[FRIAM] Downward Hicausation

Tue Nov 21 13:04:12 EST 2017

Hi, Frank, 

Sorry I let this slip by the first time.  

I have never understood how one can square the counterfactual definition of causality

Hume … concluded with a statement that A causes B if B would not have occurred unless A had occurred.

With the Pragamatic Maxim

Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object.

Nick 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

 <http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

From: Friam [mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com] On Behalf Of Frank Wimberly
Sent: Sunday, November 19, 2017 3:43 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Downward causation

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 <tel:(505)%20670-9918> 

On Nov 19, 2017 3:28 PM, "Nick Thompson" <nickthompson at earthlink.net <mailto: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/> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

From: Friam [mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com <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 <mailto: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 <mailto: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/> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

From: Friam [mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com <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 <mailto: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 <mailto: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/> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

From: Friam [mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com <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 <mailto: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 <mailto:carl at plektyx.com> > wrote:

Of interest, also the whole issue... http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/375/2109/20160338

C

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