Nick, You say: 'Glen originally mentioned a GENerator/ PHENomenon distinction which seems to be the broader of the two and does not forbid downward causation.'
I feel comfortable saying gen-phen-like maps. I am in the investigative modality at present and have not yet nailed down for myself the precise meanings of any chosen lexicon. I am proceeding by allowing the scope of definition, of a notion, to vary indirectly over the course of the discussion, to the extent that I am able. Our discussion covered a lot of ground with a lot of ideas coming from each of us, adopting and integrating the batch comes with no obvious algorithm. In the end, I may abandon gen-phen-like in favor of another signifier or it may come to mean something significant based on the context of this conversation. Who knows? In vFriam discussion, I mostly remember us talking about the function-goal distinction and thermostats. You conjectured that the two collections are exclusive, and I spent time thinking about what this could mean. I am thinking about the collection of functions being of a different type than the collection of goals, and there possibly being construals of goals into the collection of functions. Conceptually, this makes room to consider the difference between a goal and a goal wrapped in functions clothing. The particular project I am engaged in here is to flesh this concept out a bit more. I haven't yet gotten down into the sticks weeds and certainly am not yet able to work easily with emergence in this framework. More to come, to the extent that this stays interesting to me. You say: 'One rule of that game, I think, which I may have violated myself in this discussion, is that things cannot cause things. Only events can cause events.' Along with Glen, I am not sure I have decided to limit the scope of definition around causation. That as Frank points out, "causation is a relation between events", does not preclude there being other relations between events nor causation being a relation between other things, does it? If our conversations were intended to be type-safe, I could perhaps be persuaded the other way. You say: 'The reason is that the notion of cause involves temporal order' What about something being logically prior rather than just temporally prior? Perhaps, we would use a different word than cause? -- Sent from: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. . FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
