Downward causation

[Carl Tollander]

Of interest, also the whole issue... http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/375/2109/20160338

C

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[Roger Critchlow-2]

Nice.

-- rec --

On Sat, Nov 18, 2017 at 12:29 PM, Carl Tollander <[hidden email]> wrote:

Of interest, also the whole issue... http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/375/2109/20160338

C

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[Nick Thompson]

Hi, Roger,

 

Can you say what you thought was “nice” about it.  (As you know, it makes me nervous to disagree with you about stuff).  I struggled with the article.  I thought at one point she confused aggregate with emergent properties. Emergent properties are properties of the whole that are dependent on the temporal or spatial arrangement of the parts.  Thus the enzymatic properties of proteins, which depend on the arrangement of their amino acids, are emergent properties.   Also, the standard definition of materialism is the believe that everything real consists of matter and its relations.  So entertaining the notion that relations are not material (and therefore incapable of being causal) is … well … silly.   Finally, I have always suspected that downward causation is an example of a “mystery” i.e., confusion that arises when words are applied to a situation where they aren’t equal to the task.  (“What is the sound of one hand clapping?”)  I think whenever we talk about causes we are trying to do with physical events what we do with social and legal ones … we are trying to assign responsibility for event so we can blame or praise the thing that “caused” it.  It’s a form of animism.  To say that A is a cause of B is only to say that variations in A have been shown, experimentally, to be necessary and or sufficient for variations in B.  Causal statements ALWAYS come with an “other things being equal” clause, ceteris paribus.  To the extent that emergent properties can be shown to be necessary or sufficient for some change in the property of some parts of the whole, we have downward causation, no?   Now the shape of the hemoglobin molecule is an emergent property of that molecule which determines whether it binds oxygen in its active site.  Whether or not it has oxygen bound to its active site determines its shape.  Surely one of these is downward causation.  I am just no sure which. (};-|)

 

Nick

 

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Roger Critchlow
Sent: Saturday, November 18, 2017 6:15 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Downward causation

 

Nice.

 

-- rec --

 

 

On Sat, Nov 18, 2017 at 12:29 PM, Carl Tollander <[hidden email]> wrote:

Of interest, also the whole issue... http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/375/2109/20160338

 

C

 

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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

 

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[Roger Critchlow-2]

I looked at the abstract and thought, of course, if you "coarse grain" the visual field, then you synthesize objects out of groups of pixels that cohere together in time and space.  In time you might even come to blame the imputed objects for their presumed effects in the world.  Perhaps it's an illusion, or a hallucination, or a tautology, but once you summon a coarse grained entity into existence it will have coarse grained consequences, including changes of behavior in the summoner which are explained as reactions to coarse grained observations.

So I didn't read as hard as Nick, I just took the operational view laid out in the abstract and imagined it.  Causation is at root a tool that helps an organism to live long and to prosper.  The observation and reaction which saves a life or facilitates reproduction or helps progeny mature is primary.

-- rec --

On Sat, Nov 18, 2017 at 11:25 PM, Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi, Roger,

 

Can you say what you thought was “nice” about it.  (As you know, it makes me nervous to disagree with you about stuff).  I struggled with the article.  I thought at one point she confused aggregate with emergent properties. Emergent properties are properties of the whole that are dependent on the temporal or spatial arrangement of the parts.  Thus the enzymatic properties of proteins, which depend on the arrangement of their amino acids, are emergent properties.   Also, the standard definition of materialism is the believe that everything real consists of matter and its relations.  So entertaining the notion that relations are not material (and therefore incapable of being causal) is … well … silly.   Finally, I have always suspected that downward causation is an example of a “mystery” i.e., confusion that arises when words are applied to a situation where they aren’t equal to the task.  (“What is the sound of one hand clapping?”)  I think whenever we talk about causes we are trying to do with physical events what we do with social and legal ones … we are trying to assign responsibility for event so we can blame or praise the thing that “caused” it.  It’s a form of animism.  To say that A is a cause of B is only to say that variations in A have been shown, experimentally, to be necessary and or sufficient for variations in B.  Causal statements ALWAYS come with an “other things being equal” clause, ceteris paribus.  To the extent that emergent properties can be shown to be necessary or sufficient for some change in the property of some parts of the whole, we have downward causation, no?   Now the shape of the hemoglobin molecule is an emergent property of that molecule which determines whether it binds oxygen in its active site.  Whether or not it has oxygen bound to its active site determines its shape.  Surely one of these is downward causation.  I am just no sure which. (};-|)

 

Nick

 

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Roger Critchlow
Sent: Saturday, November 18, 2017 6:15 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Downward causation

 

Nice.

 

-- rec --

 

 

On Sat, Nov 18, 2017 at 12:29 PM, Carl Tollander <[hidden email]> wrote:

Of interest, also the whole issue... http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/375/2109/20160338

 

C

 

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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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[Nick Thompson]

Ahh!  Thanks Roger.  That blows some life into it for me.  Is watching a bean plant grow in time lapse an example of coarse-graining?  So let’s imagine we are watching such an image and we notice that the plant “reaches for the sun”.  (I.e., we move the light around and the plant follows it as it grows.)    Now let’s also imagine (ex hypothesis, mind you!) that the plant puts out extra roots on the opposite side to stabilize it.  I would call that top-down causation, I guess.

 

I dunno.  Anything that comes out of SFI is kind of ink-blots for me. 

 

Nick

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Roger Critchlow
Sent: Sunday, November 19, 2017 3:01 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Downward causation

 

I looked at the abstract and thought, of course, if you "coarse grain" the visual field, then you synthesize objects out of groups of pixels that cohere together in time and space.  In time you might even come to blame the imputed objects for their presumed effects in the world.  Perhaps it's an illusion, or a hallucination, or a tautology, but once you summon a coarse grained entity into existence it will have coarse grained consequences, including changes of behavior in the summoner which are explained as reactions to coarse grained observations.

 

So I didn't read as hard as Nick, I just took the operational view laid out in the abstract and imagined it.  Causation is at root a tool that helps an organism to live long and to prosper.  The observation and reaction which saves a life or facilitates reproduction or helps progeny mature is primary.

 

-- rec --

 

On Sat, Nov 18, 2017 at 11:25 PM, Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi, Roger,

 

Can you say what you thought was “nice” about it.  (As you know, it makes me nervous to disagree with you about stuff).  I struggled with the article.  I thought at one point she confused aggregate with emergent properties. Emergent properties are properties of the whole that are dependent on the temporal or spatial arrangement of the parts.  Thus the enzymatic properties of proteins, which depend on the arrangement of their amino acids, are emergent properties.   Also, the standard definition of materialism is the believe that everything real consists of matter and its relations.  So entertaining the notion that relations are not material (and therefore incapable of being causal) is … well … silly.   Finally, I have always suspected that downward causation is an example of a “mystery” i.e., confusion that arises when words are applied to a situation where they aren’t equal to the task.  (“What is the sound of one hand clapping?”)  I think whenever we talk about causes we are trying to do with physical events what we do with social and legal ones … we are trying to assign responsibility for event so we can blame or praise the thing that “caused” it.  It’s a form of animism.  To say that A is a cause of B is only to say that variations in A have been shown, experimentally, to be necessary and or sufficient for variations in B.  Causal statements ALWAYS come with an “other things being equal” clause, ceteris paribus.  To the extent that emergent properties can be shown to be necessary or sufficient for some change in the property of some parts of the whole, we have downward causation, no?   Now the shape of the hemoglobin molecule is an emergent property of that molecule which determines whether it binds oxygen in its active site.  Whether or not it has oxygen bound to its active site determines its shape.  Surely one of these is downward causation.  I am just no sure which. (};-|)

 

Nick

 

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Roger Critchlow
Sent: Saturday, November 18, 2017 6:15 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Downward causation

 

Nice.

 

-- rec --

 

 

On Sat, Nov 18, 2017 at 12:29 PM, Carl Tollander <[hidden email]> wrote:

Of interest, also the whole issue... http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/375/2109/20160338

 

C

 

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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

 

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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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[Roger Critchlow-2]

Nick --

Sure, bean plants growing in time lapse is an excellent example of coarse graining.  And you can imagine an animator making a cartoon of the same time lapse, in fact, I remember a classic cartoon doing this, even to the point of giving the plant hands to reach with and a face.  While the video might be taken to be caused by underlying microscopic dynamics too detailed to be specified except in imagination, the cartoon clearly is the animator's expression of a coarse grained understanding of the plant.

So this may be a dodge, but it seems an interesting dodge.  It seems that everyone knows that correlation is not causation, yet all causal explanations start with correlation, and only become causal when someone tweaks the causal levers to get the predicted effects and describes how to do it in a way that can be replicated.

So when you manipulate the source of light to manipulate the plant's growth, the plant depends on the coarse grained result to live.  The plant does not depend on a microscopic trajectory to live because any particular microscopic trajectory is impossibly improbable, the plant depends on vast numbers of trajectories which all lead to the required coarse grained result, or something close enough for jazz.  The plant is organized in such a way that it marshalls sufficient microscopic resources to accomplish its coarse grained purposes.

-- rec --

On Sun, Nov 19, 2017 at 11:49 AM, Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Ahh!  Thanks Roger.  That blows some life into it for me.  Is watching a bean plant grow in time lapse an example of coarse-graining?  So let’s imagine we are watching such an image and we notice that the plant “reaches for the sun”.  (I.e., we move the light around and the plant follows it as it grows.)    Now let’s also imagine (ex hypothesis, mind you!) that the plant puts out extra roots on the opposite side to stabilize it.  I would call that top-down causation, I guess.

 

I dunno.  Anything that comes out of SFI is kind of ink-blots for me. 

 

Nick

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Roger Critchlow
Sent: Sunday, November 19, 2017 3:01 AM

To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Downward causation

 

I looked at the abstract and thought, of course, if you "coarse grain" the visual field, then you synthesize objects out of groups of pixels that cohere together in time and space.  In time you might even come to blame the imputed objects for their presumed effects in the world.  Perhaps it's an illusion, or a hallucination, or a tautology, but once you summon a coarse grained entity into existence it will have coarse grained consequences, including changes of behavior in the summoner which are explained as reactions to coarse grained observations.

 

So I didn't read as hard as Nick, I just took the operational view laid out in the abstract and imagined it.  Causation is at root a tool that helps an organism to live long and to prosper.  The observation and reaction which saves a life or facilitates reproduction or helps progeny mature is primary.

 

-- rec --

 

On Sat, Nov 18, 2017 at 11:25 PM, Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi, Roger,

 

Can you say what you thought was “nice” about it.  (As you know, it makes me nervous to disagree with you about stuff).  I struggled with the article.  I thought at one point she confused aggregate with emergent properties. Emergent properties are properties of the whole that are dependent on the temporal or spatial arrangement of the parts.  Thus the enzymatic properties of proteins, which depend on the arrangement of their amino acids, are emergent properties.   Also, the standard definition of materialism is the believe that everything real consists of matter and its relations.  So entertaining the notion that relations are not material (and therefore incapable of being causal) is … well … silly.   Finally, I have always suspected that downward causation is an example of a “mystery” i.e., confusion that arises when words are applied to a situation where they aren’t equal to the task.  (“What is the sound of one hand clapping?”)  I think whenever we talk about causes we are trying to do with physical events what we do with social and legal ones … we are trying to assign responsibility for event so we can blame or praise the thing that “caused” it.  It’s a form of animism.  To say that A is a cause of B is only to say that variations in A have been shown, experimentally, to be necessary and or sufficient for variations in B.  Causal statements ALWAYS come with an “other things being equal” clause, ceteris paribus.  To the extent that emergent properties can be shown to be necessary or sufficient for some change in the property of some parts of the whole, we have downward causation, no?   Now the shape of the hemoglobin molecule is an emergent property of that molecule which determines whether it binds oxygen in its active site.  Whether or not it has oxygen bound to its active site determines its shape.  Surely one of these is downward causation.  I am just no sure which. (};-|)

 

Nick

 

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Roger Critchlow
Sent: Saturday, November 18, 2017 6:15 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Downward causation

 

Nice.

 

-- rec --

 

 

On Sat, Nov 18, 2017 at 12:29 PM, Carl Tollander <[hidden email]> wrote:

Of interest, also the whole issue... http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/375/2109/20160338

 

C

 

============================================================
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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

 

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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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[Nick Thompson]

Thanks, Roger.  I LIKE it. 

