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Re: Natural Law and Dynamical Hierarchies

James Rose wrote:
The difficulty is the relation between 'causality' and 'indeterminancy'
(aka: 'free will'). It's already the concept-crux of the QM v Relativity
split .. but in the context of the concepts / relations / dynamics
we are scoping out to embrace .. reconciling required absoluteness
with required indeterminancy .. this is a much vaster, inclusive,
and far reaching paradigm about the nature of being. More than
the stories and myths, more than the imagined and the comfortable.

My instinct is that what we call "indeterminancy" really stems from the common confusion of causality with entailment. Science tends to seek answers to questions about causality and never look farther than a reasonable understanding of the mechanisms responsible for what we have observed happening. However, that's such a tiny piece of the puzzle. To answer the question "Why did this happen?" is to know the causal pathways that caused "this" to happen (and, in the process, also gives us a glimpse into some of the system entailment-- but since these are related, they are usually lumped together by researchers, who then perceive no difference between the two). Any given phenomenon or behavior we observe will have a short answer that only talks about this distinct situation, or perhaps will extend to all other situations similar enough in entailment relations to generate the same observables via the same causal pathways. So, if we talk about forensic evidence, for example, we will be interested in what happened in a particular case, and we may learn something about the associated entailments pertaining to a certain category of causal phenomena but that won't answer the question "Why can this happen?" That question deals with pure entailment and the answer will require far more investigation. However, answers to questions about entailment can answer questions about causality too, whereas it often cannot work in the reverse.

Where living organisms are concerned, my father was not asking "Why are human beings alive?" or "Why are single-cellular organisms alive?"... instead, his question was more like "Why can some systems be alive and others not?" (which he sometimes shortened in his written work to; "Why life?") Thus, the entailment pattern he studied and learned about was applicable in the general sense of being the same pattern for all organisms, regardless of how one species "does it". (We tend to assume that all life forms must be based on carbon, too; because all of our observed examples are based on carbon and we assume that this must be a natural law or something. At this point, it's just about causality in my view. We have good reason not to presume that it's about entailment.)

Humanity tends to see exceptions to what we have assumed are "causal laws of the universe" and we tag exceptions as being 'random' or anomalous. In fact, that's how Physics views biological systems. Similarly, as human beings, with the power of choice available to us, whenever we use our "free will" to make various different choices from one another, we often observe that the causal outcomes of various processes or activities will change in ways that make causality seem "indeterminate". Causality is always indeterminate! The laws of the universe are laws of entailment.

As we have already discussed, one of those laws is that this is a relational and interactive universe, which means (among other things) that context matters; contextual aspects can change causal outcomes. Another law of entailment is the one referring to the portability of entailment patterns and this means that there are specific relations which always have the same effect on causal outcomes. So we can learn about the relations if we want to. We can learn about the patterns. We can begin to track what observables refer to a particular case (causality) and what pertains to the underlying entailment relations.

Science has a whole plethora of examples for how to do this-- they just need to recognize what they are seeing. There are even protocols telling people how to work around the differences-- which we all do, albeit absentmindedly, all the time. For example; pure water boils at 212 degrees F. (100 degrees C.), right? What about the effect of atmospheric pressure on the boiling point? Anyone who does much cooking will have noticed that there are usually two sets of directions on any detailed recipe (particularly on a pre-packaged item) which give the temperatures and cooking times for both high-altitude kitchens and "regular" kitchens (presumed to be at or near "sea-level"). All the exceptions (to various scientific laws or to human rules for causality) tend to speak to the fact that entailment is a far bigger realm than causality and there are always going to be other contextual relations which can change what we think of as causal rules if they aren't actually rules of entailment in disguise.

The second big aspect to the mystery of "indeterminancy and free-will" is that where living organisms are concerned, there are entailments within entailments within entailments... and we are still cataloguing "causality".

Judith



Web address: http://www.rosen-enterprises.com
BioTheory: An electronic journal of general science based on the Relational (Rosennean) Complexity Paradigm
On Oct 20, 2005, at 12:21 AM, James N Rose wrote:

Judith Rosen wrote:
Hi Jamie,

Thanks! (I always feel like one of JS Bach's kids when
someone gives me praise in this particular area...

well deserved ... don't think otherwise

I have an idea for perhaps the second "order" of entailment
in the universe. I don't know if it's really second or if
it's tied for first with context-dependence. It's a distinct
concept, although related to the one already described. It's
also what my father referred to as one of the fundamental
aspects of "Natural Law": the fact that entailment, while it
is entirely dependent on contextual matters, is also exportable.

[nice word, nice application .. "exportable" ; different
mechanisms, repeatable patterns none the less]

If the contextual relations are transferred to a model with
enough accuracy, the model will predict accurate causal outcomes.
(As always, the devil is in the details... Here, it's the value
of the word "enough" that can be the source of so much trouble,
though!) Putting it another way: Any model whose inferential
entailment relations accurately mirrors the causal entailment
relations of the system being modeled will then accurately
recreate the same exact same entailment pattern of the original system.

aye, there's the rub. The thing is, though, that this trans-tier
repetitive exportation of a templated standard performance-group
is a very powerful phenomenon. Exposing it as the key dynamic
of all activities in the universe seem to be the coming quantum
jump in human comprehension. It ought to make all previous
concepts pale in comparison. ;-)


This is a rather startling truth, it seems to me. We tend to
take it as "a given" that we can do this, but has anyone ever
studied Why? This basic reality of how the universe works is
a clue into the nature of entailment itself, ..

bingo! contrary to Godel-thought .. the universe must
be embeddedly hyper-consistent and coherent --AND-- self
explanatory.

.. and therefore the nature of causality.

(yes)

If Robert Rosen was correct in his description of the nature
of Anticipatory Systems, then the fact that all living systems
incorporate this very capability (the portability of entailment
patterns) into their own organization gives us further glimpses
into how the universe works, how entailment works, and by
extrapolation, how causality works. That's where I'd be putting
my research time, if I were to embark on a PhD right now.

The difficulty is the relation between 'causality' and 'indeterminancy'
(aka: 'free will'). It's already the concept-crux of the QM v Relativity
split .. but in the context of the concepts / relations / dynamics
we are scoping out to embrace .. reconciling required absoluteness
with required indeterminancy .. this is a much vaster, inclusive,
and far reaching paradigm about the nature of being. More than
the stories and myths, more than the imagined and the comfortable.

The future of sentience rests in whether humans can grasp these
notions and clear the barriers and rise beyond them to truly and
deeply morph ourselves into the advancing species we have the
capacity to (entailedly :-) ) become.

Judith

Jamie
2005/10/19