Tim,
We seem to be going around and around. For example, your
comment:
Tim Gwinn wrote: I agree that behaviors are utilized as observables in
science - of course they are. However, they are not reliable indicators of
cause; behaviors give hints, clues and suggestions as to possible causal
underpinnings, but they do not reliably indicate them.
What does "indicate" mean, if not to give "hints, clues, and
suggestions"? The only time behaviors are not reliable indicators of
underlying causes is in the case of artificially contrived systems such as
simulacra. That is my whole point: It seemed to me that you were representing
my father as saying something was a general truth when he was only saying
it was true in analysis of bio-mimetic simulations.
In dealing with natural systems, analysis of system behaviors to
try to learn about the causal basis for those behaviors is the essence of
science as he viewed it. But, once again: We are not just interested in
the direct "causes" of these particular "effects" as we observed
them at that moment, we are interested in learning about the underlying
causal entailment relations which both allowed and generated this
system's ability to behave that way. If a dog barks, that's a little piece of
causality in the universe. We can look at causes, which can take a variety of
guises. For instance; the dog barked because it heard noises that triggered an
instinctive response. Or; the dog barked because of the interaction of it's
breathing with its vocal cords. Or; the dog barked because of the physical
forces of vocal cord vibration creating sound waves of a certain frequency
that human ears are capable of perceiving, and blah, blah, blah.........
But why do dogs bark? What are the entailments? This is a more
general question which is not connected to the particular situation, as
causality is. Causes and effects are bound in time and are particular to a
specific system and environment. That's the only way to really approach them;
reductionistically. Frozen moments, frozen observations, fractured pieces
of activity in the universe. Thus, causality piques our
curiosity, generates our questions, becomes a tool
for investigation of these mysteries, and a means by which to
check our theoretical answers. But it doesn't give us a very
comprehensive understanding of how the universe works and why it is the way it
is. We need to know the causes of the causes. Ultimately, that means we need
to know the underlying entailments.
Perhaps some additional examples might be
helpful. Let's say we want to learn about why a cuttlefish is able
to change its external color at will and mimic the hue and pattern of its
surroundings as it travels around its natural habitat... The direct causes of
this behavior (chromatophores in the skin, which create and/or
accumulate different pigments stored in separate pigment sacs, which can
expand and contract via voluntary muscular contraction of these pigment sacs,
etc, etc) will give us some idea of why this organism is able to
achieve this feat. But that kind of information is very limited in
comparison with the entailments which underlie it. Entailments are far
more comprehensive than "causes".
If we want to understand why human bodies have the organ called
an appendix, when it seemingly serves no functional purpose, what shall
we do? The direct causes, and even the indirect causes (genetics,
embryonic development, cell differentiation, formation of the digestive
system, including this organ we call an appendix) don't answer our question.
What we need are the original entailments for that organ. It wouldn't be there
if it wasn't entailed. If we analyze the human appendix via Aristotle's
system, what does the analysis tell us?
In fact, this kind of exercise can be very useful because it
sheds light on what kind of contextual information is encoded into living
system organization, how it's encoded, what happens when the original
contextual influences (which entailed the encoding of that information) have
changed, etc.
I think it's also instructive to pin down
how Aristotle's four categories of "causation", which Robert
Rosen said are actually categories of entailment, differ from
analysis of direct cause-and-effect types of analysis. There's a gray area in
there, somewhere, it seems to me, where the two diverge, but they do diverge.
Experimental science deals mainly with causes and effects, for example.
That's the province of empirics. There is so much more going on than just what
we see/observe. Indeed, that's precisely where "causality" is
limited.
Judith