 

When people say, “Correlation is not causation” they are living in a momentary illusion that they know what causation is.  AT the very least, causation consists of the results of some number of experiments in which the second correlate is denied by a failure to produce the first, but not vv.  But most people want more from causal statements.  They want METAPHYSICS.  As I guess Hume was fond of pointing out, Causes are attributions we make to experiences, not things experiences do to one another.   For someone to deny the existence of downward causality, that person has first to state what it is s/he imagines that s/he is denying.  In my world, where “causes” are just “prior necessary or sufficient correlates”, if we can show that demands on the bean plant as a whole lead to changes in its parts, we have “downward causation”.  And there is no juicier form of downward causation to be had, or to be denied.

 

Nick  

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Roger Critchlow
Sent: Sunday, November 19, 2017 10:31 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Downward causation

 

Nick --

 

Sure, bean plants growing in time lapse is an excellent example of coarse graining.  And you can imagine an animator making a cartoon of the same time lapse, in fact, I remember a classic cartoon doing this, even to the point of giving the plant hands to reach with and a face.  While the video might be taken to be caused by underlying microscopic dynamics too detailed to be specified except in imagination, the cartoon clearly is the animator's expression of a coarse grained understanding of the plant.

 

So this may be a dodge, but it seems an interesting dodge.  It seems that everyone knows that correlation is not causation, yet all causal explanations start with correlation, and only become causal when someone tweaks the causal levers to get the predicted effects and describes how to do it in a way that can be replicated.

 

So when you manipulate the source of light to manipulate the plant's growth, the plant depends on the coarse grained result to live.  The plant does not depend on a microscopic trajectory to live because any particular microscopic trajectory is impossibly improbable, the plant depends on vast numbers of trajectories which all lead to the required coarse grained result, or something close enough for jazz.  The plant is organized in such a way that it marshalls sufficient microscopic resources to accomplish its coarse grained purposes.

 

-- rec --

 

On Sun, Nov 19, 2017 at 11:49 AM, Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Ahh!  Thanks Roger.  That blows some life into it for me.  Is watching a bean plant grow in time lapse an example of coarse-graining?  So let’s imagine we are watching such an image and we notice that the plant “reaches for the sun”.  (I.e., we move the light around and the plant follows it as it grows.)    Now let’s also imagine (ex hypothesis, mind you!) that the plant puts out extra roots on the opposite side to stabilize it.  I would call that top-down causation, I guess.

 

I dunno.  Anything that comes out of SFI is kind of ink-blots for me. 

 

Nick

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Roger Critchlow
Sent: Sunday, November 19, 2017 3:01 AM

To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Downward causation

 

I looked at the abstract and thought, of course, if you "coarse grain" the visual field, then you synthesize objects out of groups of pixels that cohere together in time and space.  In time you might even come to blame the imputed objects for their presumed effects in the world.  Perhaps it's an illusion, or a hallucination, or a tautology, but once you summon a coarse grained entity into existence it will have coarse grained consequences, including changes of behavior in the summoner which are explained as reactions to coarse grained observations.

 

So I didn't read as hard as Nick, I just took the operational view laid out in the abstract and imagined it.  Causation is at root a tool that helps an organism to live long and to prosper.  The observation and reaction which saves a life or facilitates reproduction or helps progeny mature is primary.

 

-- rec --

 

On Sat, Nov 18, 2017 at 11:25 PM, Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi, Roger,

 

Can you say what you thought was “nice” about it.  (As you know, it makes me nervous to disagree with you about stuff).  I struggled with the article.  I thought at one point she confused aggregate with emergent properties. Emergent properties are properties of the whole that are dependent on the temporal or spatial arrangement of the parts.  Thus the enzymatic properties of proteins, which depend on the arrangement of their amino acids, are emergent properties.   Also, the standard definition of materialism is the believe that everything real consists of matter and its relations.  So entertaining the notion that relations are not material (and therefore incapable of being causal) is … well … silly.   Finally, I have always suspected that downward causation is an example of a “mystery” i.e., confusion that arises when words are applied to a situation where they aren’t equal to the task.  (“What is the sound of one hand clapping?”)  I think whenever we talk about causes we are trying to do with physical events what we do with social and legal ones … we are trying to assign responsibility for event so we can blame or praise the thing that “caused” it.  It’s a form of animism.  To say that A is a cause of B is only to say that variations in A have been shown, experimentally, to be necessary and or sufficient for variations in B.  Causal statements ALWAYS come with an “other things being equal” clause, ceteris paribus.  To the extent that emergent properties can be shown to be necessary or sufficient for some change in the property of some parts of the whole, we have downward causation, no?   Now the shape of the hemoglobin molecule is an emergent property of that molecule which determines whether it binds oxygen in its active site.  Whether or not it has oxygen bound to its active site determines its shape.  Surely one of these is downward causation.  I am just no sure which. (};-|)

 

Nick

 

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Roger Critchlow
Sent: Saturday, November 18, 2017 6:15 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Downward causation

 

Nice.

 

-- rec --

 

 

On Sat, Nov 18, 2017 at 12:29 PM, Carl Tollander <[hidden email]> wrote:

Of interest, also the whole issue... http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/375/2109/20160338

 

C

 

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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

 

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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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[Frank Wimberly-2]

Nick, you must have known you would eventually provoke me:

-Correlation is not causation

Sometimes you can infer a causal direction from observational data.  Interested readers can see https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5340263/

By my former colleagues Scheines and Ramsey.

-Hume

After writing a long alternative to the counterfactual definition of causation, he concluded with a statement that A causes B if B would not have occurred unless A had occurred.

Frank

On Nov 19, 2017 3:28 PM, "Nick Thompson" <[hidden email]> wrote:

Thanks, Roger.  I LIKE it. 

 

When people say, “Correlation is not causation” they are living in a momentary illusion that they know what causation is.  AT the very least, causation consists of the results of some number of experiments in which the second correlate is denied by a failure to produce the first, but not vv.  But most people want more from causal statements.  They want METAPHYSICS.  As I guess Hume was fond of pointing out, Causes are attributions we make to experiences, not things experiences do to one another.   For someone to deny the existence of downward causality, that person has first to state what it is s/he imagines that s/he is denying.  In my world, where “causes” are just “prior necessary or sufficient correlates”, if we can show that demands on the bean plant as a whole lead to changes in its parts, we have “downward causation”.  And there is no juicier form of downward causation to be had, or to be denied.

 

Nick  

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Roger Critchlow
Sent: Sunday, November 19, 2017 10:31 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Downward causation

 

Nick --

 

Sure, bean plants growing in time lapse is an excellent example of coarse graining.  And you can imagine an animator making a cartoon of the same time lapse, in fact, I remember a classic cartoon doing this, even to the point of giving the plant hands to reach with and a face.  While the video might be taken to be caused by underlying microscopic dynamics too detailed to be specified except in imagination, the cartoon clearly is the animator's expression of a coarse grained understanding of the plant.

 

So this may be a dodge, but it seems an interesting dodge.  It seems that everyone knows that correlation is not causation, yet all causal explanations start with correlation, and only become causal when someone tweaks the causal levers to get the predicted effects and describes how to do it in a way that can be replicated.

 

So when you manipulate the source of light to manipulate the plant's growth, the plant depends on the coarse grained result to live.  The plant does not depend on a microscopic trajectory to live because any particular microscopic trajectory is impossibly improbable, the plant depends on vast numbers of trajectories which all lead to the required coarse grained result, or something close enough for jazz.  The plant is organized in such a way that it marshalls sufficient microscopic resources to accomplish its coarse grained purposes.

 

-- rec --

 

On Sun, Nov 19, 2017 at 11:49 AM, Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Ahh!  Thanks Roger.  That blows some life into it for me.  Is watching a bean plant grow in time lapse an example of coarse-graining?  So let’s imagine we are watching such an image and we notice that the plant “reaches for the sun”.  (I.e., we move the light around and the plant follows it as it grows.)    Now let’s also imagine (ex hypothesis, mind you!) that the plant puts out extra roots on the opposite side to stabilize it.  I would call that top-down causation, I guess.

 

I dunno.  Anything that comes out of SFI is kind of ink-blots for me. 

 

Nick

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Roger Critchlow
Sent: Sunday, November 19, 2017 3:01 AM

To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Downward causation

 

I looked at the abstract and thought, of course, if you "coarse grain" the visual field, then you synthesize objects out of groups of pixels that cohere together in time and space.  In time you might even come to blame the imputed objects for their presumed effects in the world.  Perhaps it's an illusion, or a hallucination, or a tautology, but once you summon a coarse grained entity into existence it will have coarse grained consequences, including changes of behavior in the summoner which are explained as reactions to coarse grained observations.

 

So I didn't read as hard as Nick, I just took the operational view laid out in the abstract and imagined it.  Causation is at root a tool that helps an organism to live long and to prosper.  The observation and reaction which saves a life or facilitates reproduction or helps progeny mature is primary.

 

-- rec --

 

On Sat, Nov 18, 2017 at 11:25 PM, Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi, Roger,

 

Can you say what you thought was “nice” about it.  (As you know, it makes me nervous to disagree with you about stuff).  I struggled with the article.  I thought at one point she confused aggregate with emergent properties. Emergent properties are properties of the whole that are dependent on the temporal or spatial arrangement of the parts.  Thus the enzymatic properties of proteins, which depend on the arrangement of their amino acids, are emergent properties.   Also, the standard definition of materialism is the believe that everything real consists of matter and its relations.  So entertaining the notion that relations are not material (and therefore incapable of being causal) is … well … silly.   Finally, I have always suspected that downward causation is an example of a “mystery” i.e., confusion that arises when words are applied to a situation where they aren’t equal to the task.  (“What is the sound of one hand clapping?”)  I think whenever we talk about causes we are trying to do with physical events what we do with social and legal ones … we are trying to assign responsibility for event so we can blame or praise the thing that “caused” it.  It’s a form of animism.  To say that A is a cause of B is only to say that variations in A have been shown, experimentally, to be necessary and or sufficient for variations in B.  Causal statements ALWAYS come with an “other things being equal” clause, ceteris paribus.  To the extent that emergent properties can be shown to be necessary or sufficient for some change in the property of some parts of the whole, we have downward causation, no?   Now the shape of the hemoglobin molecule is an emergent property of that molecule which determines whether it binds oxygen in its active site.  Whether or not it has oxygen bound to its active site determines its shape.  Surely one of these is downward causation.  I am just no sure which. (};-|)

 

Nick

 

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Roger Critchlow
Sent: Saturday, November 18, 2017 6:15 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Downward causation

 

Nice.

 

-- rec --

 

 

On Sat, Nov 18, 2017 at 12:29 PM, Carl Tollander <[hidden email]> wrote:

Of interest, also the whole issue... http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/375/2109/20160338

 

C

 

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[Nick Thompson]

Hi, Eric,

 

Thank you, Eric.   OF COURSE, that is what I should have said.  Thank you for saying it so excellently.  Peirce did in fact see causal attribution as a form of abduction.  I  would hope I would have thought to say it myself, if I wasn’t so distracted by the “counter-factual” thang.  But that way of speaking makes me CRAAAAAY-ZEEE.  How can something defined in terms of something that didn’t happen

 

Before you wrote, I was about to get on my “mystery” high horse.  A mystery, you remember, is a confusion arrived at when a bit of language is applied to a situation where it doesn’t really work.  Causal attributions are often falsely singular, in the sense that , we often speak as if  the motion of a billiard ball was caused by the motion of the cue ball, say.  But what we really have to back those attributions up is a pattern of relations between impacts of cue balls and motions of object balls.  When we step up to the next level of organization, the confusion disappears, doesn’t it?  Events of Type A are said to cause events of type B when experiments with proper controls show that an increase in the occurrence of type B events is dependent upon the previous occurrence of Type A events.  But to say that any particular Type A event causes a Type B event is an abuse of language, a mystery. 

 

Is there any way to put those two things together:  the abduction thing and the misattribution thing? 

 

Nick

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Eric Charles
Sent: Tuesday, November 21, 2017 6:43 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Downward Hicausation

 

What great timing! One of the best philosophy comics on the web right now is "Existential Comics." This very week they took a swipe at "causation." Here is an adventure of Sherlock Hume: http://existentialcomics.com/comic/212

I suspect that the best I can do to contribute beyond that is to try fall back on my role of scolding Nick.

Nick should be asserting that "causation" is a metaphor. The billiard ball are the understood scenario. Billiard balls sitting on a still table, unmolested don't move. But if you knock one ball into another ball, the other ball move so. When I say something like "The approaching lion caused the gazelle to move", I am invoking the metaphor that the lion-gazelle relationship is like that of the billiard balls. Had the lion not been doing what it was doing, the gazelle would not have moved away. It isn't simply a "counterfactual." It is an assertion (an abduction) regarding broad patterns of gazelle behavior that can be readily observed under many other situations.** Some of those, I have presumably already seen. Those constitute the "basic implication" of the metaphor. Others I have not observed, and those constitute potential investigatory events - not ethereal thought experiments. As in true of any metaphor, there are also aspects of the billiard-ball scenario I do not intend to map perfectly onto the lion-gazelle scenario (e.g., the lion and gazelle are not spheres).

