Posted by
Phil Henshaw-2 on
Nov 13, 2007; 1:08pm
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/FRIAM-and-causality-tp525252p525256.html
Nick,
I'm glad you clarified, and it's a valid poit. My reply wasn't too far off. The problem is that to study what IS happeniing rather than what SHOULD BE (locating cause where it occurs rather than in unobservable imaginery events) requires a new method.
Phil
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry
-----Original Message-----
From: "Nicholas Thompson" <
[hidden email]>
Date: Mon, 12 Nov 2007 21:10:11
To:"friam" <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] FRIAM and causality
Friends,
Darn it! I cant get anybody to tangle with the fundamental thing I am
saying here. Anytime we embody something that is true of the aggregate of
observables in a single unobservable case, we are committing a fallacy.
The locus classicus of this fallacy is mental causation, where we hypostize
our awareness of a pattern of a person's behavior and lodge it in an
unobservable event with in his "mind" (or brain, it really doesn't matter).
Here the problem is at its most obscene, but it lurks elsewhere.
I am puzzling here how to put the point in the MOST ANNOYING WAY POSSIBLE,
so that SOMEBODY will feel obligated to address it.
Let's try this: To say that a probability attaches to an event at an
instant is to commit this fallacy. What we know is a past relative
frequency of relevant conditions and relevant consequences. Instantaneous
probability is a fiction.
OK. so perhaps it's a heuristic fiction. Well, not if it directs
attention away from the evaluation of our knowledge, concerning the
relative frequency of events. Perhaps another way make this point is
that "cause" is an emergent.
"Cause" is just another one of those misattributions. We saw the hammer
hit the nail, but to say that the Hammer caused the nail to penetrate the
wood is to invent an unobservable, an instantaneous "cause".
Like most people, I would prefer to be stoned to death than be ignored.
Nick
> [Original Message]
> From: Eric Smith <desmith at santafe.edu>
> To: <nickthompson at earthlink.net>; The Friday Morning Applied Complexity
Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
> Date: 11/12/2007 1:29:08 PM
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] FRIAM and causality
>
> Hi Nick,
>
> I assume you already know about the work Judea Pearl did to define a
> notion of causality in the context of inference on Boolean networks?
> I don't have citations on this, because I only learned about it
> recently in someone's talk, but I gather it is fairly widely known.
> Happily it doesn't claim to address all questions in which a given
> kind of word appears, so it probably contributed something concrete to
> answering a single class of them.
>
> What is that old folk saying, said with a sigh?
> "Always a physicist, never a philosopher."
>
> Best,
>
> Eric
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