[FRIAM] Epidiagram

[thompnickson2 at gmail.com]

Dear Friammers, 

 

This diagram is pursuant to last week's discussion of the device I called he
Sober Epiphenomenator.  You will recall that, in it's simplest form, the
epiphenomenator is a device that sorts spheres into colors, but only because
each of the different colors of sphere is of a different size, and the
device sorts for sphere size.  The idea is that the color of the balls,
while salient to the human eye, is an epiphenomenon of the machine's sorting
system.  My suggestion is that this model can be used to clarify many
concepts that are kicking around in our discussions.  

 

I think of an epiphenomenon as a side effect.  It is a consequence of an
action that is not part of the causal chain that brings that action into
being.  Allow, for instance, that aspirin was initially developed because of
it's effects on pain.  Later it was found that aspirin is a blood thinner.
Thinned blood was, at that point, a side effect of aspirin, whose main
effect was the easing of pain.  Thinned blood was an epiphenomenon in that
it was not part of the causal chain that led to the development of aspirin. 

 

Already we can see that there is something screwy here.  Painkilling and
blood-thinning are both consequences of taking aspirin.  How consequence can
play a part in their own causal history is not immediately evident, unless
there is some iterative process that involves a feedback loop from
consequences of a decision of some sort to the decision process itself.  So
any time we are talking about epiphenomena, we are, of necessity, talking
about feedback loops.  An epiphenomenon is a consequence of some sort of
decision-process that has not feed back on the development of the process
itself.  

But even in the aspirin case, simple as it is, we can begin to see a
complication.  Many of us take aspirin for its bloodthinning properties.  So
while these properties might have been epiphenomenal for the purpose of the
development of the product, it is not epiphenomenal for my taking of it.
And to the extent that the tablet I take has been modified for its
blood-thinning purpose - it is smaller - the blood thinning properties are
no longer epiphenomenal with respect to the tablet I take.  

 


I am running out of time so I better get to the explication of the attached
diagram.  My working intuition is that the notion of epiphenomenon lurks in
many of the domains we regularly discuss.  The first I want to explore is
the one most familiar to me, The Law of Short Sighted Striving.  The law
states that in animal behavior generally, that which the animal strives to
attain is not that which the behavior has been selected for.  Rather the
animals strive to attain some other end which when attained, because of the
nature of the animal's environment, provides the consequence for which
nature selects.  In the diagram attached, the particulars filled in may be
fanciful at best.  They arise from a paper I read decades ago by the Rutgers
behavioral endocrinologist Danial Lehrman, about the origins of incubation
behavior in ring doves.  Given the length of time that has passed, it would
be extraordinary if any of the facts asserted are still regarded as true.  

 

Nevertheless, the facts asserted are that hormonal changes in the dove raise
a painful patch on the underside of the dove which is soothed by placing the
patch on the egg.  Through a process of learning , the dove comes therefore
to incubate the eggs.  Note that such a dove would not care a whit for any
of the things that biologists care for in this situation, including the fact
that incubating the eggs leads to their hatching, which has, presumably, led
to the evolution of the brooding patch.  So, from the point of view of the
dove, the hatching of the eggs is an epiphenomenon. 

 

But shifting our attention to the origins of the relation between cool eggs
and dove incubation, we find that the warming of eggs is not epiphenomenal
to that causal loop.  

 

Thus, what is, or is not, an epiphenomenal is a matter of point of view, a
conclusion that suggests that any further consideration of the matter is
likely to both fraught and interesting. 

 

If I had had more time, I could have written a shorter exposition. 

 

Nick 

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