So that is where Hume and those like him go wrong. They want to beat the billiard balls scenario itself to death. But that's not how metaphors work. There is something understood about the billiard balls, and it is that-understood-thing that is being generalized to another scenario. Any attempt to explain the billiard balls will involve evoking different metaphors, which would entail different assertions (abductions). There is no foundation (Peirce tells us, amongst others), Descartes was on a fool's errand: In the land of inference, it is turtles all the way down.

 

** The breadth of the patterns being referenced is, I believe, where Frank's point about probability slips in. One could certainly simplify the complexity of the assertion by making lumping similar scenarios together and speaking about the probability of a certain gazelle behavior within the cluster of similar situations.

 

-----------
Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
Supervisory Survey Statistician

U.S. Marine Corps

 

On Tue, Nov 21, 2017 at 5:08 PM, gⅼеɳ ☣ <[hidden email]> wrote:

Also Known As: Beware equating experience with existence.

On 11/21/2017 02:00 PM, Frank Wimberly wrote:
> Beware the tendency to think that if you can't immediately measure something then it doesn't exist.


--
☣ gⅼеɳ

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[Eric Charles-2]

"Is there any way to put those two things together:  the abduction thing and the misattribution thing? "

On Wed, Nov 22, 2017 at 1:07 AM, Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi, Eric,

 

Thank you, Eric.   OF COURSE, that is what I should have said.  Thank you for saying it so excellently.  Peirce did in fact see causal attribution as a form of abduction.  I  would hope I would have thought to say it myself, if I wasn’t so distracted by the “counter-factual” thang.  But that way of speaking makes me CRAAAAAY-ZEEE.  How can something defined in terms of something that didn’t happen

 

Before you wrote, I was about to get on my “mystery” high horse.  A mystery, you remember, is a confusion arrived at when a bit of language is applied to a situation where it doesn’t really work.  Causal attributions are often falsely singular, in the sense that , we often speak as if  the motion of a billiard ball was caused by the motion of the cue ball, say.  But what we really have to back those attributions up is a pattern of relations between impacts of cue balls and motions of object balls.  When we step up to the next level of organization, the confusion disappears, doesn’t it?  Events of Type A are said to cause events of type B when experiments with proper controls show that an increase in the occurrence of type B events is dependent upon the previous occurrence of Type A events.  But to say that any particular Type A event causes a Type B event is an abuse of language, a mystery. 

 

Is there any way to put those two things together:  the abduction thing and the misattribution thing? 

 

Nick

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Eric Charles
Sent: Tuesday, November 21, 2017 6:43 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Downward Hicausation

 

What great timing! One of the best philosophy comics on the web right now is "Existential Comics." This very week they took a swipe at "causation." Here is an adventure of Sherlock Hume: http://existentialcomics.com/comic/212

I suspect that the best I can do to contribute beyond that is to try fall back on my role of scolding Nick.

Nick should be asserting that "causation" is a metaphor. The billiard ball are the understood scenario. Billiard balls sitting on a still table, unmolested don't move. But if you knock one ball into another ball, the other ball move so. When I say something like "The approaching lion caused the gazelle to move", I am invoking the metaphor that the lion-gazelle relationship is like that of the billiard balls. Had the lion not been doing what it was doing, the gazelle would not have moved away. It isn't simply a "counterfactual." It is an assertion (an abduction) regarding broad patterns of gazelle behavior that can be readily observed under many other situations.** Some of those, I have presumably already seen. Those constitute the "basic implication" of the metaphor. Others I have not observed, and those constitute potential investigatory events - not ethereal thought experiments. As in true of any metaphor, there are also aspects of the billiard-ball scenario I do not intend to map perfectly onto the lion-gazelle scenario (e.g., the lion and gazelle are not spheres).

So that is where Hume and those like him go wrong. They want to beat the billiard balls scenario itself to death. But that's not how metaphors work. There is something understood about the billiard balls, and it is that-understood-thing that is being generalized to another scenario. Any attempt to explain the billiard balls will involve evoking different metaphors, which would entail different assertions (abductions). There is no foundation (Peirce tells us, amongst others), Descartes was on a fool's errand: In the land of inference, it is turtles all the way down.

 

** The breadth of the patterns being referenced is, I believe, where Frank's point about probability slips in. One could certainly simplify the complexity of the assertion by making lumping similar scenarios together and speaking about the probability of a certain gazelle behavior within the cluster of similar situations.

 

-----------
Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
Supervisory Survey Statistician

U.S. Marine Corps

 

On Tue, Nov 21, 2017 at 5:08 PM, gⅼеɳ ☣ <[hidden email]> wrote:

Also Known As: Beware equating experience with existence.

On 11/21/2017 02:00 PM, Frank Wimberly wrote:
> Beware the tendency to think that if you can't immediately measure something then it doesn't exist.


--
☣ gⅼеɳ

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[Carl Tollander]

One of the recurring conundrums of teaching.  Finger pointing at the moon....

On Nov 22, 2017 14:32, "Eric Charles" <[hidden email]> wrote:

"Is there any way to put those two things together:  the abduction thing and the misattribution thing? "

On Wed, Nov 22, 2017 at 1:07 AM, Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi, Eric,

 

Thank you, Eric.   OF COURSE, that is what I should have said.  Thank you for saying it so excellently.  Peirce did in fact see causal attribution as a form of abduction.  I  would hope I would have thought to say it myself, if I wasn’t so distracted by the “counter-factual” thang.  But that way of speaking makes me CRAAAAAY-ZEEE.  How can something defined in terms of something that didn’t happen

 

Before you wrote, I was about to get on my “mystery” high horse.  A mystery, you remember, is a confusion arrived at when a bit of language is applied to a situation where it doesn’t really work.  Causal attributions are often falsely singular, in the sense that , we often speak as if  the motion of a billiard ball was caused by the motion of the cue ball, say.  But what we really have to back those attributions up is a pattern of relations between impacts of cue balls and motions of object balls.  When we step up to the next level of organization, the confusion disappears, doesn’t it?  Events of Type A are said to cause events of type B when experiments with proper controls show that an increase in the occurrence of type B events is dependent upon the previous occurrence of Type A events.  But to say that any particular Type A event causes a Type B event is an abuse of language, a mystery. 

 

Is there any way to put those two things together:  the abduction thing and the misattribution thing? 

 

Nick

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Eric Charles
Sent: Tuesday, November 21, 2017 6:43 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Downward Hicausation

 

What great timing! One of the best philosophy comics on the web right now is "Existential Comics." This very week they took a swipe at "causation." Here is an adventure of Sherlock Hume: http://existentialcomics.com/comic/212

I suspect that the best I can do to contribute beyond that is to try fall back on my role of scolding Nick.

Nick should be asserting that "causation" is a metaphor. The billiard ball are the understood scenario. Billiard balls sitting on a still table, unmolested don't move. But if you knock one ball into another ball, the other ball move so. When I say something like "The approaching lion caused the gazelle to move", I am invoking the metaphor that the lion-gazelle relationship is like that of the billiard balls. Had the lion not been doing what it was doing, the gazelle would not have moved away. It isn't simply a "counterfactual." It is an assertion (an abduction) regarding broad patterns of gazelle behavior that can be readily observed under many other situations.** Some of those, I have presumably already seen. Those constitute the "basic implication" of the metaphor. Others I have not observed, and those constitute potential investigatory events - not ethereal thought experiments. As in true of any metaphor, there are also aspects of the billiard-ball scenario I do not intend to map perfectly onto the lion-gazelle scenario (e.g., the lion and gazelle are not spheres).

So that is where Hume and those like him go wrong. They want to beat the billiard balls scenario itself to death. But that's not how metaphors work. There is something understood about the billiard balls, and it is that-understood-thing that is being generalized to another scenario. Any attempt to explain the billiard balls will involve evoking different metaphors, which would entail different assertions (abductions). There is no foundation (Peirce tells us, amongst others), Descartes was on a fool's errand: In the land of inference, it is turtles all the way down.

 

** The breadth of the patterns being referenced is, I believe, where Frank's point about probability slips in. One could certainly simplify the complexity of the assertion by making lumping similar scenarios together and speaking about the probability of a certain gazelle behavior within the cluster of similar situations.

 

-----------
Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
Supervisory Survey Statistician

U.S. Marine Corps

 

On Tue, Nov 21, 2017 at 5:08 PM, gⅼеɳ ☣ <[hidden email]> wrote:

Also Known As: Beware equating experience with existence.

On 11/21/2017 02:00 PM, Frank Wimberly wrote:
> Beware the tendency to think that if you can't immediately measure something then it doesn't exist.


--
☣ gⅼеɳ

============================================================
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[Nick Thompson]

Hi, Eric,

 

Well, I would like to say that my personal version of the Pragmatic Maxim:

 

Consider what possible experimental effects the invocation of your conception has; those effects are the entire meaning of your conception.

 

… means that the causality makes reference to experiments or to nothing whatsoever.   The problem is, of course, that strictly speaking that means we cannot apply causality to past events, including evolutionary ones.  That would seem to be overkill.   There is, of course, the comparative method and, of course, “thought experiments.”   Nothing in the maxim, I suppose, requires me to actually perform the experiment; only to conceptualize it.  Seems like mushy ground. 

 

Nick  

 

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Carl Tollander
Sent: Wednesday, November 22, 2017 7:10 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Downward causation

 

One of the recurring conundrums of teaching.  Finger pointing at the moon....

 

 

On Nov 22, 2017 14:32, "Eric Charles" <[hidden email]> wrote:

"Is there any way to put those two things together:  the abduction thing and the misattribution thing? "

I would head in a different direction. The question is about, how one does the attribution; the answer is, most people do it poorly. In a large part, the history of scientific method is a history of determining the conditions under which we allow causal attributions. When I used to teach, I illustrated this most directly in my intro-to-behaviorism class.

 

That class included a lot of discussion of applied behavior analysis (altering the environment of a person in an effort to improve their behavioral functioning within that environment). The central challenge is that the ABA practitioner typically only has access to the (usually a) child for a very limited time, and you don't want to jump to the conclusion that your efforts are working when external factors might equally explain the change in the child's behavior. We work up from very basic methods of increasing confidence. We eventually build up to an ABAB design, in which the prospective solution is applied, then removed, then applied, then removed. Every time the problem behavior goes away, comes back, goes away, and comes back, etc., our confidence increases that our intervention is causing the improvement in behavior, because it is increasingly unlikely that some other factor just so happens to be varying at exactly the same times.

 

Part of the process of "becoming" "a scientist" is increasingly the sophistication of research needed before you draw such conclusions... or, perhaps more accurately, how well you match the tentativeness-vs-solidity of your beliefs to the type of empirical evidence in favor of them. Eventually one is drawing on a wealth of difficult-to-specify domain-specific knowledge in support of any conclusion, but likely justifies the conclusion on the basis of the latest bit of crucial evidence (the one which, for them, solidifies the pattern).

 

Though... suddenly I might have a legitimate response to your inquiry: I would hypothesize that people often mistakenly point at the bit of information that was crucial to them, rather than the larger pattern that the crucial bit of information brought into focus.

 

With Murder on the Orient Express on my mind.... Hercule Poirot would narrate such a thing explicitly, would he not? He would say "The crucial clue in helping me unravel my confusion was X" and then he would explain the larger pattern thus illuminated. A lesser detective would act as if the clue itself were crucial in its own right - "This is the key!" - even if it was a trivial thing on its own, thus committing a dramatic misattribution by virtue of not being self-aware of the abduction taking place.

 

Did that get anywhere?

 

 

-----------
Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
Supervisory Survey Statistician

U.S. Marine Corps

 

On Wed, Nov 22, 2017 at 1:07 AM, Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi, Eric,

 

Thank you, Eric.   OF COURSE, that is what I should have said.  Thank you for saying it so excellently.  Peirce did in fact see causal attribution as a form of abduction.  I  would hope I would have thought to say it myself, if I wasn’t so distracted by the “counter-factual” thang.  But that way of speaking makes me CRAAAAAY-ZEEE.  How can something defined in terms of something that didn’t happen

 

Before you wrote, I was about to get on my “mystery” high horse.  A mystery, you remember, is a confusion arrived at when a bit of language is applied to a situation where it doesn’t really work.  Causal attributions are often falsely singular, in the sense that , we often speak as if  the motion of a billiard ball was caused by the motion of the cue ball, say.  But what we really have to back those attributions up is a pattern of relations between impacts of cue balls and motions of object balls.  When we step up to the next level of organization, the confusion disappears, doesn’t it?  Events of Type A are said to cause events of type B when experiments with proper controls show that an increase in the occurrence of type B events is dependent upon the previous occurrence of Type A events.  But to say that any particular Type A event causes a Type B event is an abuse of language, a mystery. 

