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Re: Causality vs. Entailment



Dear Ayten,
thank you for your considerate reflections, they deserve consideration. I should have waited till those who know more about the circumstances than me give their thoughts but I risk the 'si tacuisses' and give you my fast tuppence:
 
1./
So you put entailment into a completely different ballpark from the 'simple causality' - while I considered it almost synonymous with 'effect'. Interesting and considerable.
I called (my) chaotic = nonlinear, and I feel you use it in a similar way. Then I extended my views to conclude that whatever we deem chaotic is an outcome of 'influences' we did not consider in our (model-based) thinking. Maybe: we didn't even know about such. No magic wand. Rather: ignorance (a malaise being cured by epistemic enrichment).
If I want to
translate it into my verbiage: "entailment" is an outcome seen in a more wholistic view than the limited, the closely reduced simple "narrow-model causal" view of a system. OK, I buy it. Goes closer to RR. - Still not a (maximum?) natural view. Still applicable in science. Not infinitely vague. Maybe even computable.
I guess your 'self-organizing' refers to the 'evolving stage' -while it (a system) picks up the optimum "structure" in the forming. (Later on a SELF-organization would be an oximoron, because once a (broader) 'system' took shape, it requires some additional input to undergo any  (slef/re-)  organizational' changes). Be it observed or not.
 
2./
I had a 'snide' remark meaning that there is NO gender unless we consider (at least) TWO. The kaon of the one handed applause.
I definitely distract my question from the 'What is Life" start-stage, since procaryotes are living without genderizing.
I cannot figure a 'development' from a nonexisting lower stage into a "more complex' one. I am looking for the deterministic routes leading (maybe) to something totally different from what our model included earlier. Potentials for anything NEW have been around, we just did not know about them. No Deus ex Machina miracle, be it in a Rosennean or otherwise identified machine.
I feel in your "chain of evolution" a Darwinian taste. He was a genius, but worked in a narrow model of Gaia. A cell is a complexity within 'life' (if you like the _expression_) just as much 'complex' as much we include in our model.
 
How "low complexity" was life before Watson and Crick?
and how little-complex the DNA was when only 4% was (assigned to as) relevant genetic content? We learn and the "complexness" of our models increases with more and more discovery we allow into the content within our (as well widening) boundaries. It is a learning process.
"At the end" we face a natural system with no limitations.
 
We ARE reductionists by our capabilities. It's all right. We just TRY to look wider and so did Robert Rosen.
 
These are my prima vista suggestions, not a preaching.
 
Cheers
 
John M
 
----- Original Message -----
To: ***
Sent: Saturday, February 12, 2005 3:23 AM
Subject: Re: Causality vs. Entailment

Dear John,
I reflected on your following query-cum-conception on entailment as expressed in your sentence:
 
"I was inclined to read entailment as the 'effect' (consequence?) end of a causality-based process (pair?) where 'cause' is the originating end."
I may not be saying anything new to you but still my query-cum-conception for 'entailment' is: It occurs as an entanglement of many ingredients in nonlinear processes, that is it happens in complex systems to bring about something new - never existed before - out of several existing things.   In this sense, poetically thinking,  "entailment" is the 'magic wand' which looks for suitable matches and potential connections among them and weld them to produce an emergent thing. This process should be self-organizing. It needs diversity gradually which increases as the system's complexity increases, and thus it goes away from simple systems where the cause&effect chain operates. There, there is no need for entailment, it is a direct cause and resulting something/effect.
 
Certainly I need confirmation or correction as this concept is one of the foundational stones of Rosennean Theory, I guess.
 
On our second query:
"I still hope that somebody (JK? DF? AA?) has an idea what circumstances prompted (not caused - as in a narrow model-view) the 'change' from the genderless procaryotic mitosis world to evolve into an (eucaryotic) bisexual proliferation."
 
Is it not questioning the initial conditions for the emergence of life, thus directly related to the question of "What is Life?" and the chain of evolution also fro simple cell to gradually complexing -both physically and psychologically- living bodies. 
 
I am however naively wondering whether we are not going back to querying initial conditions of the appearence of both simplicity and then gradually complexity on earth in general?? A revision may not be a bad idea!
 
My best,
Aten