Re: Entailment in the Ambience: Causality

[Tim Gwinn <***>]

JJK wrote:
> In pain [plain?] vernacular, I think you are saying, and hopefully we
would
> all agree, that say, we simply need to know better than to trust our
> senses on matters of fractionability. Does that work?

Yep, that works for me. To me, if fractionability cannot be entailed by
distinguishability, then it cuts both ways: we can't make the usual kinds of
assumptions of fractionability of systems, and conversely, we also can't
categorically assert that there are not systems which are fractionable.

Regards,
Tim


> -----Original Message-----
> From: ROSEN Forum [mailto:*** Behalf Of John
> Kineman
> Sent: Wednesday, September 22, 2004 7:54 PM
> To: ***
> Subject: Re: Entailment in the Ambience: Causality
>
>
> Tim,
>
> Tim Gwinn wrote:
>
> > distinguishability does not entail fractionability means that our
> >capacity to organize our experiences and make identifications and
> >categorizations of these experiences does not (and cannot)
> thereby guarantee
> >that what is identified can generally, much less universally, be studied
> >apart from, or ignoring, the context in which it was identified without
> >alteration or loss of qualities or behaviors, or equally, that
> the study of
> >the separate members of some collection of identified things will be an
> >adequate substitute for the study of the assembled whole which comprises
> >that collection.
> >
> >
> >
> JK: This part of your post got through to me, I think. I would word the
> explanation differently, but I do understand the idea now that you are
> saying, that just because we can distinguish something, like a tree,
> does not mean it can then be considered scientifically as an isolated
> system. If that is your meaning, yes, I wholeheartedly agree. The
> problem in the more precise wording of this that I focused on earlier is
> that observation itself is an abstraction of that contextual reality,
> just to be able to see it at all. But perhaps that is an unnecessary
> subtlety - a subtlety which JM was kind to point out and which I agreed
> with, but small in comparison to the greater problem of compounding that
> observational limitation by then making models based on formalizing that
> view. In pain vernacular, I think you are saying, and hopefully we would
> all agree, that say, we simply need to know better than to trust our
> senses on matters of fractionability. Does that work?
>
> >        More generally, our ability to
> distinguish/discriminate/identify is not
> >provably an ability to perceive ontological boundaries of any kind.
> >This could lead to extreme skepticism, or simply to caution, in science
> >depending on one's view.
> >
> Yea, I think this says the same thing.
>
> John K.