 

Is there any way to put those two things together:  the abduction thing and the misattribution thing? 

 

Nick

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Eric Charles
Sent: Tuesday, November 21, 2017 6:43 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Downward Hicausation

 

What great timing! One of the best philosophy comics on the web right now is "Existential Comics." This very week they took a swipe at "causation." Here is an adventure of Sherlock Hume: http://existentialcomics.com/comic/212

I suspect that the best I can do to contribute beyond that is to try fall back on my role of scolding Nick.

Nick should be asserting that "causation" is a metaphor. The billiard ball are the understood scenario. Billiard balls sitting on a still table, unmolested don't move. But if you knock one ball into another ball, the other ball move so. When I say something like "The approaching lion caused the gazelle to move", I am invoking the metaphor that the lion-gazelle relationship is like that of the billiard balls. Had the lion not been doing what it was doing, the gazelle would not have moved away. It isn't simply a "counterfactual." It is an assertion (an abduction) regarding broad patterns of gazelle behavior that can be readily observed under many other situations.** Some of those, I have presumably already seen. Those constitute the "basic implication" of the metaphor. Others I have not observed, and those constitute potential investigatory events - not ethereal thought experiments. As in true of any metaphor, there are also aspects of the billiard-ball scenario I do not intend to map perfectly onto the lion-gazelle scenario (e.g., the lion and gazelle are not spheres).

So that is where Hume and those like him go wrong. They want to beat the billiard balls scenario itself to death. But that's not how metaphors work. There is something understood about the billiard balls, and it is that-understood-thing that is being generalized to another scenario. Any attempt to explain the billiard balls will involve evoking different metaphors, which would entail different assertions (abductions). There is no foundation (Peirce tells us, amongst others), Descartes was on a fool's errand: In the land of inference, it is turtles all the way down.

 

** The breadth of the patterns being referenced is, I believe, where Frank's point about probability slips in. One could certainly simplify the complexity of the assertion by making lumping similar scenarios together and speaking about the probability of a certain gazelle behavior within the cluster of similar situations.

 

-----------
Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
Supervisory Survey Statistician

U.S. Marine Corps

 

On Tue, Nov 21, 2017 at 5:08 PM, gⅼеɳ ☣ <[hidden email]> wrote:

Also Known As: Beware equating experience with existence.

On 11/21/2017 02:00 PM, Frank Wimberly wrote:
> Beware the tendency to think that if you can't immediately measure something then it doesn't exist.


--
☣ gⅼеɳ

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[Frank Wimberly-2]

Nick,

Whenever I say this it doesn't seem to register.  Pearl, Glymour, Spirtes, et al have put statistical causal reasoning on a firm foundation.  This involves learning causal models from observational rather that experimental data, including data from the past.  Also remember the distinction between "actual" causation (hitting this jar with a hammer causes it to break) and statistical causation (smoking causes cancer).

There is an extensive and growing literature on these topics.  

Frank

On Nov 22, 2017 9:43 PM, "Nick Thompson" <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi, Eric,

 

Well, I would like to say that my personal version of the Pragmatic Maxim:

 

Consider what possible experimental effects the invocation of your conception has; those effects are the entire meaning of your conception.

 

… means that the causality makes reference to experiments or to nothing whatsoever.   The problem is, of course, that strictly speaking that means we cannot apply causality to past events, including evolutionary ones.  That would seem to be overkill.   There is, of course, the comparative method and, of course, “thought experiments.”   Nothing in the maxim, I suppose, requires me to actually perform the experiment; only to conceptualize it.  Seems like mushy ground. 

 

Nick  

 

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Carl Tollander
Sent: Wednesday, November 22, 2017 7:10 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Downward causation

 

One of the recurring conundrums of teaching.  Finger pointing at the moon....

 

 

On Nov 22, 2017 14:32, "Eric Charles" <[hidden email]> wrote:

"Is there any way to put those two things together:  the abduction thing and the misattribution thing? "

I would head in a different direction. The question is about, how one does the attribution; the answer is, most people do it poorly. In a large part, the history of scientific method is a history of determining the conditions under which we allow causal attributions. When I used to teach, I illustrated this most directly in my intro-to-behaviorism class.

 

That class included a lot of discussion of applied behavior analysis (altering the environment of a person in an effort to improve their behavioral functioning within that environment). The central challenge is that the ABA practitioner typically only has access to the (usually a) child for a very limited time, and you don't want to jump to the conclusion that your efforts are working when external factors might equally explain the change in the child's behavior. We work up from very basic methods of increasing confidence. We eventually build up to an ABAB design, in which the prospective solution is applied, then removed, then applied, then removed. Every time the problem behavior goes away, comes back, goes away, and comes back, etc., our confidence increases that our intervention is causing the improvement in behavior, because it is increasingly unlikely that some other factor just so happens to be varying at exactly the same times.

 

Part of the process of "becoming" "a scientist" is increasingly the sophistication of research needed before you draw such conclusions... or, perhaps more accurately, how well you match the tentativeness-vs-solidity of your beliefs to the type of empirical evidence in favor of them. Eventually one is drawing on a wealth of difficult-to-specify domain-specific knowledge in support of any conclusion, but likely justifies the conclusion on the basis of the latest bit of crucial evidence (the one which, for them, solidifies the pattern).

 

Though... suddenly I might have a legitimate response to your inquiry: I would hypothesize that people often mistakenly point at the bit of information that was crucial to them, rather than the larger pattern that the crucial bit of information brought into focus.

 

With Murder on the Orient Express on my mind.... Hercule Poirot would narrate such a thing explicitly, would he not? He would say "The crucial clue in helping me unravel my confusion was X" and then he would explain the larger pattern thus illuminated. A lesser detective would act as if the clue itself were crucial in its own right - "This is the key!" - even if it was a trivial thing on its own, thus committing a dramatic misattribution by virtue of not being self-aware of the abduction taking place.

 

Did that get anywhere?

 

 

-----------
Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
Supervisory Survey Statistician

U.S. Marine Corps

 

On Wed, Nov 22, 2017 at 1:07 AM, Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi, Eric,

 

Thank you, Eric.   OF COURSE, that is what I should have said.  Thank you for saying it so excellently.  Peirce did in fact see causal attribution as a form of abduction.  I  would hope I would have thought to say it myself, if I wasn’t so distracted by the “counter-factual” thang.  But that way of speaking makes me CRAAAAAY-ZEEE.  How can something defined in terms of something that didn’t happen

 

Before you wrote, I was about to get on my “mystery” high horse.  A mystery, you remember, is a confusion arrived at when a bit of language is applied to a situation where it doesn’t really work.  Causal attributions are often falsely singular, in the sense that , we often speak as if  the motion of a billiard ball was caused by the motion of the cue ball, say.  But what we really have to back those attributions up is a pattern of relations between impacts of cue balls and motions of object balls.  When we step up to the next level of organization, the confusion disappears, doesn’t it?  Events of Type A are said to cause events of type B when experiments with proper controls show that an increase in the occurrence of type B events is dependent upon the previous occurrence of Type A events.  But to say that any particular Type A event causes a Type B event is an abuse of language, a mystery. 

 

Is there any way to put those two things together:  the abduction thing and the misattribution thing? 

 

Nick

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Eric Charles
Sent: Tuesday, November 21, 2017 6:43 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Downward Hicausation

 

What great timing! One of the best philosophy comics on the web right now is "Existential Comics." This very week they took a swipe at "causation." Here is an adventure of Sherlock Hume: http://existentialcomics.com/comic/212

I suspect that the best I can do to contribute beyond that is to try fall back on my role of scolding Nick.

Nick should be asserting that "causation" is a metaphor. The billiard ball are the understood scenario. Billiard balls sitting on a still table, unmolested don't move. But if you knock one ball into another ball, the other ball move so. When I say something like "The approaching lion caused the gazelle to move", I am invoking the metaphor that the lion-gazelle relationship is like that of the billiard balls. Had the lion not been doing what it was doing, the gazelle would not have moved away. It isn't simply a "counterfactual." It is an assertion (an abduction) regarding broad patterns of gazelle behavior that can be readily observed under many other situations.** Some of those, I have presumably already seen. Those constitute the "basic implication" of the metaphor. Others I have not observed, and those constitute potential investigatory events - not ethereal thought experiments. As in true of any metaphor, there are also aspects of the billiard-ball scenario I do not intend to map perfectly onto the lion-gazelle scenario (e.g., the lion and gazelle are not spheres).

So that is where Hume and those like him go wrong. They want to beat the billiard balls scenario itself to death. But that's not how metaphors work. There is something understood about the billiard balls, and it is that-understood-thing that is being generalized to another scenario. Any attempt to explain the billiard balls will involve evoking different metaphors, which would entail different assertions (abductions). There is no foundation (Peirce tells us, amongst others), Descartes was on a fool's errand: In the land of inference, it is turtles all the way down.

 

** The breadth of the patterns being referenced is, I believe, where Frank's point about probability slips in. One could certainly simplify the complexity of the assertion by making lumping similar scenarios together and speaking about the probability of a certain gazelle behavior within the cluster of similar situations.

 

-----------
Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
Supervisory Survey Statistician

U.S. Marine Corps

 

On Tue, Nov 21, 2017 at 5:08 PM, gⅼеɳ ☣ <[hidden email]> wrote:

Also Known As: Beware equating experience with existence.

On 11/21/2017 02:00 PM, Frank Wimberly wrote:
> Beware the tendency to think that if you can't immediately measure something then it doesn't exist.


--
☣ gⅼеɳ

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

 

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

 

============================================================
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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

[Nick Thompson]

Hi Frank,

 

Please forgive me for not being adequately responsive.  I have looked at some of the sources you have mentioned and they are beyond my ability to understand.  So, I am dependent on you (or others) to explain to me how those models work.  Now, I realize that this perhaps brings us to the threshold of our old argument about whether mathematics needs explanation … it just is,  You like it or you don’t.   Sounds like a good discussion to have on Friday

 

Nick

 

 

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Frank Wimberly
Sent: Wednesday, November 22, 2017 9:55 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Downward causation

 

Nick,

 

Whenever I say this it doesn't seem to register.  Pearl, Glymour, Spirtes, et al have put statistical causal reasoning on a firm foundation.  This involves learning causal models from observational rather that experimental data, including data from the past.  Also remember the distinction between "actual" causation (hitting this jar with a hammer causes it to break) and statistical causation (smoking causes cancer).

 

There is an extensive and growing literature on these topics.  

 

Frank

 

 

Frank Wimberly
Phone [phone]

 

On Nov 22, 2017 9:43 PM, "Nick Thompson" <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi, Eric,

 

Well, I would like to say that my personal version of the Pragmatic Maxim:

 

Consider what possible experimental effects the invocation of your conception has; those effects are the entire meaning of your conception.

 

… means that the causality makes reference to experiments or to nothing whatsoever.   The problem is, of course, that strictly speaking that means we cannot apply causality to past events, including evolutionary ones.  That would seem to be overkill.   There is, of course, the comparative method and, of course, “thought experiments.”   Nothing in the maxim, I suppose, requires me to actually perform the experiment; only to conceptualize it.  Seems like mushy ground. 

 

Nick  

 

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Carl Tollander
Sent: Wednesday, November 22, 2017 7:10 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Downward causation

 

One of the recurring conundrums of teaching.  Finger pointing at the moon....

 

 

On Nov 22, 2017 14:32, "Eric Charles" <[hidden email]> wrote:

"Is there any way to put those two things together:  the abduction thing and the misattribution thing? "

I would head in a different direction. The question is about, how one does the attribution; the answer is, most people do it poorly. In a large part, the history of scientific method is a history of determining the conditions under which we allow causal attributions. When I used to teach, I illustrated this most directly in my intro-to-behaviorism class.

 

That class included a lot of discussion of applied behavior analysis (altering the environment of a person in an effort to improve their behavioral functioning within that environment). The central challenge is that the ABA practitioner typically only has access to the (usually a) child for a very limited time, and you don't want to jump to the conclusion that your efforts are working when external factors might equally explain the change in the child's behavior. We work up from very basic methods of increasing confidence. We eventually build up to an ABAB design, in which the prospective solution is applied, then removed, then applied, then removed. Every time the problem behavior goes away, comes back, goes away, and comes back, etc., our confidence increases that our intervention is causing the improvement in behavior, because it is increasingly unlikely that some other factor just so happens to be varying at exactly the same times.

