Re: Causality vs. Entailment

[Steve Johnson <***>]

Thank you Judith! I'm glad I was not completely crazy
thinking that Rosen did not use the terms
interchangeably. I was sure he was not. I think the
atemporal and immanent aspect of entailment is one
major distinction. By contrast, causality is something
humans impose post factum and is necessarily linear
and entangled with psychological encoding of time.
Also because the very word "cause" has so much baggage
in science Rosen was always careful to avoid giving
any teleological appearances to it. He felt more
linguistically free to experiment with and develop the
meaning entailment. Well, that's my feeling anyway.

Thanks again,

- Steve

--- Judith Rosen <***> wrote:

> Ayten's notion of entailment is accurate in
> depicting entailment as 
> sort of a form of "causal potential" although there
> is more here than 
> this. All causality is just a tiny fraction of the
> total potential 
> entailed by systems and their interactions.
> Entailment is also 
> independent of time or directionality, in that
> separate things (parts, 
> components, stages, interactivity, etc) can both
> entail/be-entailed-by 
> one another in totality, but not necessarily
> directly or specifically 
> (like the chicken and the egg). Causality is
> dependent on time flow, 
> among other things, where entailment is not.
> 
> Entailment describes relations, including potential,
> in totality. 
> Causality describes what happens. In this way,
> causality can be seen 
> as a subset of the total entailment potential of
> systems and can be 
> used to try to learn about the entailment relations
> within system 
> organizations. It is entailment that Robert Rosen
> was most seeking to 
> understand because it would include causality (and
> inference, as 
> well-- which describes the version of entailment
> expressed in 
> modeling/simulations) within it. Entailment is the
> more comprehensive 
> category.
> 
> It's sort of like a situation where your pet dog
> reacts to some new 
> stimulus in ways you've never seen it behave before.
> Extreme heat, 
> extreme cold, earthquake, weather, whatever...  The
> entailment was 
> always present, but this is the first causal
> example.
> 
> There have been cases of organisms that were thought
> to be fully 
> understood, only to have it suddenly become manifest
> that what we've 
> seen is only a very long larval stage and the
> organism undergoes a 
> sudden metamorphosis to reach some new stage (which
> we presume is the 
> adult). The Axolotl, of Mexico, was one such
> organism. It developed 
> the capability of breeding while still in its larval
> stage, a fairly 
> well-known phenomenon (neotony). In this case, the
> lakes where this 
> salamander species lived was at very high altitude.
> When taken to 
> lower altitudes, the axolotls began to metamorphose
> into a fairly 
> ordinary salamander species.
> 
> My father was fascinated by the axolotl because he
> said it had far 
> more biological capability in its larval stage,
> which it lost when it 
> metamorphosed. For example, in the larval stage it
> can breathe air or 
> use its gills in an aquatic environment. It can
> completely regenerate 
> an entire limb if cut off. In its natural
> environment, the axolotl 
> never actually fulfills its entailed metamorphosis
> from larval stage 
> to adult stage, living its entire life in the larval
> stage. Thus, 
> entailment and causality diverge in the same
> species.
> 
> My father actually wrote a fictional short story
> based on this 
> phenomenon, entitled "What Really Happened To Jeff"
> or something like 
> that, where the main character is a college student
> whose roommate was 
> experimenting on axolotls and developed a theory
> that our current 
> human form may just be a case of arrested
> development in the larval 
> stage. He figured out how to trigger it and
> disappeared without a 
> trace with no clues as to what could have happened
> to him (except for 
> the dessicated sea squirt found lying on the floor
> of the lab...).
> 
> Entailment is what is responsible for side effects;
> the so called 
> "hidden variables" or unknown relations within a
> system being studied.
> 
> Judith
>   ----- Original Message ----- 
>   From: Ayten Aydin
>   To: ***
>   Sent: Saturday, February 12, 2005 3:23 AM
>   Subject: Re: [ROSEN] 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
> 
> 
>   ----- Original Message ----- 
>   From: "John M" <***>
>   To: <***>
>   Sent: Friday, February 11, 2005 1:45 AM
>   Subject: Re: Causality vs. Entailment
> 
> 
>   > Dear Steve,
>   > I always had my linguistic problems with
> 'entaliment', so I looked 
> up my
>   > li'l dictionary which said: "entail": 'involve,
> as a necessary 
> result',
>   > while "cause" is the other end: 'something that
> brings about a 
> result'. I
>   > was inclined to read entailment as the 'effect'
> (consequence?) end 
> 
=== message truncated ===



                
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