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Judith, I have no idea who your remarks below are
directed toward, but if they are directed toward me, let me reiterate that I still
completely disagree with your characterization of entailment vs. causality. As
far as I am concerned in my reading of his works, all entailments in the
external world are causal entailments; all entailments in the formal world are inferential
entailments. “Causality” is not “what happens”, it refers
the entire locus of causal entailments in the external world. I see no passages in his writing to indicate
that either 1) “causality” refers only to “what happens”,
or 2) that there are entailments in the external world which are not causal entailments. Regards, Tim From: ROSEN Forum
[mailto:*** On Behalf
Of Judith Rosen 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 |