 

Part of the process of "becoming" "a scientist" is increasingly the sophistication of research needed before you draw such conclusions... or, perhaps more accurately, how well you match the tentativeness-vs-solidity of your beliefs to the type of empirical evidence in favor of them. Eventually one is drawing on a wealth of difficult-to-specify domain-specific knowledge in support of any conclusion, but likely justifies the conclusion on the basis of the latest bit of crucial evidence (the one which, for them, solidifies the pattern).

 

Though... suddenly I might have a legitimate response to your inquiry: I would hypothesize that people often mistakenly point at the bit of information that was crucial to them, rather than the larger pattern that the crucial bit of information brought into focus.

 

With Murder on the Orient Express on my mind.... Hercule Poirot would narrate such a thing explicitly, would he not? He would say "The crucial clue in helping me unravel my confusion was X" and then he would explain the larger pattern thus illuminated. A lesser detective would act as if the clue itself were crucial in its own right - "This is the key!" - even if it was a trivial thing on its own, thus committing a dramatic misattribution by virtue of not being self-aware of the abduction taking place.

 

Did that get anywhere?

 

 

-----------
Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
Supervisory Survey Statistician

U.S. Marine Corps

 

On Wed, Nov 22, 2017 at 1:07 AM, Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi, Eric,

 

Thank you, Eric.   OF COURSE, that is what I should have said.  Thank you for saying it so excellently.  Peirce did in fact see causal attribution as a form of abduction.  I  would hope I would have thought to say it myself, if I wasn’t so distracted by the “counter-factual” thang.  But that way of speaking makes me CRAAAAAY-ZEEE.  How can something defined in terms of something that didn’t happen

 

Before you wrote, I was about to get on my “mystery” high horse.  A mystery, you remember, is a confusion arrived at when a bit of language is applied to a situation where it doesn’t really work.  Causal attributions are often falsely singular, in the sense that , we often speak as if  the motion of a billiard ball was caused by the motion of the cue ball, say.  But what we really have to back those attributions up is a pattern of relations between impacts of cue balls and motions of object balls.  When we step up to the next level of organization, the confusion disappears, doesn’t it?  Events of Type A are said to cause events of type B when experiments with proper controls show that an increase in the occurrence of type B events is dependent upon the previous occurrence of Type A events.  But to say that any particular Type A event causes a Type B event is an abuse of language, a mystery. 

 

Is there any way to put those two things together:  the abduction thing and the misattribution thing? 

 

Nick

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Eric Charles
Sent: Tuesday, November 21, 2017 6:43 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Downward Hicausation

 

What great timing! One of the best philosophy comics on the web right now is "Existential Comics." This very week they took a swipe at "causation." Here is an adventure of Sherlock Hume: http://existentialcomics.com/comic/212

I suspect that the best I can do to contribute beyond that is to try fall back on my role of scolding Nick.

Nick should be asserting that "causation" is a metaphor. The billiard ball are the understood scenario. Billiard balls sitting on a still table, unmolested don't move. But if you knock one ball into another ball, the other ball move so. When I say something like "The approaching lion caused the gazelle to move", I am invoking the metaphor that the lion-gazelle relationship is like that of the billiard balls. Had the lion not been doing what it was doing, the gazelle would not have moved away. It isn't simply a "counterfactual." It is an assertion (an abduction) regarding broad patterns of gazelle behavior that can be readily observed under many other situations.** Some of those, I have presumably already seen. Those constitute the "basic implication" of the metaphor. Others I have not observed, and those constitute potential investigatory events - not ethereal thought experiments. As in true of any metaphor, there are also aspects of the billiard-ball scenario I do not intend to map perfectly onto the lion-gazelle scenario (e.g., the lion and gazelle are not spheres).

So that is where Hume and those like him go wrong. They want to beat the billiard balls scenario itself to death. But that's not how metaphors work. There is something understood about the billiard balls, and it is that-understood-thing that is being generalized to another scenario. Any attempt to explain the billiard balls will involve evoking different metaphors, which would entail different assertions (abductions). There is no foundation (Peirce tells us, amongst others), Descartes was on a fool's errand: In the land of inference, it is turtles all the way down.

 

** The breadth of the patterns being referenced is, I believe, where Frank's point about probability slips in. One could certainly simplify the complexity of the assertion by making lumping similar scenarios together and speaking about the probability of a certain gazelle behavior within the cluster of similar situations.

 

-----------
Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
Supervisory Survey Statistician

U.S. Marine Corps

 

On Tue, Nov 21, 2017 at 5:08 PM, gⅼеɳ ☣ <[hidden email]> wrote:

Also Known As: Beware equating experience with existence.

On 11/21/2017 02:00 PM, Frank Wimberly wrote:
> Beware the tendency to think that if you can't immediately measure something then it doesn't exist.


--
☣ gⅼеɳ

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

 

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

 

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

[Frank Wimberly-2]

Nick,

They are not beyond your ability to understand.  I am happy to explain as much as you like.

Frank

On Nov 22, 2017 10:10 PM, "Nick Thompson" <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi Frank,

 

Please forgive me for not being adequately responsive.  I have looked at some of the sources you have mentioned and they are beyond my ability to understand.  So, I am dependent on you (or others) to explain to me how those models work.  Now, I realize that this perhaps brings us to the threshold of our old argument about whether mathematics needs explanation … it just is,  You like it or you don’t.   Sounds like a good discussion to have on Friday

 

Nick

 

 

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Frank Wimberly
Sent: Wednesday, November 22, 2017 9:55 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Downward causation

 

Nick,

 

Whenever I say this it doesn't seem to register.  Pearl, Glymour, Spirtes, et al have put statistical causal reasoning on a firm foundation.  This involves learning causal models from observational rather that experimental data, including data from the past.  Also remember the distinction between "actual" causation (hitting this jar with a hammer causes it to break) and statistical causation (smoking causes cancer).

 

There is an extensive and growing literature on these topics.  

 

Frank

 

 

Frank Wimberly
Phone <a href="tel:(505)%20670-9918" value="[phone]" target="_blank">[phone]

 

On Nov 22, 2017 9:43 PM, "Nick Thompson" <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi, Eric,

 

Well, I would like to say that my personal version of the Pragmatic Maxim:

 

Consider what possible experimental effects the invocation of your conception has; those effects are the entire meaning of your conception.

 

… means that the causality makes reference to experiments or to nothing whatsoever.   The problem is, of course, that strictly speaking that means we cannot apply causality to past events, including evolutionary ones.  That would seem to be overkill.   There is, of course, the comparative method and, of course, “thought experiments.”   Nothing in the maxim, I suppose, requires me to actually perform the experiment; only to conceptualize it.  Seems like mushy ground. 

 

Nick  

 

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Carl Tollander
Sent: Wednesday, November 22, 2017 7:10 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Downward causation

 

One of the recurring conundrums of teaching.  Finger pointing at the moon....

 

 

On Nov 22, 2017 14:32, "Eric Charles" <[hidden email]> wrote:

"Is there any way to put those two things together:  the abduction thing and the misattribution thing? "

I would head in a different direction. The question is about, how one does the attribution; the answer is, most people do it poorly. In a large part, the history of scientific method is a history of determining the conditions under which we allow causal attributions. When I used to teach, I illustrated this most directly in my intro-to-behaviorism class.

 

That class included a lot of discussion of applied behavior analysis (altering the environment of a person in an effort to improve their behavioral functioning within that environment). The central challenge is that the ABA practitioner typically only has access to the (usually a) child for a very limited time, and you don't want to jump to the conclusion that your efforts are working when external factors might equally explain the change in the child's behavior. We work up from very basic methods of increasing confidence. We eventually build up to an ABAB design, in which the prospective solution is applied, then removed, then applied, then removed. Every time the problem behavior goes away, comes back, goes away, and comes back, etc., our confidence increases that our intervention is causing the improvement in behavior, because it is increasingly unlikely that some other factor just so happens to be varying at exactly the same times.

 

Part of the process of "becoming" "a scientist" is increasingly the sophistication of research needed before you draw such conclusions... or, perhaps more accurately, how well you match the tentativeness-vs-solidity of your beliefs to the type of empirical evidence in favor of them. Eventually one is drawing on a wealth of difficult-to-specify domain-specific knowledge in support of any conclusion, but likely justifies the conclusion on the basis of the latest bit of crucial evidence (the one which, for them, solidifies the pattern).

 

Though... suddenly I might have a legitimate response to your inquiry: I would hypothesize that people often mistakenly point at the bit of information that was crucial to them, rather than the larger pattern that the crucial bit of information brought into focus.

 

With Murder on the Orient Express on my mind.... Hercule Poirot would narrate such a thing explicitly, would he not? He would say "The crucial clue in helping me unravel my confusion was X" and then he would explain the larger pattern thus illuminated. A lesser detective would act as if the clue itself were crucial in its own right - "This is the key!" - even if it was a trivial thing on its own, thus committing a dramatic misattribution by virtue of not being self-aware of the abduction taking place.

 

Did that get anywhere?

 

 

-----------
Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
Supervisory Survey Statistician

U.S. Marine Corps

 

On Wed, Nov 22, 2017 at 1:07 AM, Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi, Eric,

 

Thank you, Eric.   OF COURSE, that is what I should have said.  Thank you for saying it so excellently.  Peirce did in fact see causal attribution as a form of abduction.  I  would hope I would have thought to say it myself, if I wasn’t so distracted by the “counter-factual” thang.  But that way of speaking makes me CRAAAAAY-ZEEE.  How can something defined in terms of something that didn’t happen

 

Before you wrote, I was about to get on my “mystery” high horse.  A mystery, you remember, is a confusion arrived at when a bit of language is applied to a situation where it doesn’t really work.  Causal attributions are often falsely singular, in the sense that , we often speak as if  the motion of a billiard ball was caused by the motion of the cue ball, say.  But what we really have to back those attributions up is a pattern of relations between impacts of cue balls and motions of object balls.  When we step up to the next level of organization, the confusion disappears, doesn’t it?  Events of Type A are said to cause events of type B when experiments with proper controls show that an increase in the occurrence of type B events is dependent upon the previous occurrence of Type A events.  But to say that any particular Type A event causes a Type B event is an abuse of language, a mystery. 

 

Is there any way to put those two things together:  the abduction thing and the misattribution thing? 

 

Nick

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Eric Charles
Sent: Tuesday, November 21, 2017 6:43 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Downward Hicausation

 

What great timing! One of the best philosophy comics on the web right now is "Existential Comics." This very week they took a swipe at "causation." Here is an adventure of Sherlock Hume: http://existentialcomics.com/comic/212

I suspect that the best I can do to contribute beyond that is to try fall back on my role of scolding Nick.

Nick should be asserting that "causation" is a metaphor. The billiard ball are the understood scenario. Billiard balls sitting on a still table, unmolested don't move. But if you knock one ball into another ball, the other ball move so. When I say something like "The approaching lion caused the gazelle to move", I am invoking the metaphor that the lion-gazelle relationship is like that of the billiard balls. Had the lion not been doing what it was doing, the gazelle would not have moved away. It isn't simply a "counterfactual." It is an assertion (an abduction) regarding broad patterns of gazelle behavior that can be readily observed under many other situations.** Some of those, I have presumably already seen. Those constitute the "basic implication" of the metaphor. Others I have not observed, and those constitute potential investigatory events - not ethereal thought experiments. As in true of any metaphor, there are also aspects of the billiard-ball scenario I do not intend to map perfectly onto the lion-gazelle scenario (e.g., the lion and gazelle are not spheres).

So that is where Hume and those like him go wrong. They want to beat the billiard balls scenario itself to death. But that's not how metaphors work. There is something understood about the billiard balls, and it is that-understood-thing that is being generalized to another scenario. Any attempt to explain the billiard balls will involve evoking different metaphors, which would entail different assertions (abductions). There is no foundation (Peirce tells us, amongst others), Descartes was on a fool's errand: In the land of inference, it is turtles all the way down.

 

** The breadth of the patterns being referenced is, I believe, where Frank's point about probability slips in. One could certainly simplify the complexity of the assertion by making lumping similar scenarios together and speaking about the probability of a certain gazelle behavior within the cluster of similar situations.

 

-----------
Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
Supervisory Survey Statistician

U.S. Marine Corps

 

On Tue, Nov 21, 2017 at 5:08 PM, gⅼеɳ ☣ <[hidden email]> wrote:

Also Known As: Beware equating experience with existence.

On 11/21/2017 02:00 PM, Frank Wimberly wrote:
> Beware the tendency to think that if you can't immediately measure something then it doesn't exist.


