|
Hi Jamie,
I view entailment, through my father's development of the term, to
embody and reflect those aspects of Natural Law that bind and guide all aspects
of the universe. Causality represents the ongoing, active expressions or
manifestations of such entailments in the natural world ("natural";
as differentiated from "formal"-- the world of formalisms).
As he (RR) said in that text that I quoted; we can only
perceive the entailment relations through causal manifestations of them. But the
danger is that we are using our own minds, knowledge, imagination, etc, to try
and discern what those causal entailments might be, and we can only check our
accuracy through commutation of modeling relations and predictions based on
those relations. The danger inherent in the whole process is that
relative success in doing so with simple systems has given us certain
wrong conclusions about the nature of the universe in general. We have ignored
the areas where our models don't commute entirely, figuring the flaws were
minimal; just little details probably, and not anything fundamentally wrong with
our model... But complexity has a way of magnifying little details, doesn't it?!
As you know, Robert Rosen was convinced there was, indeed, something
fundamentally wrong with our model in general and the main problem was a total
lack of attention paid to the importance of relational causality and matters of
organization, by science.
Judith
|