FRIAM and causality

[Nick Thompson]

Phil,

For give me for being dense, but I couldnt see the connection between my probe and your response.  Nick


----- Original Message -----
From: Phil Henshaw
To: nickthompson at earthlink.net;The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Cc: gbarker at bucknell.edu; pderr at clarku.edu; caleb.thompson
Sent: 11/12/2007 5:53:01 AM
Subject: RE: [FRIAM] FRIAM and causality


But the question you posed wasn't whether you could make a subject trivial, which anyone can do with any subject I think, but whether you can make it meaningful.    Can causality be meaningful is a much more open question that does not have several of the traps built in it seems to me.

The one phenomenological dilemma I keep seeing at FRIAM is that we skirt the question of whether one needs to take on the laborious task of inventing a whole new mode of explanation for the systems of the world that have behaviors of their own, or do we just continue bagging them in along with the things that are determined from their surroundings, since that's where we started?



Phil Henshaw                       ????.?? ? `?.????
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-----Original Message-----
From: [hidden email] [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Nicholas Thompson
Sent: Monday, November 12, 2007 2:30 AM
To: friam at redfish.com
Cc: gbarker at bucknell.edu; pderr at clarku.edu; caleb.thompson
Subject: [FRIAM] FRIAM and causality


?The truth arises from arguments amongst friends? -- David Hume
 
One of my goals at Friam, believe it or not, is actually to get some fundamental issues settled amongst us.  We had, last week, a brisk discussion about causality.  I don?t think I was particularly articulate, and so, to push that argument forward, I would like to try to state my position clearly and succinctly.    
 
The argument was between some who felt that causality was ?real? and those that felt that it was basically a figment of our imaginations.   The argument may seem frivolous, but actually becomes of consequence anytime anyone starts to think about how one proves that X is the cause of Y.  Intuitively, X is the cause of Y if Y is X?s ?fault?.  To say that X is the cause of Y is to accuse X of Y.   Given my current belief that story-telling is at the base of EVERYTHING, I think you convince somebody that X is the cause of Y just by telling the most reasonable story in which it seems obvious that Y would not have occurred had not X occurred.  But there is no particular reason that the world should always be a reasonable place, and therefore, it is also ALWAYS possible to tell an UNREASONABLE story that shows that Y?s occurrence was not the responsibility of X, no matter how reasonable the original causal attribution is.  One of us asked for a hammer and nail, claiming that if he could but drive a nail into the surface of one of St. John?s caf? tables, none of us would be silly enough to doubt that his hammering had been the cause of the nails penetration of the table.  Not withstanding his certainty on this matter, several of us instantly offered to be JUST THAT SILLY!  We would claim, we said, that contrary to his account, his hammering had had nothing to do with the nail?s penetration, but that the accommodating molecules of wood directly under the nail had randomly parte d and sucked the nail into their midst.  
 
How validate a reasonable causal story against the infinite number of unreasonable causal stories that can always be proposed as alternatives.  By experience, obviously.  We have seen hundreds of cases where nails were driven into wood when struck by hammers (and a few cases where the hammer missed the nail, the nail remained where it was, and the thumb was driven into the wood.)  Also, despite its theoretical possibility, none of us has EVER seen a real world object sucked into a surface by random motion of the surface?s molecules.  So it is the comparative analysis of our experience with hammers and nails that would have convinced us that the hammering had driven in the nail.  
 
            So what is the problem?  Why did we not just agree to that proposition and go on?  The reason to me is simple: the conventions of our language prevent us from arriving at that conclusion.  We not only  say that Hammers Cause Nails to embed in tables, which is what we know to be true, we also  say that THIS Hammer caused THIS nail to be embedded in the wood.  Thus our use of causality is a case of misplaced concreteness.  Causality is easily attributed to the pattern of relations amongst hammers and nails, but we err when we allow ourselves to assert that that higher order pattern is exhibited by any of its contributory instances.  In fact, that in our experience the missed nails have not been driven into the wood is as much a real part of our notions of causality and hammering as the fact that a hit nail is.   Causality just cannot be attributed to an individual instance.  
 
            The fallacy of misplaced concreteness is so widespread in our conversation that we could barely speak without it,  but it is a fallacy all the same.  Other instances of it are intentions, dispositions, personality traits, communication, information etc., etc., and such mathematical fictions as the slope of a line at a point.   Whenever we use any of these terms, we attribute to single instances properties of aggregates of which they are part.  
 
            Now, how do we stop arguing about this?  First of all, we stop and give honor to the enormous amount of information that actually goes into making a rational causal attribution that hammering causes embedding, information which is not available in any of its instances.   Second, we then stop and give honor to  the incredible power of the human mind to sift through this data and identify patterns in it.  Third, and finally,  we stop and wonder at whatever flaw it is in our evolution, our neurology, our cognition, our culture, or our language that causes us to lodge this knowledge in the one place it can never be ? single instances.  
 
            Are we done?
 
Nick


Nicholas S. Thompson
Research Associate, Redfish Group, Santa Fe, NM (nick at redfish.com)
Professor of Psychology and Ethology, Clark University (nthompson at clarku.edu)
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