@UlrikeHahn @dcm@bookwyrm.social @NicoleCRust @dsmith @uh so a mathematical 'constraint' is just a way of generalising over different causal systems organised in such a way that they instantiate certain causal structures well captured/approximated by the mathematical formalism at a certain level of abstraction and idealisation.

@dcm@social.sunet.se @dcm@bookwyrm.social @NicoleCRust @dsmith @uh Dimitri, I’m still not sure what you are taking the causal relations in the system itself. (buttons, neighbourhood network) to be exactly?

@UlrikeHahn @dcm@bookwyrm.social @NicoleCRust @dsmith @uh In the neighbourhood case it would be people talking to each other, I would think. I don't quite get the button example, so wouldn't know other than what I mentioned before.

@dcm@social.sunet.se @dcm@bookwyrm.social @NicoleCRust @dsmith @uh but that doesn’t explain the difference between the case when connectivity is such that everyone is reached and the case where it isn’t, no? They are talking to each other in either case.

It feels more to me like the question of whether or not the threshold of ln N (randomly placed) pairwise connections is exceeded or not is an orthogonal issue?

@UlrikeHahn @dcm@bookwyrm.social @NicoleCRust @dsmith @uh I agree, my badly phrased point is sort of the following: the threshold is not something ontologically new that strongly emerges (whole-over-parts), it is a large scale pattern that is constituted by the parts: it just is a feature of the whole of individuals and interactions.
So a point about ontology, not about causal explanation (I think that explanations of the form 'All in the neighbourhood know x because the threshold was exceeded' are fine).

@UlrikeHahn @dcm@bookwyrm.social @NicoleCRust @dsmith @uh I would think that that statement should refer to the fact that a causal change was made such that the whole came to have a feature that it did not have before: e.g., person x talked to person z about k made the system into a type described by certain regularities. In other words, there was a causal change to what constitutes the whole, ie. to some of its parts and interactions.
This should work without leading to those puzzles, right?

@dcm@social.sunet.se @UlrikeHahn @dcm@bookwyrm.social @NicoleCRust @uh

I suggest the old and comfortable idea of “cause” needs serious massage.

Because whole systems are complex and unwieldy objects of study, we parcellate them into more manageable sub-systems. Historically, we’ve done the very same thing with causes, parcellating them to study those that are more manageably proximal.

It’s awkward (and work-intensive!) but theorists and investigators studying systems must also consider distal and non-obvious causes.

@dcm@social.sunet.se @dcm@bookwyrm.social @NicoleCRust @dsmith @uh the bit where that maybe seems a bit forced is with respect to what constitutes “the whole”. It’s just a collection, pre transition, but ‘a whole’ after it. And I think that might be J’s (and Kaufmann’s) point with the example? If you think about the buttons, adding > ln(N) random links leads to a phase transition where the buttons now hang together in a single network/web. As a result they become correlated (lifting one, lifts others)

@dcm@social.sunet.se @dcm@bookwyrm.social @NicoleCRust @dsmith @uh the paradigmatic cause-effect relationship is ‘here’s a thing that changed another thing’. The >ln(N) random links phase transition doesn’t really fit that, and doesn’t itself really feel like a cause to me, but it also feels like it is referring to some sort of necessity that is more than mere labelling or redescription of the process itself (hence the perceived explanatory surplus)….?

@dcm@social.sunet.se @dcm@bookwyrm.social @NicoleCRust @dsmith @uh dear All, it was Wed. yesterday so time for the next book section, but it felt to me like were still only just starting to think in more depth about the examples, so I’d hold off a bit

@UlrikeHahn @dcm@bookwyrm.social @NicoleCRust @dsmith @uh I think these points are very helpful to understand the potential attractiveness of something like J.'s view. In my suggestion, the wholes just are collections of individual and relationships, and causal changes to those collections lead to certain regularities obtaining or not.
I agree the transition you mention is not causal , but also not explanatorily idle. J. would anyway not like this, right? No 'mereological causation' going on.

@dcm@social.sunet.se @dcm@bookwyrm.social @NicoleCRust @dsmith @uh

I agree that these thoughts are pushing me toward agreeing with J that a notion of constraint is potentially really useful. After all concepts can have associated gain just because they make certain things easier to see/grasp, even if those things can, strictly speaking, be expressed some other way too. Regarding mereological causation, that‘s a next step, and I‘m not there yet….1/2