|
Tim Gwinn wrote: So, my view is
that the study of entailments in the external world is the study
of causality. And if our notions of causality are inadequate, then they
need to be revamped/expanded.
I would reword this as follows: The study of entailments in the
external world (causal entailments) is accomplished via the study of causality.
If our notions of causality are inadequate, then our understanding of the
underlying entailments need to be revamped/expanded.
In this excerpt you quoted from my father:
Robert Rosen wrote: "In one way
or another, the concept of causality dominates our conception of what
transpires in the external, public world. In broadest terms, causality
comprehends a system of entailments, which relate to events and phenomena
occurring therein. The concept itself is due to Aristotle, who associated it
with the answers given to the question, "Why?"; indeed, to Aristotle, science
itself was the system atic study of "the why of things," and hence entirely
concerned with elucidating such causal relations." [EL p. 84, ital.
orig.]
He says "the concept of causality dominates our
conception... " as in what we can observe and study/think/create mental
models about..."of what transpires in the external, public world. In
broadest terms, causality comprehends a system of entailments..." He uses the
word "comprehends" in an unusual way, there. What he means is "embodies"..." a
system of entailments, which relate to events and phenomena occurring therein."
The word "therein" meaning; "in the public, external
world".
One of the reasons this excerpt seems so oblique is because it
comes out of a larger discussion about Objectivity and the Mind/Brain duality,
which is, itself, part of an even larger discussion on "Drawing the Boundary
Between Subject and Object". The two paragraphs preceding the one Tim quoted,
plus one which is alluded to, by a physicist named "Bergman" in 1973, are
as follows:
Robert Rosen wrote: "The world "foreign to
consciousness," which Bergman evokes in the above citation comprises the
external world of events and phenomena: the public world. The world of mind and
consciousness, on the other hand, is a private world; what happens in it, and in
whatever it touches, constitutes the subjective. We should notice that such a
partition of our immediate universe of impressions and percepts, into a public
part and a private part, is itself private. There is no public test for
"publicity"; it is something privately posited.
Bergman wrote: "Planck designated in an excellent way...
the goal of physics as the complete separation of the world from the
individuality of the structuring mind; i.e., the emancipation of anthropomorphic
elements. That means: it is the task of physics to build a world which is
foreign to consciousness and in which consciousness is
obliterated."
"The entire concern of science, especially
theoretical science, has been to make public phenomena apprehensible to the
private, cognizing mind. The mind-brain problem represents an attempt to go the
other way: to pull the private world into the public one, and thus to make the
mind apprehensible to itself by expressing it in phenomenal
terms."
The next paragraph is the one Tim cited. So we see here that this
was not an attempt, on my father's part, to define the difference between
causality and entailment, but a completely different discussion. Because of
that, the language is a bit more difficult to decipher, but it still does, as
Tim said, reflect my father's belief structure, as I attempted to elucidate,
above.
Judith
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Thursday, February 17, 2005 8:44
AM
Subject: Re: [ROSEN] Causality vs
Entailment
Steve,
Below
are some quotes which I think address your question quite directly. I try to
quote in full to keep them in context:
"In practice, as we shall
see, we tend to require much more of our selves and our universe than
natural law. To describe these it is useful to think intuitively about the
very concept of law. As we shall see, this is already not an elementary
concept and involves several distinct aspects which we shall call
entailment and surrogacy respectively. Intuitively the very
idea of law embodies a kind of inexorability or necessity. In practice, this
tends to boil down to repeatability; speaking roughly, this means that "the
same" result ensues from "the same" set of circumstances. Indeed, this
repeatability is what we actually mean when we say at least some events
occurring in our universe are not entirely whimsical or arbitrary. This was
the first condition for natural law itself. It is this kind of necessity
which is the essence of entailment. We would say that under such
circumstances an outcome is entailed by the circumstances which produce it.
It is the discovery of such entailments which constitute the endeavors of
science. In the external world, and the strivings of at least logic and
mathematics in th esymbolic world, it can be seen that the concept of
entailment is manifested by two broad oceans, depending whether we are
considering the objective enternal world or the subjective internal one. The
study of entailment in the external world constitutes causality, in
the internal world the corresponding study constitutes inference."
[RC p. 89, underline orig.]
"We recall that
mathematics itself belongs to the realm of symbolic systems, which is itself
a part of the class of languages. As such, mathematics is subject to that
brand of entailment known as inferential entailment. Moreover, as we have
seen, the proposition of language may be considered either entirely in
themselves or as descriptions of what takes place in other realms of system
theory. Most particularly, we will be concerned with the natural systems
which comprise our external worlds and about which information comes to us
through our sensory mechanisms. Natural systems, as we recall, are governed
by other modes of entailment which are collectively called causality." [RC
p. 92-93]
"In one way or another,
the concept of causality dominates our conception of what
transpires in the external, public world. In broadest terms, causality
comprehends a system of entailments, which relate to events and phenomena
occurring therein. The concept itself is due to Aristotle, who associated it
with the answers given to the question, "Why?"; indeed, to Aristotle,
science itself was the systm atic study of "the why of things," and hence
entirely concerned with elucidating such causal relations." [EL p. 84, ital.
orig.]
"As far as science is
concerned, it is inseperable as a human activity from the belief that the
external world, of material events and phenomena, itself comprise a system
of entailments. That is, the events and phenomena that we observe and
cognize are not entirely arbitrary or whimsical but must satisfy definite
relations. Moreover,these relations may be discerned and articulated, and
they collectively constitute the province of causality and manifest
the system of causal entailments described originally by Aristotle
two millenia ago." [EL p. 158, ital. orig.]
The Aristotelian categories move
us somewhat in that direction, but not far enough. As Judith said in her
reply to you, context-dependence and organization both play roles in
entailments and in my view, this means we need a more comprehensive
understanding of causality so that such things which are not 'material'
(in the usual sense) are still included in what we call 'causality', and that
accordingly our formalisms for formal models likewise are expanded
so that such entailments can be represented in inferential terms. Relational
modelling adds a way of formally (i.e., inferentially)
representing entailments which relate to organization, and whose
counterparts in the external world, in my view, are causal entailments
and so fall entirely within the province of 'causality'.
Regards,
Tim
|