[FRIAM] The epiphenomenality relation

[⛧ glen]

Absolutely. I've been trying to get you to talk about loop scoping (in space and time) for. like. ever. So what set of scoping measures do you intend to use? Time must be important, fast vs slow feedback. Distance would be, too. But there are more interesting measures, like concreteness, or vagueness. E.g. during development, parts of the developing system may express a distributional expectation/anticipation of the consequences. Such expectations might come with a fuzziness that refines to crispness with iterations of the loop. That uncertainty is, like speed and distance, a useful measure of the feedback scope. Another type of measure might be variety of consequences. The expectation might be for a sharp peaked, symmetric distribution of consequences, where, through iterations, it spreads to a fat, asymmetric, or multimodal distribution.

I'm NOT, however, willing to allow that any consequences do not feed back. All consequences feed back. I am willing to allow that the distribution of consequences changes, and that the prior differs from the post. Essentially, what feeds back is a distribution, not objectified things (which allows for a more coherent conception of causal loops). So if you qualify epi- vs phenomenon with a scalable measure, such that "small" consequences are more epi- and "large" consequences are less epi-, then we might make some progress.

Of course, all of my rhetoric argues against a crisply ordinal conception like epi- in the first place. But you're so faithfully hypnotized by that word, it's unreasonable for me to expect you to doff it.


On November 26, 2021 4:30:05 PM PST, thompnickson2 at gmail.com wrote:
>Hmmm!  I sort of see your point.  But notice that we have to get around the most fundamental notion of causality, that an effect occurs after its cause and cannot therefore be a cause of the cause that caused it.  We probably get around that by stipulating that we are dealing with recursive systems, feed back systems in which the effects may act back on the cause of the things that caused those effects.   Now, once we have stipulated THAT, we show an interest in discriminating those that do feed back in that manner from  those that don't.  The latter are epiphenomena.  You may of course insist that all causal relations are loopy, and therefore, no phenomenon is epi-.  In which case, I would insist that there is some value in discriminating between those systems that are more loopy and those that are less loopy.  
>
>Could we agree on that little step?
>
>N  
>
>Nick Thompson
>ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com
>https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of ? glen
>Sent: Friday, November 26, 2021 4:58 PM
>To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
>Subject: Re: [FRIAM] The epiphenomenality relation
>
>As always, I'd argue that such things don't exist. There are no structures (or behaviors) with consequences that played no part in their development. So, as a counterfactual hypothetical, it could be fun to play such a game. But the burden is on the game master to persuade us why it might be a fun game. It looks useless or worse, encouraging of false belief, to me.
>
>
>On November 25, 2021 10:39:18 PM PST, thompnickson2 at gmail.com wrote:
>> 
>> We
>>will argue for a definition of an epiphenomenon as a consequence of a 
>>structure's (or behavior's) design which has played no part the 
>>development of that structure (or behavior).
>--

-- 
glen ⛧