[FRIAM] This makes me think of this list...

Tue Aug 20 23:36:22 EDT 2024

For explanations of all those rules see Sprites, Glymour and Scheines
"Causation, Prediction and Search" second edition, MIT Press, 2001.

---
Frank C. Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
Santa Fe, NM 87505

505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM

On Tue, Aug 20, 2024, 9:26 PM glen <gepropella at gmail.com> wrote:

> I'll see your bet with: <
> https://pedermisager.org/blog/seven_basic_rules_for_causal_inference/>
>
> On August 20, 2024 5:59:20 PM PDT, Frank Wimberly <wimberly3 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >
> https://books.google.com/books?id=ccFHXMDXFdEC&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&printsec=frontcover&dq=Causation+and+Explanation+Campbell,+O%27Rourke,+Silverstein&hl=en&source=gb_mobile_entity#v=onepage&q=Causation%20and%20Explanation%20Campbell%2C%20O'Rourke%2C%20Silverstein&f=false
> >---
> >Frank C. Wimberly
> >140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
> >Santa Fe, NM 87505
> >
> >505 670-9918
> >Santa Fe, NM
> >
> >On Tue, Aug 20, 2024, 5:12 PM Frank Wimberly <wimberly3 at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >>
> >> > I hate thought experiments. But I need this one.
> >>
> >> See:
> >>
> >> Book Chapter3: Actual Causes and Thought Experiments
> >> By
> >>
> >> Clark Glymour ,
> >>
> >> Frank Wimberly
> >>
> >> MIT Press 2007
> >>
> >> ---
> >> Frank C. Wimberly
> >> 140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
> >> Santa Fe, NM 87505
> >>
> >> 505 670-9918
> >> Santa Fe, NM
> >>
> >> On Tue, Aug 20, 2024, 2:53 PM Santafe <desmith at santafe.edu> wrote:
> >>
> >>> Second inadequate reply, to Glen, unhappily similar to the first to
> Jon:
> >>>
> >>> > On Aug 19, 2024, at 23:37, glen <gepropella at gmail.com> wrote:
> >>>
> >>> > There's so much I'd like to say in response to 3 things: 1) to
> >>> formalize and fail is human, 2) necessary (□) vs possible (◇)
> languages,
> >>> and 3) principle vs generic/privied models. But I'm incompetent to say
> them.
> >>> >
> >>> > So instead, I'd like to ask whether we (y'all) think a perfectly
> rigid
> >>> paddle, embedded in a perfectly rigid solid, with a continual twisting
> >>> force on the handle, exhibits "degenerative" symmetry? Of course, such
> >>> things don't exist; and I hate thought experiments. But I need this
> one.
> >>>
> >>> I got lost here because I don’t know what “degenerative” symmetry is
> >>> meant to refer to.  In context of your next para, I see a contrast
> between
> >>> discrete symmetries, such as the rotations that would preserve a
> >>> crystalline unit cell, versus continuous symmetries, which I need as a
> >>> formal model to derive restoring forces.  Is “degenerative” somehow
> another
> >>> term for the continuous ones?
> >>>
> >>> The question when a continuum model can be seen as a limit of discrete
> >>> models on finer and finer grains, and when one needs it to be an
> >>> independent construct, is interesting.  It feels like it goes back to
> the
> >>> Eleatics.
> >>>
> >>> I have often thought that Zeno’s paradoxes nicely illustrate the things
> >>> you can’t do if you have a mechanics that mathematizes only positions.
> >>> Hamilton sweeps those limitations away by making momentum an
> independent
> >>> coordinate in a phase space, and in that way granting it status as an
> >>> independent property of objects from their positions (in classical
> >>> mechanics).   All the consequences of Noether’s theorem, conservations,
> >>> restoring forces, etc., are formulated in terms of these independent
> and
> >>> dual properties.  With the advent of quantum mechanics, their
> independence
> >>> becomes even more foundational to the picture of what exists, as a
> system
> >>> in a momentum eigenstate is really in a completely distinct state from
> one
> >>> in a position eigenstate.  The two are differentiated in something
> like the
> >>> way traveling waves and standing waves are differentiated in various
> wave
> >>> mechanicses.
> >>>
> >>> > Similarly, if the paddle+solid could only be in 1 of 2 states,
> rotation
> >>> 0° and rotation 180°, and would move instantly (1/∞) from one to the
> other,
> >>> with `NaN` force at every other angle and 100% force at the 2 angles.
> This
> >>> seems like symmetry as well, but not degenerative. And we could go on
> to
> >>> add more states to the symmetry (3, 4, ...) to get groups all the way
> up to
> >>> ∞, somewhere in between where the embedding material becomes liquid,
> then
> >>> gas, etc. and the "symmetry" is better expressed as a cycle/circle.
> But I'm
> >>> not actually asking questions about 1D symmetry groups. My question is
> more
> >>> banal, or tacit, or targeted to those who think with their bodies.
> When all
> >>> the other non-Arthur peasants try to pull Excalibur out of the stone,
> my
> >>> guess is they're not thinking it exhibits degenerative symmetry. And
> that
> >>> implies that normal language is not possible. It's impoverished, for
> this
> >>> concept. Math-like languages are necessary in the sea of all possible
> >>> languages. The would-be King *must* use math to describe the
> degenerative
> >>> symmetry. (Missed opportunity in Python's Holy Grail, if you ask me. "I
> >>> didn't vote for you!”)
> >>>
> >>> Here I end with the same one I ended the reply to Jon: I strongly bet
> >>> that much of what people think they believe for “Natural” reasons are
> >>> actually learned beliefs through formal systems.  I don’t think farmers
> >>> before Newton had a Cartesian and Newtonian concept of space x time, or
> >>> that they would have been bothered by Einstein.  I don’t think they
> would
> >>> have cared about Einstein any more than they cared about Newton.  They
> had
> >>> some ontology of “things", and the “places” that things *occupy*.  And
> >>> probably an ontology of keeping appointments, which in a more formal
> world
> >>> might entail something analogous to a “theory of mind” construction
> about
> >>> what other people are doing somewhere else “at the same time” as you
> are
> >>> doing your thing here.  But my default assumption would be that any of
> this
> >>> only ever took on the rigidities of a Cartesian system after the lived
> >>> practice of Newtonian mechanics had started to make some of its rigid
> >>> entailments part of routine experience.  Then it became a struggle to
> let
> >>> that go when Minkowskian geometry required something different.
> >>>
> >>> I don’t mean to be perverse and excessive in denying the implications
> of
> >>> folk physics: Probably, had farmers been dragged through it (strongly
> >>> against their will), they would have found QM’s notion that what we
> >>> _should_ call a _thing_ can be characterized by “being at” multiple
> >>> “places” more difficult than Newton’s “thing at a single place”.  But
> I’m
> >>> not sure how much trouble it would have been.  Considering the
> worldviews
> >>> people are proud to claim they hold in various religious and
> superstitious
> >>> traditions, the things asked from modern physics seem relatively
> benign as
> >>> imaginative lifts.
> >>>
> >>> Would be nice to have something substantive to say about any of this,
> >>> that would deserve to last.  But I don’t think I do.
> >>>
>
> -. --- - / ...- .- .-.. .. -.. / -- --- .-. ... . / -.-. --- -.. .
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