[FRIAM] better simulating actual FriAM

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Ha! Well, anyone can say anything they want. What matters is how coherent you can make what you say. I don't think there's any coherent way of (universally) distinguishing a thing from an event. An event is a thing and a thing can be an event. Perhaps some things are collections of events. Or, perhaps some events are composites. But either way, to be coherent in such talk, you'd have to describe how events and things compose. Without saying how they compose, all you're doing is relying on the vernacular and its attendant ambiguity.

In any case, I believe my *minimal* description of downward causation as quantification over the collective *constraining* the options for individual composition is (or can be made) coherent. But we may not get to that point with your talk of sticks and ladders because there's too much excess meaning there. You'd be better off talking about letters (like how many ways can we arrange 10 zeros and 5 ones) or square tiles in Euclidean space.

Or, how about this setup: Your components (micro) are an egg crate and 12 eggs. How many ways can you compose 12 eggs with an egg crate? You have to include *not* putting any of the eggs in the crate as a valid arrangement. But if you do put 1 egg in the crate, then how many ways can you arrange 1egg+crate with 11 eggs? I argue that the number of ways you can arrange 1egg+crate with 11 eggs is *lower* than the number of ways you can arrange crate with 12 eggs. 

I.e. an attribute of the collective ({crate,12 eggs}) limits the possible arrangements.


On 7/20/20 1:05 PM, thompnickson2 at gmail.com wrote:
> I am sitting here, on this hot day, looking at the tree across the street, and saying to myself (The Behaviorist) am I REALLY going to get away with telling Glen he cannot say, “That tree is causing the yard to be shaded.”  Something not right about that.    Modulo obsessive thinking.

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