[FRIAM] better simulating actual FriAM

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Excellent! Thanks for the link to Weismann's doctrine.

As for the 4-5 sticks, I don't at all like calling "sturdiness" an emergent property. In fact, I don't really like the phrase "emergent property" at all. And I resist using the word "emergent". I'm OK with the word "attribute" because that word can imply an observer that *ascribes* the quality to the collection of things. And then that ascriber of the attribute is the source of any ignorance or (faulty) abstraction that allows us to believe in non-reducible phenomona.

As for the particular of the 4-5 sticks, I'd argue that sturdiness is completely reducible to the *angles* and the arrangement of the sticks. You can take 4 sticks, put one to the side, and make a triangle out of the other 3 and you get "sturdiness". It's still a graph, just not a fully connected graph. So, the 5th stick isn't all that important. What's important is the graph.

To apply downward causation to an arrangement of sticks, you'd have to identify what variable was being constrained. If the variable is some form of "connectivity" or arrangement, then it's VERY easy to go from 0 sticks to 1 stick. Then it's easy to add a 2nd stick. Then it gets a little tougher to add a 3rd stick ... e.g. does it have to line up? Can it just touch on the ends? In the middle? Does it have to connect with both the other 2 sticks. Etc. Then adding the 4th stick is more constrained. Etc.

That is what I mean by downward causation. There's got to be a controlling variable limiting what the sticks can do and the collective, the present arrangement of sticks, then defines that limitation.

On 7/20/20 9:26 AM, thompnickson2 at gmail.com wrote:
> Yes.  And that is why reverse transcription was such a big deal -- Because it violates Weismann's Doctrine <https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00114-014-1164-4>.  I think most contemporary biologists still think that those violations are the province of the very small, but with all we know about epigenetics these days, the whole argument is starting to feel cranky and old-fashioned. 
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> When I try to think about “downward-causation” my imagination always fails.  Think of four sticks, arranged in a square.  They are very flimsy.  Now add a fifth stick, a diagonal.  The whole becomes much more sturdy, right  Now, this is a clear instance of an emergent property, no?  And the freedom of motion of the other four sticks has been constrained by the configuration of the whole, right?  But where is “downward-causation”, here?  Or choose your own example.  How exactly does “downward causation” work?  It puts my mental knickers in a twist. 

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