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It seems to me that there is still some confusion about what Robert
Rosen defined as "causality" and what he defined as "entailment". So, I'm going
to have another go at trying to illustrate the differences.
I have previously described causality as "what happens". Observable
phenomena and behaviors. Science tends to look at such phenomena and behaviors
as "effects" and try to determine what the "causes" of those
effects are. In this way, whatever effects we are observing, the causes are in
the past and we have to try and retrace the turn of events through the
timeline and hypothesize what the causes were. We then conduct experiments
whereby we try to recreate the circumstances and generate the same causality--
which we judge by the "effects". If we manage to re-create the effects, we
assume we have found the answers to our question.
However, problems with this whole approach abound. One biggie:
There are many different ways to generate the same effects, which is why a
simulacrum confuses people. Mimicry of life is not life, and the reason it is
not life has to do with the underlying entailments. Secondly, time is
involved in all causality. Two identical chemical reactions can have
radically different effects if we change the rates of reaction, as one example.
Various aspects of time have distinct causal impacts on system behavior and
phenomena. Entailment is what specifies what those causal impacts are going to
be.
When discussing causes and effects, we are looking at one
temporally fractured piece of causality and when we are speaking of causality,
we are speaking of one, temporally specified, set of outcomes which are only a
tiny fraction of potential outcomes that could have been. All causality is
temporally bound, and any cause is only a cause in terms of the consequent
effect. In an unfractured situation, any cause, itself, can also be seen to be
an effect. So what causes the causes of the causes???
It's hard to illustrate this verbally, but the computer keyboard
makes drawing a picture difficult as well.... I'll give it a whirl,
though:
..... cause-->effect ....(which changes labels and becomes...)
cause--> effect..... and so on.
To speak in terms of particular causes and effects is actually a
reductionistic mode of analysis. What we really want to know about is the
underlying entailment pattern which is responsible for any given series of
causes and effects. To speak of causality in a general way is actually to
be referring to entailments. All causes and effects are specified by entailments. What we want
to understand are the aspects of Natural Law that are at work in any series of
causes and effects. That's what entailment embodies. This is why we try to
transfer those entailments to our formalisms and models (inferential entailment
to embody the causal entailment). Entailment relations will hold, which is why
models that are accurate in their entailment can commute with the real system.
Living systems make very good use of this with anticipatory behavior, in
fact. Causality follows entailment.
Does that clarify (I hope)?
Judith
BioTheory: An E-Journal of General Science in the Rosennean Complexity
Paradigm http://www.rosen-enterprises.com/RobertRosen/BioTheoryLaunch.htm
Website address: http://www.rosen-enterprises.com/ |