--
☣ gⅼеɳ

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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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[Nick Thompson]

Frank,

 

I suspect that “actual” causation is just the hypostization of statistical causation.   But we’ll see.

 

I look forward to talking about the models. 

 

Nick

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Frank Wimberly
Sent: Wednesday, November 22, 2017 10:13 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Downward causation

 

Nick,

 

They are not beyond your ability to understand.  I am happy to explain as much as you like.

 

Frank

Frank Wimberly
Phone [phone]

 

On Nov 22, 2017 10:10 PM, "Nick Thompson" <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi Frank,

 

Please forgive me for not being adequately responsive.  I have looked at some of the sources you have mentioned and they are beyond my ability to understand.  So, I am dependent on you (or others) to explain to me how those models work.  Now, I realize that this perhaps brings us to the threshold of our old argument about whether mathematics needs explanation … it just is,  You like it or you don’t.   Sounds like a good discussion to have on Friday

 

Nick

 

 

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Frank Wimberly
Sent: Wednesday, November 22, 2017 9:55 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Downward causation

 

Nick,

 

Whenever I say this it doesn't seem to register.  Pearl, Glymour, Spirtes, et al have put statistical causal reasoning on a firm foundation.  This involves learning causal models from observational rather that experimental data, including data from the past.  Also remember the distinction between "actual" causation (hitting this jar with a hammer causes it to break) and statistical causation (smoking causes cancer).

 

There is an extensive and growing literature on these topics.  

 

Frank

 

 

Frank Wimberly
Phone <a href="tel:(505)%20670-9918" target="_blank">[phone]

 

On Nov 22, 2017 9:43 PM, "Nick Thompson" <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi, Eric,

 

Well, I would like to say that my personal version of the Pragmatic Maxim:

 

Consider what possible experimental effects the invocation of your conception has; those effects are the entire meaning of your conception.

 

… means that the causality makes reference to experiments or to nothing whatsoever.   The problem is, of course, that strictly speaking that means we cannot apply causality to past events, including evolutionary ones.  That would seem to be overkill.   There is, of course, the comparative method and, of course, “thought experiments.”   Nothing in the maxim, I suppose, requires me to actually perform the experiment; only to conceptualize it.  Seems like mushy ground. 

 

Nick  

 

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Carl Tollander
Sent: Wednesday, November 22, 2017 7:10 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Downward causation

 

One of the recurring conundrums of teaching.  Finger pointing at the moon....

 

 

On Nov 22, 2017 14:32, "Eric Charles" <[hidden email]> wrote:

"Is there any way to put those two things together:  the abduction thing and the misattribution thing? "

I would head in a different direction. The question is about, how one does the attribution; the answer is, most people do it poorly. In a large part, the history of scientific method is a history of determining the conditions under which we allow causal attributions. When I used to teach, I illustrated this most directly in my intro-to-behaviorism class.

 

That class included a lot of discussion of applied behavior analysis (altering the environment of a person in an effort to improve their behavioral functioning within that environment). The central challenge is that the ABA practitioner typically only has access to the (usually a) child for a very limited time, and you don't want to jump to the conclusion that your efforts are working when external factors might equally explain the change in the child's behavior. We work up from very basic methods of increasing confidence. We eventually build up to an ABAB design, in which the prospective solution is applied, then removed, then applied, then removed. Every time the problem behavior goes away, comes back, goes away, and comes back, etc., our confidence increases that our intervention is causing the improvement in behavior, because it is increasingly unlikely that some other factor just so happens to be varying at exactly the same times.

 

Part of the process of "becoming" "a scientist" is increasingly the sophistication of research needed before you draw such conclusions... or, perhaps more accurately, how well you match the tentativeness-vs-solidity of your beliefs to the type of empirical evidence in favor of them. Eventually one is drawing on a wealth of difficult-to-specify domain-specific knowledge in support of any conclusion, but likely justifies the conclusion on the basis of the latest bit of crucial evidence (the one which, for them, solidifies the pattern).

 

Though... suddenly I might have a legitimate response to your inquiry: I would hypothesize that people often mistakenly point at the bit of information that was crucial to them, rather than the larger pattern that the crucial bit of information brought into focus.

 

With Murder on the Orient Express on my mind.... Hercule Poirot would narrate such a thing explicitly, would he not? He would say "The crucial clue in helping me unravel my confusion was X" and then he would explain the larger pattern thus illuminated. A lesser detective would act as if the clue itself were crucial in its own right - "This is the key!" - even if it was a trivial thing on its own, thus committing a dramatic misattribution by virtue of not being self-aware of the abduction taking place.

 

Did that get anywhere?

 

 

-----------
Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
Supervisory Survey Statistician

U.S. Marine Corps

 

On Wed, Nov 22, 2017 at 1:07 AM, Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi, Eric,

 

Thank you, Eric.   OF COURSE, that is what I should have said.  Thank you for saying it so excellently.  Peirce did in fact see causal attribution as a form of abduction.  I  would hope I would have thought to say it myself, if I wasn’t so distracted by the “counter-factual” thang.  But that way of speaking makes me CRAAAAAY-ZEEE.  How can something defined in terms of something that didn’t happen

 

Before you wrote, I was about to get on my “mystery” high horse.  A mystery, you remember, is a confusion arrived at when a bit of language is applied to a situation where it doesn’t really work.  Causal attributions are often falsely singular, in the sense that , we often speak as if  the motion of a billiard ball was caused by the motion of the cue ball, say.  But what we really have to back those attributions up is a pattern of relations between impacts of cue balls and motions of object balls.  When we step up to the next level of organization, the confusion disappears, doesn’t it?  Events of Type A are said to cause events of type B when experiments with proper controls show that an increase in the occurrence of type B events is dependent upon the previous occurrence of Type A events.  But to say that any particular Type A event causes a Type B event is an abuse of language, a mystery. 

 

Is there any way to put those two things together:  the abduction thing and the misattribution thing? 

 

Nick

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Eric Charles
Sent: Tuesday, November 21, 2017 6:43 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Downward Hicausation

 

What great timing! One of the best philosophy comics on the web right now is "Existential Comics." This very week they took a swipe at "causation." Here is an adventure of Sherlock Hume: http://existentialcomics.com/comic/212

I suspect that the best I can do to contribute beyond that is to try fall back on my role of scolding Nick.

Nick should be asserting that "causation" is a metaphor. The billiard ball are the understood scenario. Billiard balls sitting on a still table, unmolested don't move. But if you knock one ball into another ball, the other ball move so. When I say something like "The approaching lion caused the gazelle to move", I am invoking the metaphor that the lion-gazelle relationship is like that of the billiard balls. Had the lion not been doing what it was doing, the gazelle would not have moved away. It isn't simply a "counterfactual." It is an assertion (an abduction) regarding broad patterns of gazelle behavior that can be readily observed under many other situations.** Some of those, I have presumably already seen. Those constitute the "basic implication" of the metaphor. Others I have not observed, and those constitute potential investigatory events - not ethereal thought experiments. As in true of any metaphor, there are also aspects of the billiard-ball scenario I do not intend to map perfectly onto the lion-gazelle scenario (e.g., the lion and gazelle are not spheres).

So that is where Hume and those like him go wrong. They want to beat the billiard balls scenario itself to death. But that's not how metaphors work. There is something understood about the billiard balls, and it is that-understood-thing that is being generalized to another scenario. Any attempt to explain the billiard balls will involve evoking different metaphors, which would entail different assertions (abductions). There is no foundation (Peirce tells us, amongst others), Descartes was on a fool's errand: In the land of inference, it is turtles all the way down.

 

** The breadth of the patterns being referenced is, I believe, where Frank's point about probability slips in. One could certainly simplify the complexity of the assertion by making lumping similar scenarios together and speaking about the probability of a certain gazelle behavior within the cluster of similar situations.

 

-----------
Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
Supervisory Survey Statistician

U.S. Marine Corps

 

On Tue, Nov 21, 2017 at 5:08 PM, gⅼеɳ ☣ <[hidden email]> wrote:

Also Known As: Beware equating experience with existence.

On 11/21/2017 02:00 PM, Frank Wimberly wrote:
> Beware the tendency to think that if you can't immediately measure something then it doesn't exist.


--
☣ gⅼеɳ

============================================================
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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

 

============================================================
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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

 

============================================================
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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

============================================================
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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

============================================================
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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
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============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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[Eric Charles-2]

Frank, Nick,

I highly recommend that the book "Beyond Versus". Though it limits itself to the context of the nature vs. nurture debates (over a century's worth of them), it fits this context because it is a book-length study of the differences in mindset and result between trying to predict variation and trying to elucidate causal mechanisms. To set the task of determining whether variation in smoking habits relate to variation in cancer rates is quite a different task from trying to determine biological pathways that lead from smoking to cancer. Statistics plays a role in both, to be sure, but the roles are very different and should not be confused. 

On Thu, Nov 23, 2017 at 1:29 AM, Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Frank,

 

I suspect that “actual” causation is just the hypostization of statistical causation.   But we’ll see.

 

I look forward to talking about the models. 

 

Nick

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Frank Wimberly
Sent: Wednesday, November 22, 2017 10:13 PM

To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Downward causation

 

Nick,

 

They are not beyond your ability to understand.  I am happy to explain as much as you like.

 

Frank

Frank Wimberly
Phone <a href="tel:(505)%20670-9918" value="[phone]" target="_blank">[phone]

 

On Nov 22, 2017 10:10 PM, "Nick Thompson" <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi Frank,

 

Please forgive me for not being adequately responsive.  I have looked at some of the sources you have mentioned and they are beyond my ability to understand.  So, I am dependent on you (or others) to explain to me how those models work.  Now, I realize that this perhaps brings us to the threshold of our old argument about whether mathematics needs explanation … it just is,  You like it or you don’t.   Sounds like a good discussion to have on Friday

 

Nick

 

 

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Frank Wimberly
Sent: Wednesday, November 22, 2017 9:55 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Downward causation

 

Nick,

 

Whenever I say this it doesn't seem to register.  Pearl, Glymour, Spirtes, et al have put statistical causal reasoning on a firm foundation.  This involves learning causal models from observational rather that experimental data, including data from the past.  Also remember the distinction between "actual" causation (hitting this jar with a hammer causes it to break) and statistical causation (smoking causes cancer).

 

There is an extensive and growing literature on these topics.  

 

Frank

 

 

Frank Wimberly
Phone <a href="tel:(505)%20670-9918" target="_blank">[phone]

 

On Nov 22, 2017 9:43 PM, "Nick Thompson" <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi, Eric,

 

Well, I would like to say that my personal version of the Pragmatic Maxim:

 

Consider what possible experimental effects the invocation of your conception has; those effects are the entire meaning of your conception.

 

… means that the causality makes reference to experiments or to nothing whatsoever.   The problem is, of course, that strictly speaking that means we cannot apply causality to past events, including evolutionary ones.  That would seem to be overkill.   There is, of course, the comparative method and, of course, “thought experiments.”   Nothing in the maxim, I suppose, requires me to actually perform the experiment; only to conceptualize it.  Seems like mushy ground. 

 

Nick  

 

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Carl Tollander
Sent: Wednesday, November 22, 2017 7:10 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Downward causation

 

One of the recurring conundrums of teaching.  Finger pointing at the moon....

 

 

On Nov 22, 2017 14:32, "Eric Charles" <[hidden email]> wrote:

"Is there any way to put those two things together:  the abduction thing and the misattribution thing? "

I would head in a different direction. The question is about, how one does the attribution; the answer is, most people do it poorly. In a large part, the history of scientific method is a history of determining the conditions under which we allow causal attributions. When I used to teach, I illustrated this most directly in my intro-to-behaviorism class.

 

That class included a lot of discussion of applied behavior analysis (altering the environment of a person in an effort to improve their behavioral functioning within that environment). The central challenge is that the ABA practitioner typically only has access to the (usually a) child for a very limited time, and you don't want to jump to the conclusion that your efforts are working when external factors might equally explain the change in the child's behavior. We work up from very basic methods of increasing confidence. We eventually build up to an ABAB design, in which the prospective solution is applied, then removed, then applied, then removed. Every time the problem behavior goes away, comes back, goes away, and comes back, etc., our confidence increases that our intervention is causing the improvement in behavior, because it is increasingly unlikely that some other factor just so happens to be varying at exactly the same times.

 

Part of the process of "becoming" "a scientist" is increasingly the sophistication of research needed before you draw such conclusions... or, perhaps more accurately, how well you match the tentativeness-vs-solidity of your beliefs to the type of empirical evidence in favor of them. Eventually one is drawing on a wealth of difficult-to-specify domain-specific knowledge in support of any conclusion, but likely justifies the conclusion on the basis of the latest bit of crucial evidence (the one which, for them, solidifies the pattern).

