FRIAM and CAUSALITY (was NOT "complexity and emergence")

[Nick Thompson]

Dammit, you guys,  you took MY thread, dragged it off into the bushes,
worried it like a fetid gazelle, and then  left it there to ROT!

My point -- still not dealt with, i don't think --  is that when we speak
of x causing y, we usually speak of what Frank Wimberley called, in his
early response to this thread, "token causality."
i.e. an instance of x causing y.  But we actually know NOTHING about
causality in the particular instance.  What we DO know about, because our
brains are very good at detecting patterns, is patterns amongst events in
the past.  So to speak of causality in the particular instance in the
PRESENT is ACTUALLY to speak of patterns in the past.  In this way,
causality is just like a whole bunch of psychological attributions, such as
hunger, lust, disposition, intention, and biological attributions such as
"adapted to" and "geenfur" where the argument goes on about individual
cases but the knowledge is about patterns.  

YES, MY POINT WAS (Get to the point, Thompson!)  that we ought to be
talking about the PATTERNS.  That conversation about the individual present
instances is actually a distraction.  Let's STOP substituting a
conversation about something we don't know anything about (causality as
instance) and get busy on the much more complicated conversation about
causality as pattern.  

Actually, I am not so much concerned with causality in general, as I am
about psychological and biological attributions.  What I hate is that
people are busily looking for "motivation" in the single instance in the
brain while nobody is looking for the organization of behavior that IS
motivation. (If I read one more SCINEWS article about how wonderful it is
that the brain lights up when the organism is thinking, I shall ....  shall
.......................cancel my subscription!  Of COURSE the brain DOES
motivation, thought, etc.; but that doesnt mean that mental evens are brain
events!  Good LORD! )

 Roughly analogous to killing the golden goose.  For heaven's sake, let's
just harvest the eggs AND GET ON WITH IT!

But I love you all!

NIck

ps.  For those of you who are EP-ists, I would love to join in a
conversation about the human tendancy to concretise pattern ... the fallacy
of misplaced concreteness.  I think this is the common pattern that unifies
all thes attributions and is the pattern of patterns that needs
explanation.  

> [Original Message]
> From: <friam-request at redfish.com>
> To: <friam at redfish.com>
> Date: 12/11/2007 10:04:35 AM
> Subject: Friam Digest, Vol 54, Issue 9
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> Today's Topics:
>
>    1. complexity and emergence (was: FRIAM and causality)
>       (Glen E. P. Ropella)
>    2. JungleDisk - Reliable online storage powered by Amazon S3 ? -
>       Jungle Disk (Owen Densmore)
>    3. Re: JungleDisk - Reliable online storage powered by Amazon S3
>       (Marcus G. Daniels)
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Mon, 10 Dec 2007 13:38:19 -0800
> From: "Glen E. P. Ropella" <gepr at tempusdictum.com>
> Subject: [FRIAM] complexity and emergence (was: FRIAM and causality)
> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
> <friam at redfish.com>
> Message-ID: <475DB1CB.3060809 at tempusdictum.com>
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> Phil Henshaw on 12/09/2007 01:13 PM:
> > Well, hopefully returning to the main thread.   The question seems to
> > concern an observation that information can be 'misused', letting people
> > capitalize on the interesting ways in which 'bad models' don't fit, to
> > display a 'reality' beyond the information which is both verifiably
> > present and verifiably explorable.   To me that seems to have a bearing
> > on the sort of opposite principle of Niels Bohr.  I believe Bohr's idea
> > was that because science works only with information that a fundamental
> > assumption of science must be that nothing exists which can not be
> > represented with information, ...and so, only immature thinkers could
> > possibly doubt that at the most fundamental level the structure of the
> > universe is that "God rolls dice", I think it goes.
> >
> > Do you see that connection or any bits and pieces of it?  Or are these
> > durable shapes in the fog between the models something different?
>
> I definitely see a connection.  The "interstitial spaces" or
> "interactions" that are the primary subject of complexity studies fall
> (to my mind) squarely in the category of "implicit" or "not clearly
> identified, named, or described".
>
> To me, much of the controversy around both "complexity" and "emergence"
> lies in this very sense of the "unameable".  It's not so much that the
> words are meaningless, abused, or reflect subjective phenomena, as it is
> that these are words intended to refer to un-identified, un-named, or
> un-described things.  Once a phenomenon is identified, named, and
> described explicitly, it ceases to be "emergent" or "complex" in some
> (non-technical) uses of those terms.
>
> I don't particularly relate it to Bohr's principle (as you've described
> it), though.  I'm a fan of _naive_ approaches to understanding and
> manipulating things because a naive perspective can help one escape
> infinite regress ("rat holes") and paradox set up by historical trends.
>  So, when convenient, it's a good thing to just assume reality is as its
> portrayed in our (always false) models.  But, like all perspectives,
> it's useful to be able to don and doff them in order to achieve some end.
>
> In the end, most of the "shapes in the fog" _can_ be identified, named,
> and described.  But, some of them resist.  It's tough to tell whether
> such "shapes in the fog" are real or just an artifact of the models
> through which we look.  In the end, given the tools we have available,
> we can't state, definitively, that some thing we cannot identify, name,
> or describe clearly is a thing at all.  We are left with falsification
> as the only reliable method.  We can never say:  "Bob's description is
> true."  We can only say: "Bob's description has not yet been shown
> false."  Likewise, we can't say "that shape in the fog _is_ merely bias
> resulting from millenia of bad language".  We can only say "models 1-n
> fail to capture that shape in the fog".
>
> - --
> glen e. p. ropella, 971-219-3846, http://tempusdictum.com
> There is all the difference in the world between treating people equally
> and attempting to make them equal. -- F.A. Hayek
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>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 2
> Date: Mon, 10 Dec 2007 17:40:23 -0700
> From: Owen Densmore <owen at backspaces.net>
> Subject: [FRIAM] JungleDisk - Reliable online storage powered by
> Amazon S3 ? - Jungle Disk
> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
> <friam at redfish.com>
> Message-ID: <90E1A1BF-7206-4DB1-AFA6-207B9F2FD075 at backspaces.net>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; delsp=yes; format=flowed
>
> Anyone use this?
>     http://www.jungledisk.com/
>
> .. a friend mentioned it while discussing having my "desktop"  
> available everywhere.  So I'm hoping I can either use the remote disk  
> in real-time .. i.e. literally edit remote files .. or use it as an
> incremental update.
>
>      -- Owen
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 3
> Date: Mon, 10 Dec 2007 17:48:00 -0700
> From: "Marcus G. Daniels" <marcus at snoutfarm.com>
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] JungleDisk - Reliable online storage powered by
> Amazon S3
> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
> <friam at redfish.com>
> Message-ID: <475DDE40.4020903 at snoutfarm.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
>
> >
> >  <http://www.jungledisk.com/>
> > .. a friend mentioned it while discussing having my "desktop"  
> > available everywhere.
> On this topic, another interesting technology for around the house.  USB
> monitors (monitors with graphics cards built in) -- combine with a Wifi
> USB extender.  No wires!
>
> http://www.displaylink.com/shop.html
> http://www.iogear.com/main.php?loc=product&Item=GUWH104KIT
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
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> End of Friam Digest, Vol 54, Issue 9
> ************************************

