Re: formal cause and time

[Judith Rosen <***>]

I started a response to this thread, only to lose it in a computer glitch!  ARG!

Start again!

David Macy wrote:
> Well, I may not want to draw much more attention than I already have.  We may be off the map here at the Rosen list.  There may be monsters here.

Hey! I resemble that remark! (Sorry! Couldn't resist. One of my brother's favorite lines....)  Monsters? C'mon! And this is hardly "off-topic". If you tried to convert us to your religion, I'd say you were  being off-topic. Other than that, far more is on-topic than off. Never be afraid to bring up questions or ideas here. OK?

D.M . further wrote:
> It wasn't really a disagreement between us.  We were just kind of bantering about the nature of formal causation between us.  In Robert Rosen's book Essays on Life Itself in chapter one there is a section entitled: What is this "New Physics"?  In it Robert says the following...
>  
> Most significant, I feel, will be the shifting of attention from exclusively inertial (or structural) concepts to gravitational aspects.  This can be expressed as a shift from concerns with material causations of behavior, manifested in state sets, to formal and effecient causations.
>  
> So I was just trying to get a jump on things, if you know what I mean.  I am still not clear about how RR uses the terms inertial and gravitational.  He seems to be talking to physicists when he uses these terms, and I'm not a physicist. Getting back to formal causation, there seems to be, in my own mind, some confusion about what exactly it is. So I was talking with this person in the hopes that by discussing it, the nature of formal causation would become clarified for me (which is really why I brought it to the list).

Currently, science is based in a hunt for material causation because it's the one that grabs human attention when "causality happens"-- an apple falls on Newton's head, for example. It's the most obvious. It's a "thing" rather than some product of a set of relations like motion or velocity is. So, in a point of view where the "things" are the subject, then a concept like "velocity" becomes something about the thing. In that quote of my father's, "Inertial" refers to static "thing-ness" whereas "Gravitational" refers to interactive effects: effects of interaction via relations, and the interaction includes more than just material things as parties to this effect. For example, gravitation would be impossible without the relations of time. There is no such thing within a single state-space. He is also making the point, over and over in his work, that interactive effects can be just as much a "thing" as a collection of particles such as an atom. Indeed, he argues that an atom is our name for a collective effect of interactions, relations, and particles, etc. all balanced into a cohesive system. We think of it as a thing because atoms, in large conglomerations, present to us that way. Solidity, mass... these are effects, just as life is a collective effect. The particles of an atom wouldn't have that effect individually, nor would they, collectively, via some other configuration or organization. 

D.M. wrote:
> In the uses I've heard before of formal causation (like most all of the examples Aristotle used) it has been applied to artifacts.  So a question such as "why the statue?" would be answered with "because of the form of a man."  However, RR seems to be intending more than this.  The person I was talking to seemed to hit it with describing formal cause as "the instructions for building something" which I merely pointed out as encompassing things in addition to the idea of a form, or blueprints in the specific case of a house.

One of the aspects of confusion here is, again, the confusion of causality with entailment. Aristotle's four categories of "causation" are actually not about causality except that entailment is what guides causality. These categories are modes for examining different types of entailment within a system. In other words, he's concerned with "what can cause.... this"-- in our little corner of the universe (reality as we experience it). Material Causation has to do with the apple that fell on Newton's head. Obviously, the effect would not have been the same if it had been a ten ton boulder, so this is a legitimate aspect to consider. But it is also true that the effect would not have been the same if the energy and particles contained in the apple had hit Newton, outside of their relational organization as an "apple", right? So, we have to consider the apple as a discrete system, because, in the interaction with Newton's head, on Earth, in that specific situation, the apple gives the collective effect of being a single entity, with a pattern of causal entailment capabilities that only exist because of the total organization of that system as it is at that point in time.  

Furthermore, the apple, itself, is not really the main concern. If we are Newton, we don't want to know such things about the apple as "why does this apple exist?"... what we want to know is "Why did this apple fall like that?". In other words: "Why does this apple behave like this in these circumstances?" Newton came up with a description of some of the unseen players involved in that whole interaction and named one "gravity" which he then proceeded to try and define and describe. However, he always looked at it from the same "thing-based" point of view (which was espoused by Descartes, before him, as being part of the scientific method) rather than an "effects of interaction" point of view. Einstein came along and recognized that this was a mistake, but he didn't entirely realize just how big a mistake it was-- or WHY. 

Aristotle's work predated the mistakes. He was going about things quite differently (which is why my father used his method in his own work). Aristotle was not looking at a particular situation or a particular "thing". Instead, he was looking at causality, itself. In other words, with his intellect, he was examining the nature of causality itself-- as "the thing"-- and by doing so, he realized that there is more than one type of "right" answer to explain any given example of causality. So, he formalized a process for delving into this phenomenon, and developed four categories, which generate four different sets of answers about any given object, even if the object is causality itself. What my father proved mathematically was that those four sets of answers constitute information that cannot be arrived at via one another nor can they be reduced to each other. They represent utterly different types of information, and they are all correct.

RR was not advocating throwing out the material aspects of systems, except in jest. Instead, he was advocating opening science up to the reality that any single mode of description, or any imposed limitation on how we approach our investigation of any system, is unscientific. To forbid "Final Causation" as a mode of investigation, for example, is a mistake. So is the total reliance on any one category (or any incomplete set of categories) of causation to explain causality-- such as the modern/ancient preoccupation with answers from the category of Material Causation. 

Getting back to David's actual question: 
>  The person I was talking to seemed to hit it with describing formal cause as "the instructions for building something" which I merely pointed out as encompassing things in addition to the idea of a form, or blueprints in the specific case of a house.

Formal Causation doesn't refer to "the form"... that's "Material Causation". In this usage, "Formal" refers to "formalizable, formalized, modeled, etc". So, it basically refers to information. And, David, we may as well come right out and say that I was the one you were conversing with! It makes it easier to clarify what I meant about time....

In that conversation with David, what I suggested was that Aristotle's four categories don't necessarily exhaust the different kinds of information that cannot be arrived at via any other mode. Time is suggested by all four categories, but isn't directly assessed. However, does the fact that time is indirectly implied by each category mean that the causal impact of time can be "reduced" to or "arrived at via" other categories? I don't know the answer to that.

Judith


Web address: http://www.rosen-enterprises.com
BioTheory: An electronic journal of general science based on the Relational (Rosennean) Complexity Paradigm
On Nov 12, 2005, at 1:22 PM, David Macy wrote:

> Hey Ayten,
>  
>     It has been a long while since I've heard from you.  Welcome back.
>  
> You wrote...
>  
> To attract more vivid attention please use a larger font, perhaps 12 instead of 10.
>  
> Well, I may not want to draw much more attention than I already have.  We may be off the map here at the Rosen list.  There may be monsters here.
>  
> Further you wrote...
>  
> Could the disagreement with that someone you were talking about this concept stem from the basic difference in mental process of the contenders: one represents a project approach where the formal cause at the edge and represents a fixed plan to be materialized to reach a fixed objective, the other (You and I for that matter) represent a process approach which stretches the boundary of the formal cause makes it flexible and links it with the final cause as a light house to move towards.
>  
> It wasn't really a disagreement between us.  We were just kind of bantering about the nature of formal causation between us.  In Robert Rosen's book Essays on Life Itself in chapter one there is a section entitled: What is this "New Physics"?  In it Robert says the following...
>  
> Most significant, I feel, will be the shifting of attention from exclusively inertial (or structural) concepts to gravitational aspects.  This can be expressed as a shift from concerns with material causations of behavior, manifested in state sets, to formal and effecient causations.
>  
> So I was just trying to get a jump on things, if you know what I mean.  I am still not clear about how RR uses the terms inertial and gravitational.  He seems to be talking to physicists when he uses these terms, and I'm not a physicist. Getting back to formal causation, there seems to be, in my own mind, some confusion about what exactly it is. So I was talking with this person in the hopes that by discussing it, the nature of formal causation would become clarified for me (which is really why I brought it to the list).
>  
> In the uses I've heard before of formal causation (like most all of the examples Aristotle used) it has been applied to artifacts.  So a question such as "why the statue?" would be answered with "because of the form of a man."  However, RR seems to be intending more than this.  The person I was talking to seemed to hit it with describing formal cause as "the instructions for building something" which I merely pointed out as encompassing things in addition to the idea of a form, or blueprints in the specific case of a house.
>  
> David
>  
> P.S. As an aside, apparently Aristotle felt that psychology was a field of study residing somewhere between physics and biology.