 

Though... suddenly I might have a legitimate response to your inquiry: I would hypothesize that people often mistakenly point at the bit of information that was crucial to them, rather than the larger pattern that the crucial bit of information brought into focus.

 

With Murder on the Orient Express on my mind.... Hercule Poirot would narrate such a thing explicitly, would he not? He would say "The crucial clue in helping me unravel my confusion was X" and then he would explain the larger pattern thus illuminated. A lesser detective would act as if the clue itself were crucial in its own right - "This is the key!" - even if it was a trivial thing on its own, thus committing a dramatic misattribution by virtue of not being self-aware of the abduction taking place.

 

Did that get anywhere?

 

 

-----------
Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
Supervisory Survey Statistician

U.S. Marine Corps

 

On Wed, Nov 22, 2017 at 1:07 AM, Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi, Eric,

 

Thank you, Eric.   OF COURSE, that is what I should have said.  Thank you for saying it so excellently.  Peirce did in fact see causal attribution as a form of abduction.  I  would hope I would have thought to say it myself, if I wasn’t so distracted by the “counter-factual” thang.  But that way of speaking makes me CRAAAAAY-ZEEE.  How can something defined in terms of something that didn’t happen

 

Before you wrote, I was about to get on my “mystery” high horse.  A mystery, you remember, is a confusion arrived at when a bit of language is applied to a situation where it doesn’t really work.  Causal attributions are often falsely singular, in the sense that , we often speak as if  the motion of a billiard ball was caused by the motion of the cue ball, say.  But what we really have to back those attributions up is a pattern of relations between impacts of cue balls and motions of object balls.  When we step up to the next level of organization, the confusion disappears, doesn’t it?  Events of Type A are said to cause events of type B when experiments with proper controls show that an increase in the occurrence of type B events is dependent upon the previous occurrence of Type A events.  But to say that any particular Type A event causes a Type B event is an abuse of language, a mystery. 

 

Is there any way to put those two things together:  the abduction thing and the misattribution thing? 

 

Nick

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Eric Charles
Sent: Tuesday, November 21, 2017 6:43 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Downward Hicausation

 

What great timing! One of the best philosophy comics on the web right now is "Existential Comics." This very week they took a swipe at "causation." Here is an adventure of Sherlock Hume: http://existentialcomics.com/comic/212

I suspect that the best I can do to contribute beyond that is to try fall back on my role of scolding Nick.

Nick should be asserting that "causation" is a metaphor. The billiard ball are the understood scenario. Billiard balls sitting on a still table, unmolested don't move. But if you knock one ball into another ball, the other ball move so. When I say something like "The approaching lion caused the gazelle to move", I am invoking the metaphor that the lion-gazelle relationship is like that of the billiard balls. Had the lion not been doing what it was doing, the gazelle would not have moved away. It isn't simply a "counterfactual." It is an assertion (an abduction) regarding broad patterns of gazelle behavior that can be readily observed under many other situations.** Some of those, I have presumably already seen. Those constitute the "basic implication" of the metaphor. Others I have not observed, and those constitute potential investigatory events - not ethereal thought experiments. As in true of any metaphor, there are also aspects of the billiard-ball scenario I do not intend to map perfectly onto the lion-gazelle scenario (e.g., the lion and gazelle are not spheres).

So that is where Hume and those like him go wrong. They want to beat the billiard balls scenario itself to death. But that's not how metaphors work. There is something understood about the billiard balls, and it is that-understood-thing that is being generalized to another scenario. Any attempt to explain the billiard balls will involve evoking different metaphors, which would entail different assertions (abductions). There is no foundation (Peirce tells us, amongst others), Descartes was on a fool's errand: In the land of inference, it is turtles all the way down.

 

** The breadth of the patterns being referenced is, I believe, where Frank's point about probability slips in. One could certainly simplify the complexity of the assertion by making lumping similar scenarios together and speaking about the probability of a certain gazelle behavior within the cluster of similar situations.

 

-----------
Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
Supervisory Survey Statistician

U.S. Marine Corps

 

On Tue, Nov 21, 2017 at 5:08 PM, gⅼеɳ ☣ <[hidden email]> wrote:

Also Known As: Beware equating experience with existence.

On 11/21/2017 02:00 PM, Frank Wimberly wrote:
> Beware the tendency to think that if you can't immediately measure something then it doesn't exist.


--
☣ gⅼеɳ

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

 

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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

[Eric Charles-2]

"causality makes reference to experiments or to nothing whatsoever"

Well sure.... if we have a generous definition of "experiment". I think you might be better served by the word "investigation".

A consequence is something that would be experienced under some arranged circumstances (or you are talking nonsense). Whether you want to call the act-of-arrangement an experiment is a semantic distraction. Let's say I have the idea that "George is in the elevator" and I make that thought more clear in my mind by thinking through the consequences. One consequence is that if I go to where the elevator door is going to open and wait there, I will see George after the door opens. Is that an experiment? Personally, I would say "yes", but a very minimal sort. A more pretentious scientist - and certainly anyone committed to evangelical scientism - would scoff at applying such a noble label to such a mundane act. Is it an investigatory act? I think everyone would grant it that status.

At some point in his Harvard lectures Perice rephrases his Pragmatic Maxim as follows:
Pragmatism is the principle that every theoretical judgment expressible in a sentence in the indicative mood is a confused form of thought whose only meaning, if it has any, lies in its tendency to enforce a corresponding practical maxim expressible as a conditional sentence having its apodosis in the imperative mood.

So far as I am comfortable with such language, I think it means: Anytime someone trying to make a truth claim about the world, they would be better served by making if-then claims, where the "then" clause states a thing you will do. For example, "George is in the elevator" should be understood as shorthand for an elaborate collection of statements such as "If you want to see George, you will stand in front of the elevator door as it opens", "If you measure the weight of the elevator before and after the passenger exits, you will find it different by one-George's-worth of weight," and "If you want to kill George, you will kill a person in the elevator." 

On Thu, Nov 23, 2017 at 7:44 AM, Eric Charles <[hidden email]> wrote:

Frank, Nick,

I highly recommend that the book "Beyond Versus". Though it limits itself to the context of the nature vs. nurture debates (over a century's worth of them), it fits this context because it is a book-length study of the differences in mindset and result between trying to predict variation and trying to elucidate causal mechanisms. To set the task of determining whether variation in smoking habits relate to variation in cancer rates is quite a different task from trying to determine biological pathways that lead from smoking to cancer. Statistics plays a role in both, to be sure, but the roles are very different and should not be confused. 

On Thu, Nov 23, 2017 at 1:29 AM, Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Frank,

 

I suspect that “actual” causation is just the hypostization of statistical causation.   But we’ll see.

 

I look forward to talking about the models. 

 

Nick

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Frank Wimberly
Sent: Wednesday, November 22, 2017 10:13 PM

To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Downward causation

 

Nick,

 

They are not beyond your ability to understand.  I am happy to explain as much as you like.

 

Frank

Frank Wimberly
Phone <a href="tel:(505)%20670-9918" value="[phone]" target="_blank">[phone]

 

On Nov 22, 2017 10:10 PM, "Nick Thompson" <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi Frank,

 

Please forgive me for not being adequately responsive.  I have looked at some of the sources you have mentioned and they are beyond my ability to understand.  So, I am dependent on you (or others) to explain to me how those models work.  Now, I realize that this perhaps brings us to the threshold of our old argument about whether mathematics needs explanation … it just is,  You like it or you don’t.   Sounds like a good discussion to have on Friday

 

Nick

 

 

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Frank Wimberly
Sent: Wednesday, November 22, 2017 9:55 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Downward causation

 

Nick,

 

Whenever I say this it doesn't seem to register.  Pearl, Glymour, Spirtes, et al have put statistical causal reasoning on a firm foundation.  This involves learning causal models from observational rather that experimental data, including data from the past.  Also remember the distinction between "actual" causation (hitting this jar with a hammer causes it to break) and statistical causation (smoking causes cancer).

 

There is an extensive and growing literature on these topics.  

 

Frank

 

 

Frank Wimberly
Phone <a href="tel:(505)%20670-9918" target="_blank">[phone]

 

On Nov 22, 2017 9:43 PM, "Nick Thompson" <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi, Eric,

 

Well, I would like to say that my personal version of the Pragmatic Maxim:

 

Consider what possible experimental effects the invocation of your conception has; those effects are the entire meaning of your conception.

 

… means that the causality makes reference to experiments or to nothing whatsoever.   The problem is, of course, that strictly speaking that means we cannot apply causality to past events, including evolutionary ones.  That would seem to be overkill.   There is, of course, the comparative method and, of course, “thought experiments.”   Nothing in the maxim, I suppose, requires me to actually perform the experiment; only to conceptualize it.  Seems like mushy ground. 

 

Nick  

 

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Carl Tollander
Sent: Wednesday, November 22, 2017 7:10 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Downward causation

 

One of the recurring conundrums of teaching.  Finger pointing at the moon....

 

 

On Nov 22, 2017 14:32, "Eric Charles" <[hidden email]> wrote:

"Is there any way to put those two things together:  the abduction thing and the misattribution thing? "

I would head in a different direction. The question is about, how one does the attribution; the answer is, most people do it poorly. In a large part, the history of scientific method is a history of determining the conditions under which we allow causal attributions. When I used to teach, I illustrated this most directly in my intro-to-behaviorism class.

 

That class included a lot of discussion of applied behavior analysis (altering the environment of a person in an effort to improve their behavioral functioning within that environment). The central challenge is that the ABA practitioner typically only has access to the (usually a) child for a very limited time, and you don't want to jump to the conclusion that your efforts are working when external factors might equally explain the change in the child's behavior. We work up from very basic methods of increasing confidence. We eventually build up to an ABAB design, in which the prospective solution is applied, then removed, then applied, then removed. Every time the problem behavior goes away, comes back, goes away, and comes back, etc., our confidence increases that our intervention is causing the improvement in behavior, because it is increasingly unlikely that some other factor just so happens to be varying at exactly the same times.

 

Part of the process of "becoming" "a scientist" is increasingly the sophistication of research needed before you draw such conclusions... or, perhaps more accurately, how well you match the tentativeness-vs-solidity of your beliefs to the type of empirical evidence in favor of them. Eventually one is drawing on a wealth of difficult-to-specify domain-specific knowledge in support of any conclusion, but likely justifies the conclusion on the basis of the latest bit of crucial evidence (the one which, for them, solidifies the pattern).

 

Though... suddenly I might have a legitimate response to your inquiry: I would hypothesize that people often mistakenly point at the bit of information that was crucial to them, rather than the larger pattern that the crucial bit of information brought into focus.

 

With Murder on the Orient Express on my mind.... Hercule Poirot would narrate such a thing explicitly, would he not? He would say "The crucial clue in helping me unravel my confusion was X" and then he would explain the larger pattern thus illuminated. A lesser detective would act as if the clue itself were crucial in its own right - "This is the key!" - even if it was a trivial thing on its own, thus committing a dramatic misattribution by virtue of not being self-aware of the abduction taking place.

 

Did that get anywhere?

 

 

-----------
Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
Supervisory Survey Statistician

U.S. Marine Corps

 

On Wed, Nov 22, 2017 at 1:07 AM, Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi, Eric,

 

Thank you, Eric.   OF COURSE, that is what I should have said.  Thank you for saying it so excellently.  Peirce did in fact see causal attribution as a form of abduction.  I  would hope I would have thought to say it myself, if I wasn’t so distracted by the “counter-factual” thang.  But that way of speaking makes me CRAAAAAY-ZEEE.  How can something defined in terms of something that didn’t happen

 

Before you wrote, I was about to get on my “mystery” high horse.  A mystery, you remember, is a confusion arrived at when a bit of language is applied to a situation where it doesn’t really work.  Causal attributions are often falsely singular, in the sense that , we often speak as if  the motion of a billiard ball was caused by the motion of the cue ball, say.  But what we really have to back those attributions up is a pattern of relations between impacts of cue balls and motions of object balls.  When we step up to the next level of organization, the confusion disappears, doesn’t it?  Events of Type A are said to cause events of type B when experiments with proper controls show that an increase in the occurrence of type B events is dependent upon the previous occurrence of Type A events.  But to say that any particular Type A event causes a Type B event is an abuse of language, a mystery. 

 

Is there any way to put those two things together:  the abduction thing and the misattribution thing? 

 

Nick

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Eric Charles
Sent: Tuesday, November 21, 2017 6:43 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Downward Hicausation

 

What great timing! One of the best philosophy comics on the web right now is "Existential Comics." This very week they took a swipe at "causation." Here is an adventure of Sherlock Hume: http://existentialcomics.com/comic/212

I suspect that the best I can do to contribute beyond that is to try fall back on my role of scolding Nick.