[Marcus G. Daniels]

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[David Eric Smith]

Hi Nick,

Given the energy (and time!) apparently available to this thread, it
is with some trepidation that I poke my head out of the weeds.  (On
the other hand, congratulations, Steve).

I like your last post about patterns, except for the strong emphasis
on psychological/mental attribution, if causality is the example we
wish to talk about.  As in the case with data compression or phase
transitions in condensed-matter physics, it is all fine that someone
notices the data redundancy or order parameter in the material.  But
this should only be possible with any reliability if such a pattern is
available in the system, to be recognized.  My typical (and probably
tiresome by now) example for the phase transitions is: give me water
at +1 deg C and -1 deg C at 1 atm pressure, and then apply any
learning algorithm you like to provide a short algorithm to ask
whatever questions I put to it about the orientation and motion of the
molecules, and how they differ in the two samples.  Maybe some
algorithms won't learn anything useful for short descriptions, but in
a fair casino I would bet that most of those that do learn anything
will learn to estimate the order parameter, and then to use it as the
starting point for quick prediction of many observables.  There simply
isn't anything else that has particularly changed between the
properties of the two samples, and everything that has changed is a
deterministic function of the order parameter, even the moments of all
the distributions for fluctuations.  And however they name it or
represent it, I expect that the predictive content of what they learn
will be more or less the same as that in what we call the order
parameter (the existence and direction of crystalline orientation).

Something like that would seem appropriate to causality, at least for
the simple forms that we largely understand, such as classical
dynamics in physics, or Pearl's boolean nets in inference.  To argue
that psychological/mental attribution is anything beyond one-of-many
possible learning processes, you would have to convince me that the
concept of causation is at root a behavioral one -- perhaps some kind
of agent-patient relation, or even something in the social domain --
and that as a result the attribution of causation by people contains
particular aspects that other learning algorithms would not typically
produce.  For astrology and a large part of the metaphor we apply to
nations and other institutions, and things of that sort, I would go
along with this.  Otherwise I counter that the pattern is "in the
thing (the process in question)", and not particularly in one learner
versus another, who try to learn about the thing.

This small point of dispute, which maybe wouldn't even bother you, is
quite in keeping with your overall assertion that repeated experience
is needed to decide whether a pattern is appropriately characterized
with the logical structure of causality (a properly contextualized if
not-x, then not-y).

Of course, having agreed with you so far, I suddenly realize that I
will probably disagree with you now and start an argument, which had I
known it, would have kept me from starting this note.  If a relation
(a compressed description of some regularity) is available in a
process to be learned, and described with the logical structure of
causality, then in what sense does the system itself care whether the
learner needs repeated exposure to learn it.  The repetition is a
feature of the needs of learning algorithms, largely irrespective of
what they are trying to learn about.  How does it do anything but
needlessly complicate my description of nature, to suppose that other
instances than this one (of some process) have anything to do with the
existence or non-existence of an aspect of the process that admits
description as causal?  If it exists, the simplest description of its
existence is whichever one omits all un-needed elements of context;
such a description would then put its existence in each instance
without further qualifications.

So causation (in ordinary material processes or appropriate branches
of information theory) is admissible in our descriptions as a property
of the thing, in each instance, and largely independent of the fact
that we should be the ones characterizing the thing; the need for
repeated exposure is a property of us, largely independent of whether
causal relation or some other pattern is what we will notice in the
thing.

Anyway, don't know if those opinions will address what you are after,
and they are probably less sophisticated than what has already been
said here.

All best,

Eric

[Robert Holmes]

Correct me if I'm wrong Nick, but isn't this all simply a case of hard
scientists (physicists, chemists etc.) understanding causality and
attributing it appropriately and soft scientists (biologists, ethologists
etc.) not?
Robert


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