.thompson
Sent: 11/17/2007 9:32:21 PM
Subject: RE: [FRIAM] FRIAM and causality
But why can't you accept the existence of physical things?
All language derives its meaning from connecting you with things outside its
structure after all, since anything purely self-referential is meaningless.
Why even attempt to eliminate pointing at things that are beyond definition,
the age old functional method, and why not treat images alone, however high you
pile them, as hopelessly flimsy and inadequate contraptions to substitute for
the simple useful act of 'look'? Don't we need to get off the kick of thinking
what's in our brains is so all fired important?
We live in a world that is truly physically exploding with the unmanageable
complexity of our multiplying overlapping contraptions, which we try to act
like we don't notice, though the evidence is starkly clear in the daily
accelerating change in how we all live. You thought endless growth in
multiplying resource extraction was bad for the earth. Wait till you see
growth without resources, on pure complication. That's what those economist
fellows call 'decoupling', the perpetual motion machines the authors of the
IPCC climate models decided will allow mankind to continually multiply wealth
without effect. We might just as well propose the whole lot of us lift off
the planet in a swirl of pixy dust! This is our planet and our watch, and
we're missing the physical process about to destroy several centuries of hard
forged real investment in making it a descent place to live, because we won't
intellectually tolerate the existence of things that aren't in our minds.
What's 'out there' beyond our minds may well be completely undefinable, and
even 'meaningless' in the sense that it's not something our minds are able to
make, but it's what actually does matter. You might even find it oddly
familiar, perhaps looking from the perspective with which our natural faculties
evolved... :-,)
Phil
Phil,
OK. So, it's images all the way down, so we cant get any traction there. I
suppose one might argue that a single hammering and a pattern of hammerings (if
you will) exist at different levels of organization, and you might prefer one
level to another for some reason external to this argument. So far, so good.
But my position is that the attribution of causality forces you either to
myth-making OR to the higher level of organization. The first level of
organization at which one can know hammer causality is the level many
experiences with hitting nails with hammers and seeing them go into wood or or
not, and not hitting nails with hammers and not seeing them go into wood or
not, etc., ad nauseam. So, in my idiotic postivisitic mode, I assert, that
pattern IS what causality is. I mean why would one bother to attribute it
anywhere else than where we know it.
I have been thinking this way with respect to such mental attributions as
motivation, emotion, feeling, etc, for years and only recently realized that
these arguments apply as well to such "hard-science" terms as disposition,
cause and probability. This tendency to hypostize complex relations into
phantom single instances seems to go deep. In fact, where would differential
calculus be without it???!
With respect to probability, Frank Wimberly has shaken my confidence a bit by
reminding me that some probability attributions arise by deduction from theory,
rather than induction from experience. I guess I have to qualify my basic
assertion to say that to the extent that the attribution that the hammer drove
the nail into the wood derives from experience, it derives from our experience
with hammers and nails, etc., in general, rather than our experience with this
hammer and this nail in this instance.
All the best,
Nick
----- Original Message -----
From: Phil Henshaw
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED];The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; caleb.thompson
Sent: 11/16/2007 4:41:46 PM
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] FRIAM and causality
NIck,
Didn't you place the only things that physcally cause anything, the individual
hammers and the individual nails in the direct action of driving a nail, in the
place of the 'unreal' in you argument? The things that don't actually exist
except in our minds, the categories of hammers and of nails and their
presumptive relation in an orderly arrangement of ideas, you seemed to treat as
being real and causal. Doesn't that what you mean depends on what you're
using the words to refer to, the physical things on one hand, or the relations
of images on the other? Perhaps they're different, and a good bit of the
con-fusion occurs as a result of not being clear about which we're referring
to.
Phil
On 11/12/07, Nicholas Thompson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
"The truth arises from arguments amongst friends" -- David Hume
One of my goals at Friam, believe it or not, is actually to get some
fundamental issues settled amongst us. We had, last week, a brisk discussion
about causality. I don't think I was particularly articulate, and so, to push
that argument forward, I would like to try to state my position clearly and
succinctly.
The argument was between some who felt that causality was "real" and those that
felt that it was basically a figment of our imaginations. The argument may
seem frivolous, but actually becomes of consequence anytime anyone starts to
think about how one proves that X is the cause of Y. Intuitively, X is the
cause of Y if Y is X's "fault". To say that X is the cause of Y is to accuse X
of Y. Given my current belief that story-telling is at the base of
EVERYTHING, I think you convince somebody that X is the cause of Y just by
telling the most reasonable story in which it seems obvious that Y would not
have occurred had not X occurred. But there is no particular reason that the
world should always be a reasonable place, and therefore, it is also ALWAYS
possible to tell an UNREASONABLE story that shows that Y's occurrence was not
the responsibility of X, no matter how reasonable the original causal
attribution is. One of us asked for a hammer and nail, claiming that if he
could but drive a nail into the surface of one of St. John's caf? tables, none
of us would be silly enough to doubt that his hammering had been the cause of
the nails penetration of the table. Not withstanding his certainty on this
matter, several of us instantly offered to be JUST THAT SILLY! We would claim,
we said, that contrary to his account, his hammering had had nothing to do with
the nail's penetration, but that the accommodating molecules of wood directly
under the nail had randomly parte d and sucked the nail into their midst.
How validate a reasonable causal story against the infinite number of
unreasonable causal stories that can always be proposed as alternatives. By
experience, obviously. We have seen hundreds of cases where nails were driven
into wood when struck by hammers (and a few cases where the hammer missed the
nail, the nail remained where it was, and the thumb was driven into the wood.)
Also, despite its theoretical possibility, none of us has EVER seen a real
world object sucked into a surface by random motion of the surface's molecules.
So it is the comparative analysis of our experience with hammers and nails
that would have convinced us that the hammering had driven in the nail.
So what is the problem? Why did we not just agree to that
proposition and go on? The reason to me is simple: the conventions of our
language prevent us from arriving at that conclusion. We not only say that
Hammers Cause Nails to embed in tables, which is what we know to be true, we
also say that THIS Hammer caused THIS nail to be embedded in the wood. Thus
our use of causality is a case of misplaced concreteness. Causality is easily
attributed to the pattern of relations amongst hammers and nails, but we err
when we allow ourselves to assert that that higher order pattern is exhibited
by any of its contributory instances. In fact, that in our experience the
missed nails have not been driven into the wood is as much a real part of our
notions of causality and hammering as the fact that a hit nail is. Causality
just cannot be attributed to an individual instance.
The fallacy of misplaced concreteness is so widespread in our
conversation that we could barely speak without it, but it is a fallacy all
the same. Other instances of it are intentions, dispositions, personality
traits, communication, information etc., etc., and such mathematical fictions
as the slope of a line at a point. Whenever we use any of these terms, we
attribute to single instances properties of aggregates of which they are part.
Now, how do we stop arguing about this? First of all, we stop and
give honor to the enormous amount of information that actually goes into making
a rational causal attribution that hammering causes embedding, information
which is not available in any of its instances. Second, we then stop and give
honor to the incredible power of the human mind to sift through this data and
identify patterns in it. Third, and finally, we stop and wonder at whatever
flaw it is in our evolution, our neurology, our cognition, our culture, or our
language that causes us to lodge this knowledge in the one place it can never
be
single instances.
Are we done?
Nick
Nicholas S. Thompson
Research Associate, Redfish Group, Santa Fe, NM ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
Professor of Psychology and Ethology, Clark University ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
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