Nick should be asserting that "causation" is a metaphor. The billiard ball are the understood scenario. Billiard balls sitting on a still table, unmolested don't move. But if you knock one ball into another ball, the other ball move so. When I say something like "The approaching lion caused the gazelle to move", I am invoking the metaphor that the lion-gazelle relationship is like that of the billiard balls. Had the lion not been doing what it was doing, the gazelle would not have moved away. It isn't simply a "counterfactual." It is an assertion (an abduction) regarding broad patterns of gazelle behavior that can be readily observed under many other situations.** Some of those, I have presumably already seen. Those constitute the "basic implication" of the metaphor. Others I have not observed, and those constitute potential investigatory events - not ethereal thought experiments. As in true of any metaphor, there are also aspects of the billiard-ball scenario I do not intend to map perfectly onto the lion-gazelle scenario (e.g., the lion and gazelle are not spheres).

So that is where Hume and those like him go wrong. They want to beat the billiard balls scenario itself to death. But that's not how metaphors work. There is something understood about the billiard balls, and it is that-understood-thing that is being generalized to another scenario. Any attempt to explain the billiard balls will involve evoking different metaphors, which would entail different assertions (abductions). There is no foundation (Peirce tells us, amongst others), Descartes was on a fool's errand: In the land of inference, it is turtles all the way down.

 

** The breadth of the patterns being referenced is, I believe, where Frank's point about probability slips in. One could certainly simplify the complexity of the assertion by making lumping similar scenarios together and speaking about the probability of a certain gazelle behavior within the cluster of similar situations.

 

-----------
Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
Supervisory Survey Statistician

U.S. Marine Corps

 

On Tue, Nov 21, 2017 at 5:08 PM, gⅼеɳ ☣ <[hidden email]> wrote:

Also Known As: Beware equating experience with existence.

On 11/21/2017 02:00 PM, Frank Wimberly wrote:
> Beware the tendency to think that if you can't immediately measure something then it doesn't exist.


--
☣ gⅼеɳ

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

 

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

 

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

[Frank Wimberly-2]

What philosophers argue about:

On Nov 23, 2017 6:38 AM, "Eric Charles" <[hidden email]> wrote:

"causality makes reference to experiments or to nothing whatsoever"

Well sure.... if we have a generous definition of "experiment". I think you might be better served by the word "investigation".

A consequence is something that would be experienced under some arranged circumstances (or you are talking nonsense). Whether you want to call the act-of-arrangement an experiment is a semantic distraction. Let's say I have the idea that "George is in the elevator" and I make that thought more clear in my mind by thinking through the consequences. One consequence is that if I go to where the elevator door is going to open and wait there, I will see George after the door opens. Is that an experiment? Personally, I would say "yes", but a very minimal sort. A more pretentious scientist - and certainly anyone committed to evangelical scientism - would scoff at applying such a noble label to such a mundane act. Is it an investigatory act? I think everyone would grant it that status.

At some point in his Harvard lectures Perice rephrases his Pragmatic Maxim as follows:
Pragmatism is the principle that every theoretical judgment expressible in a sentence in the indicative mood is a confused form of thought whose only meaning, if it has any, lies in its tendency to enforce a corresponding practical maxim expressible as a conditional sentence having its apodosis in the imperative mood.

So far as I am comfortable with such language, I think it means: Anytime someone trying to make a truth claim about the world, they would be better served by making if-then claims, where the "then" clause states a thing you will do. For example, "George is in the elevator" should be understood as shorthand for an elaborate collection of statements such as "If you want to see George, you will stand in front of the elevator door as it opens", "If you measure the weight of the elevator before and after the passenger exits, you will find it different by one-George's-worth of weight," and "If you want to kill George, you will kill a person in the elevator." 

On Thu, Nov 23, 2017 at 7:44 AM, Eric Charles <[hidden email]> wrote:

Frank, Nick,

I highly recommend that the book "Beyond Versus". Though it limits itself to the context of the nature vs. nurture debates (over a century's worth of them), it fits this context because it is a book-length study of the differences in mindset and result between trying to predict variation and trying to elucidate causal mechanisms. To set the task of determining whether variation in smoking habits relate to variation in cancer rates is quite a different task from trying to determine biological pathways that lead from smoking to cancer. Statistics plays a role in both, to be sure, but the roles are very different and should not be confused. 

On Thu, Nov 23, 2017 at 1:29 AM, Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Frank,

 

I suspect that “actual” causation is just the hypostization of statistical causation.   But we’ll see.

 

I look forward to talking about the models. 

 

Nick

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Frank Wimberly
Sent: Wednesday, November 22, 2017 10:13 PM

To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Downward causation

 

Nick,

 

They are not beyond your ability to understand.  I am happy to explain as much as you like.

 

Frank

Frank Wimberly
Phone <a href="tel:(505)%20670-9918" value="[phone]" target="_blank">[phone]

 

On Nov 22, 2017 10:10 PM, "Nick Thompson" <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi Frank,

 

Please forgive me for not being adequately responsive.  I have looked at some of the sources you have mentioned and they are beyond my ability to understand.  So, I am dependent on you (or others) to explain to me how those models work.  Now, I realize that this perhaps brings us to the threshold of our old argument about whether mathematics needs explanation … it just is,  You like it or you don’t.   Sounds like a good discussion to have on Friday

 

Nick

 

 

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Frank Wimberly
Sent: Wednesday, November 22, 2017 9:55 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Downward causation

 

Nick,

 

Whenever I say this it doesn't seem to register.  Pearl, Glymour, Spirtes, et al have put statistical causal reasoning on a firm foundation.  This involves learning causal models from observational rather that experimental data, including data from the past.  Also remember the distinction between "actual" causation (hitting this jar with a hammer causes it to break) and statistical causation (smoking causes cancer).

 

There is an extensive and growing literature on these topics.  

 

Frank

 

 

Frank Wimberly
Phone <a href="tel:(505)%20670-9918" target="_blank">[phone]

 

On Nov 22, 2017 9:43 PM, "Nick Thompson" <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi, Eric,

 

Well, I would like to say that my personal version of the Pragmatic Maxim:

 

Consider what possible experimental effects the invocation of your conception has; those effects are the entire meaning of your conception.

 

… means that the causality makes reference to experiments or to nothing whatsoever.   The problem is, of course, that strictly speaking that means we cannot apply causality to past events, including evolutionary ones.  That would seem to be overkill.   There is, of course, the comparative method and, of course, “thought experiments.”   Nothing in the maxim, I suppose, requires me to actually perform the experiment; only to conceptualize it.  Seems like mushy ground. 

 

Nick  

 

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Carl Tollander
Sent: Wednesday, November 22, 2017 7:10 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Downward causation

 

One of the recurring conundrums of teaching.  Finger pointing at the moon....

 

 

On Nov 22, 2017 14:32, "Eric Charles" <[hidden email]> wrote:

"Is there any way to put those two things together:  the abduction thing and the misattribution thing? "

I would head in a different direction. The question is about, how one does the attribution; the answer is, most people do it poorly. In a large part, the history of scientific method is a history of determining the conditions under which we allow causal attributions. When I used to teach, I illustrated this most directly in my intro-to-behaviorism class.

 

That class included a lot of discussion of applied behavior analysis (altering the environment of a person in an effort to improve their behavioral functioning within that environment). The central challenge is that the ABA practitioner typically only has access to the (usually a) child for a very limited time, and you don't want to jump to the conclusion that your efforts are working when external factors might equally explain the change in the child's behavior. We work up from very basic methods of increasing confidence. We eventually build up to an ABAB design, in which the prospective solution is applied, then removed, then applied, then removed. Every time the problem behavior goes away, comes back, goes away, and comes back, etc., our confidence increases that our intervention is causing the improvement in behavior, because it is increasingly unlikely that some other factor just so happens to be varying at exactly the same times.

 

Part of the process of "becoming" "a scientist" is increasingly the sophistication of research needed before you draw such conclusions... or, perhaps more accurately, how well you match the tentativeness-vs-solidity of your beliefs to the type of empirical evidence in favor of them. Eventually one is drawing on a wealth of difficult-to-specify domain-specific knowledge in support of any conclusion, but likely justifies the conclusion on the basis of the latest bit of crucial evidence (the one which, for them, solidifies the pattern).

 

Though... suddenly I might have a legitimate response to your inquiry: I would hypothesize that people often mistakenly point at the bit of information that was crucial to them, rather than the larger pattern that the crucial bit of information brought into focus.

 

With Murder on the Orient Express on my mind.... Hercule Poirot would narrate such a thing explicitly, would he not? He would say "The crucial clue in helping me unravel my confusion was X" and then he would explain the larger pattern thus illuminated. A lesser detective would act as if the clue itself were crucial in its own right - "This is the key!" - even if it was a trivial thing on its own, thus committing a dramatic misattribution by virtue of not being self-aware of the abduction taking place.

 

Did that get anywhere?

 

 

-----------
Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
Supervisory Survey Statistician

U.S. Marine Corps

 

On Wed, Nov 22, 2017 at 1:07 AM, Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi, Eric,

 

Thank you, Eric.   OF COURSE, that is what I should have said.  Thank you for saying it so excellently.  Peirce did in fact see causal attribution as a form of abduction.  I  would hope I would have thought to say it myself, if I wasn’t so distracted by the “counter-factual” thang.  But that way of speaking makes me CRAAAAAY-ZEEE.  How can something defined in terms of something that didn’t happen

 

Before you wrote, I was about to get on my “mystery” high horse.  A mystery, you remember, is a confusion arrived at when a bit of language is applied to a situation where it doesn’t really work.  Causal attributions are often falsely singular, in the sense that , we often speak as if  the motion of a billiard ball was caused by the motion of the cue ball, say.  But what we really have to back those attributions up is a pattern of relations between impacts of cue balls and motions of object balls.  When we step up to the next level of organization, the confusion disappears, doesn’t it?  Events of Type A are said to cause events of type B when experiments with proper controls show that an increase in the occurrence of type B events is dependent upon the previous occurrence of Type A events.  But to say that any particular Type A event causes a Type B event is an abuse of language, a mystery. 

 

Is there any way to put those two things together:  the abduction thing and the misattribution thing? 

 

Nick

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Eric Charles
Sent: Tuesday, November 21, 2017 6:43 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Downward Hicausation

 

What great timing! One of the best philosophy comics on the web right now is "Existential Comics." This very week they took a swipe at "causation." Here is an adventure of Sherlock Hume: http://existentialcomics.com/comic/212

I suspect that the best I can do to contribute beyond that is to try fall back on my role of scolding Nick.

Nick should be asserting that "causation" is a metaphor. The billiard ball are the understood scenario. Billiard balls sitting on a still table, unmolested don't move. But if you knock one ball into another ball, the other ball move so. When I say something like "The approaching lion caused the gazelle to move", I am invoking the metaphor that the lion-gazelle relationship is like that of the billiard balls. Had the lion not been doing what it was doing, the gazelle would not have moved away. It isn't simply a "counterfactual." It is an assertion (an abduction) regarding broad patterns of gazelle behavior that can be readily observed under many other situations.** Some of those, I have presumably already seen. Those constitute the "basic implication" of the metaphor. Others I have not observed, and those constitute potential investigatory events - not ethereal thought experiments. As in true of any metaphor, there are also aspects of the billiard-ball scenario I do not intend to map perfectly onto the lion-gazelle scenario (e.g., the lion and gazelle are not spheres).

So that is where Hume and those like him go wrong. They want to beat the billiard balls scenario itself to death. But that's not how metaphors work. There is something understood about the billiard balls, and it is that-understood-thing that is being generalized to another scenario. Any attempt to explain the billiard balls will involve evoking different metaphors, which would entail different assertions (abductions). There is no foundation (Peirce tells us, amongst others), Descartes was on a fool's errand: In the land of inference, it is turtles all the way down.

 

** The breadth of the patterns being referenced is, I believe, where Frank's point about probability slips in. One could certainly simplify the complexity of the assertion by making lumping similar scenarios together and speaking about the probability of a certain gazelle behavior within the cluster of similar situations.

 

-----------
Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
Supervisory Survey Statistician

U.S. Marine Corps

 

On Tue, Nov 21, 2017 at 5:08 PM, gⅼеɳ ☣ <[hidden email]> wrote:

Also Known As: Beware equating experience with existence.

On 11/21/2017 02:00 PM, Frank Wimberly wrote:
> Beware the tendency to think that if you can't immediately measure something then it doesn't exist.


--
☣ gⅼеɳ

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

 

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

 

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove