Re: Causality vs Entailment, high stakes now

[Dan Fiscus <***>]

Judith and all,

Interesting discussion on entailment in both its causal and
inferential aspects. An important issue to me is that while
these two (inference vs causality) may seem separable and
of different fundamental quality or type, they are not really
separable IMO. And the current world situation is good
evidence of two things: 1) that our past theory of entailment
in which we thought our inferential models - almost all
mechanistic - were good, true approximations of causal
entailment and the why-because pairs of the "real world" is
being shown to be flawed, and 2) that inference (as in
human mental modeling) and real world causality are not
separable. I say the current world situation shows this, since
what we are seeing is human self-destruction and threats
to the most basic life support needs (fully required for and
inseparable from our ability to think, infer, model, have a
living, functioning mind) based on the extreme amplification
of our largely mechanistic science and technology with its
specific brand of mechanistic entailment theory that Rosen
critiqued so well.

In other words, it is not just science issue as in goodness of
fit or whether our models and theory of entailment commute
as if in academic or statistical or even formal/relational terms
alone. Instead, our very lives and thus also our ability to
think, infer, model, theorize, debate, do emails all depend on
whether or not we get it right. In this case, whether the
model or theory of entailment commutes carries life and
death consequences.

Dan




Judith Rosen wrote:
> *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*