[FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

[Nick Thompson]

Marcus, 

 

Is this the butterfly-flap argument in another form?  

 

Ok, I am improvising here: 

 

Let us say that a group of tourists goes to camp under Standing Rock, a geological formation known for its apparent precariousness.  Unbeknownst to the campers and the park rangers, erosion due to a rainstorm the previous night had undermined the foundation of the rock, leaving as precarious as it looked.  During the night, a mouse walked out on the rock, and leaning over to peer at the sleeping campers below, tipped over the rock, crushing the tourists.  (We Santa Feans are given to ghoulish tourist stories.) 

 

Brought to trial, the mouse’s lawyer claimed that the mouse’s responsible, while not zero, was so small with respect to the other causal forces involved as to be negligible.  The mouse was acquitted. 

 

Moral: Some causes are so small as to not be worth talking about. 

 

I think this is a crappy argument, but I had fun writing it. 

 

Nick 

 

 

 

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

 <http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com] On Behalf Of Marcus Daniels
Sent: Tuesday, April 30, 2019 9:28 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

 

Nick writes:

 

“But when you go on to say that nature is determined by unknowable causes that’s an oxymoron.  To the extent that anything is caused, by whatever means,  it reveals its causes in its behavior.  To the extent that events are random, no cause is revealed and no cause exists.”

 

The apparently random cause could have been mixed-in long ago, far out of scope from a contemporary experiment.   So to understand the behavior, you’d have to go back in time and follow everything (sub-atomically) that followed.   It doesn’t mean there is no cause, just that it is meaningless in practice to talk about it – it is too far away.

 

Marcus

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