[FRIAM] Downward causation

Sun Nov 19 17:43:26 EST 2017

Nick, you must have known you would eventually provoke me:

-Correlation is not causation
Sometimes you can infer a causal direction from observational data.
Interested readers can see
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5340263/
By my former colleagues Scheines and Ramsey.

-Hume
After writing a long alternative to the counterfactual definition of
causation, he concluded with a statement that A causes B if B would not
have occurred unless A had occurred.

Frank

Frank Wimberly
Phone (505) 670-9918

On Nov 19, 2017 3:28 PM, "Nick Thompson" <nickthompson at earthlink.net> wrote:

> Thanks, Roger.  I LIKE it.
>
>
>
> When people say, “Correlation is not causation” they are living in a
> momentary illusion that they know what causation is.  AT the very least,
> causation consists of the results of some number of experiments in which
> the second correlate is denied by a failure to produce the first, but not
> vv.  But most people want more from causal statements.  They want
> METAPHYSICS.  As I guess Hume was fond of pointing out, Causes are
> attributions we make to experiences, not things experiences do to one
> another.   For someone to deny the existence of downward causality, that
> person has first to state what it is s/he imagines that s/he is denying.
> In my world, where “causes” are just “prior necessary or sufficient
> correlates”, if we can show that demands on the bean plant as a whole lead
> to changes in its parts, we have “downward causation”.  And there is no
> juicier form of downward causation to be had, or to be denied.
>
>
>
> Nick
>
>
>
> Nicholas S. Thompson
>
> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
>
> Clark University
>
> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
>
>
>
> *From:* Friam [mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com] *On Behalf Of *Roger
> Critchlow
> *Sent:* Sunday, November 19, 2017 10:31 AM
> *To:* The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <
> friam at redfish.com>
> *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] Downward causation
>
>
>
> Nick --
>
>
>
> Sure, bean plants growing in time lapse is an excellent example of coarse
> graining.  And you can imagine an animator making a cartoon of the same
> time lapse, in fact, I remember a classic cartoon doing this, even to the
> point of giving the plant hands to reach with and a face.  While the video
> might be taken to be caused by underlying microscopic dynamics too detailed
> to be specified except in imagination, the cartoon clearly is the
> animator's expression of a coarse grained understanding of the plant.
>
>
>
> So this may be a dodge, but it seems an interesting dodge.  It seems that
> everyone knows that correlation is not causation, yet all causal
> explanations start with correlation, and only become causal when someone
> tweaks the causal levers to get the predicted effects and describes how to
> do it in a way that can be replicated.
>
>
>
> So when you manipulate the source of light to manipulate the plant's
> growth, the plant depends on the coarse grained result to live.  The plant
> does not depend on a microscopic trajectory to live because any particular
> microscopic trajectory is impossibly improbable, the plant depends on vast
> numbers of trajectories which all lead to the required coarse grained
> result, or something close enough for jazz.  The plant is organized in such
> a way that it marshalls sufficient microscopic resources to accomplish its
> coarse grained purposes.
>
>
>
> -- rec --
>
>
>
> On Sun, Nov 19, 2017 at 11:49 AM, Nick Thompson <
> nickthompson at earthlink.net> wrote:
>
> Ahh!  Thanks Roger.  That blows some life into it for me.  Is watching a
> bean plant grow in time lapse an example of coarse-graining?  So let’s
> imagine we are watching such an image and we notice that the plant “reaches
> for the sun”.  (I.e., we move the light around and the plant follows it as
> it grows.)    Now let’s also imagine (ex hypothesis, mind you!) that the
> plant puts out extra roots on the opposite side to stabilize it.  I would
> call that top-down causation, I guess.
>
>
>
> I dunno.  Anything that comes out of SFI is kind of ink-blots for me.
>
>
>
> Nick
>
>
>
> Nicholas S. Thompson
>
> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
>
> Clark University
>
> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
>
>
>
> *From:* Friam [mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com] *On Behalf Of *Roger
> Critchlow
> *Sent:* Sunday, November 19, 2017 3:01 AM
>
>
> *To:* The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <
> friam at redfish.com>
> *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] Downward causation
>
>
>
> I looked at the abstract and thought, of course, if you "coarse grain" the
> visual field, then you synthesize objects out of groups of pixels that
> cohere together in time and space.  In time you might even come to blame
> the imputed objects for their presumed effects in the world.  Perhaps it's
> an illusion, or a hallucination, or a tautology, but once you summon a
> coarse grained entity into existence it will have coarse grained
> consequences, including changes of behavior in the summoner which are
> explained as reactions to coarse grained observations.
>
>
>
> So I didn't read as hard as Nick, I just took the operational view laid
> out in the abstract and imagined it.  Causation is at root a tool that
> helps an organism to live long and to prosper.  The observation and
> reaction which saves a life or facilitates reproduction or helps progeny
> mature is primary.
>
>
>
> -- rec --
>
>
>
> On Sat, Nov 18, 2017 at 11:25 PM, Nick Thompson <
> nickthompson at earthlink.net> wrote:
>
> Hi, Roger,
>
>
>
> Can you say what you thought was “nice” about it.  (As you know, it makes
> me nervous to disagree with you about stuff).  I struggled with the
> article.  I thought at one point she confused aggregate with emergent
> properties. Emergent properties are properties of the whole that are
> dependent on the temporal or spatial arrangement of the parts.  Thus the
> enzymatic properties of proteins, which depend on the arrangement of their
> amino acids, are emergent properties.   Also, the standard definition of
> materialism is the believe that everything real consists of *matter and
> its relations. * So entertaining the notion that relations are not
> material (and therefore incapable of being causal) is … well … silly.
>  Finally, I have always suspected that downward causation is an example of
> a “mystery” i.e., confusion that arises when words are applied to a
> situation where they aren’t equal to the task.  (“What is the sound of one
> hand clapping?”)  I think whenever we talk about causes we are trying to do
> with physical events what we do with social and legal ones … we are trying
> to assign responsibility for event so we can blame or praise the thing that
> “caused” it.  It’s a form of animism.  To say that A is a cause of B is
> only to say that variations in A have been shown, experimentally, to be
> necessary and or sufficient for variations in B.  Causal statements ALWAYS
> come with an “other things being equal” clause, *ceteris paribus*.  To
> the extent that emergent properties can be shown to be necessary or
> sufficient for some change in the property of some parts of the whole, we
> have downward causation, no?   Now the shape of the hemoglobin molecule is
> an emergent property of that molecule which determines whether it binds
> oxygen in its active site.  Whether or not it has oxygen bound to its
> active site determines its shape.  Surely one of these is downward
> causation.  I am just no sure which. (};-|)
>
>
>
> Nick
>
>
>
>
>
> Nicholas S. Thompson
>
> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
>
> Clark University
>
> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
>
>
>
> *From:* Friam [mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com] *On Behalf Of *Roger
> Critchlow
> *Sent:* Saturday, November 18, 2017 6:15 PM
> *To:* The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <
> friam at redfish.com>
> *Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] Downward causation
>
>
>
> Nice.
>
>
>
> -- rec --
>
>
>
>
>
> On Sat, Nov 18, 2017 at 12:29 PM, Carl Tollander <carl at plektyx.com> wrote:
>
> Of interest, also the whole issue... http://rsta.
> royalsocietypublishing.org/content/375/2109/20160338
>
>
>
> C
>
>
>
>
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> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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