[FRIAM] Epidiagram

Fri Aug 14 11:50:48 EDT 2020

Thanks, Dave, 

There is no friend to a writer greater than the friend who will comment on the nonsense the writer produces  early in the stage of a bit of writing. 

Gonna have to think about the dove.  I think I probably am prepared to give to the dove anything I give to the human.  I have always been impatient with “Man/Beast” dualism.  It’s all walking meat.   If “humans are fundamentally different sorts of animals” drops out of the analysis at the end, ok fine, but I don’t want to start there. 

At the moment, I am not so much trying to say how things are, but trying to  understand what the notion of epiphenomenon could possibly mean in the context of recursive systems.  Since, in my understanding, epiphenomena are defined by their non-participation in their own generation, figuring out when it is true to say that some property of an object has not participated in its own generation is essential to the project.  Even in the case of the Sober device, it is not strictly true, since, of course, all the relations displayed in the project were essential to the construction of the object as a demonstration of a principle.  

I seem to have arrived at the result that only recursive systems can exhibit epiphenomenality.  If I now also show that recursive systems can’t either, then we are done,  I don’t have to write the paper, and I can go back to doom-surfing and depressive couch-dozing. 

N

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

 <mailto:ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com> ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com

 <https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of Prof David West
Sent: Friday, August 14, 2020 9:00 AM
To: friam at redfish.com
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Epidiagram

Re: Aspirin

Consequence1 (C1) — introduce the chemical complex we label 'aspirin' into a defined biochemical "stew" = some biochemical reactions among components of that stew.

Consequence2 (C2) — the specific biochemical reactions of C1 cause a state change, i.e. the state of the stew is X instead of Y, or a set of biochemical reactions are taking place because of C1 that would not have taken place absent C1.

InterpretationA (IA) — an EGO (that pesky self-awareness / self-consciousness) detects C2 (is able to differentiate between the stew being in state X instead of state Y) and interprets C2 as the absence of pain. This interpretation infers a causal link between the taking of aspirin and the absence of pain. NOTE: the original inference was that chewing the bark of a certain tree alleviated pain.

InterpretationB (IB) — EGO is unable to differentiate thin from thick blood, the system being in State P instead of state Q. Hence IB is null.

InterpretationC (IC) — PHYSICIAN, via measurement, is able to differentiate between thick and thin blood AND, along with a host of other "known things," interprets the state of the system, G, to be "better" than states H, I, J, and K. (There are multiple permutations / states, because so many discrete factors play a role in making the differentiation. The PHYSICIAN makes an inference that taking aspirin leads to a system in a "better" state.

No epiphenomena here, unless you want to assert that the 'causal inferences of EGO' are epiphenomena of an ability to differentiate between two (or more) states of a system "observed" by EGO.

This will not work with the dove, because you will not allow the dove an EGO, nor will you allow "Nature" to be a PHYSICIAN.

davew

On Thu, Aug 13, 2020, at 10:09 PM, thompnickson2 at gmail.com <mailto:thompnickson2 at gmail.com>  wrote:

Dear Friammers,

This diagram is pursuant to last week’s discussion of the device I called he Sober Epiphenomenator.  You will recall that, in it’s simplest form, the epiphenomenator is a device that sorts spheres into colors, but only because each of the different colors of sphere is of a different size, and the device sorts for sphere size.  The idea is that the color of the balls, while salient to the human eye, is an epiphenomenon of the machine’s sorting system.  My suggestion is that this model can be used to clarify many concepts that are kicking around in our discussions. 

I think of an epiphenomenon as a side effect.  It is a consequence of an action that is not part of the causal chain that brings that action into being.  Allow, for instance, that aspirin was initially developed because of it’s effects on pain.  Later it was found that aspirin is a blood thinner.  Thinned blood was, at that point, a side effect of aspirin, whose main effect was the easing of pain.  Thinned blood was an epiphenomenon in that it was not part of the causal chain that led to the development of aspirin.

Already we can see that there is something screwy here.  Painkilling and blood-thinning are both consequences of taking aspirin.  How consequence can play a part in their own causal history is not immediately evident, unless there is some iterative process that involves a feedback loop from consequences of a decision of some sort to the decision process itself.  So any time we are talking about epiphenomena, we are, of necessity, talking about feedback loops.  An epiphenomenon is a consequence of some sort of decision-process that has not feed back on the development of the process itself. 

But even in the aspirin case, simple as it is, we can begin to see a complication.  Many of us take aspirin for its bloodthinning properties.  So while these properties might have been epiphenomenal for the purpose of the development of the product, it is not epiphenomenal for my taking of it.  And to the extent that the tablet I take has been modified for its blood-thinning purpose – it is smaller – the blood thinning properties are no longer epiphenomenal with respect to the tablet I take. 

I am running out of time so I better get to the explication of the attached diagram.  My working intuition is that the notion of epiphenomenon lurks in many of the domains we regularly discuss.  The first I want to explore is the one most familiar to me, The Law of Short Sighted Striving.  The law states that in animal behavior generally, that which the animal strives to attain is not that which the behavior has been selected for.  Rather the animals strive to attain some other end which when attained, because of the nature of the animal’s environment, provides the consequence for which nature selects.  In the diagram attached, the particulars filled in may be fanciful at best.  They arise from a paper I read decades ago by the Rutgers behavioral endocrinologist Danial Lehrman, about the origins of incubation behavior in ring doves.  Given the length of time that has passed, it would be extraordinary if any of the facts asserted are still regarded as true. 

Nevertheless, the facts asserted are that hormonal changes in the dove raise a painful patch on the underside of the dove which is soothed by placing the patch on the egg.  Through a process of learning , the dove comes therefore to incubate the eggs.  Note that such a dove would not care a whit for any of the things that biologists care for in this situation, including the fact that incubating the eggs leads to their hatching, which has, presumably, led to the evolution of the brooding patch.  So, from the point of view of the dove, the hatching of the eggs is an epiphenomenon.

But shifting our attention to the origins of the relation between cool eggs and dove incubation, we find that the warming of eggs is not epiphenomenal to that causal loop. 

Thus, what is, or is not, an epiphenomenal is a matter of point of view, a conclusion that suggests that any further consideration of the matter is likely to both fraught and interesting.

If I had had more time, I could have written a shorter exposition.

Nick

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