@dcm@social.sunet.se @dcm@bookwyrm.social @NicoleCRust @dsmith @uh not sure I am understanding correctly:

as a ‘feature of the whole and of the individuals and their interaction’ it is not ontologically distinct, so how does that square with it being a cause?

does that mean causes do not have to be ontologically distinct from their effects or does it mean the explantory use of “because” is not restricted to causal relationships (or both?)

@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 @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)….?

@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 2/2 but what the door is open too is new relations/interactions that can now operate on the wholes, and -by virtue of that- affect the parts. Whether that might merit a sense of „mereological causation“ will require clear examples…?

@UlrikeHahn @dcm@bookwyrm.social @NicoleCRust @dsmith @uh I also agree with the explanatory value points, my beef is only with the metaphysical ones. If one takes, as I do, the relations/interactions at the whole-'level' to be constituted by/identical with the collection of individuals and relations in the whole, then the explanatory value is kept, but without mereological causation, strong emergence, and the like. The features at the higher-level just are the 'summation' of what is going on at the lower one.

@dcm@social.sunet.se @dcm@bookwyrm.social @NicoleCRust @dsmith @uh yes, I can see that and it sort of works for me, the ‚sort of‘ hesitation coming from the fact that these kind of phase transition examples mean a whole new set of relations/interactions become available to the parts. But I‘m happy to leave it there for the moment!

@dcm@social.sunet.se @dcm@bookwyrm.social @NicoleCRust @dsmith @uh the one last issue I want to raise (again) is that the distinction between context independent and dependent constraints continues to baffle me- as any constraint that can operate on multiple entities at the same time would seem to have the potential to induce some kind of correlation, even the ones she lists as „independent“ like the incline (think multiple objects rolling down the same hill)…

@UlrikeHahn @dcm@bookwyrm.social @NicoleCRust @dsmith @uh yes, completely baffling to me too. I think I got a better grip on what constraints are supposed to be at all (including the enabling vs limiting constraint distinction), by reading section 4 of this Bich & Bechtel paper: https://philpapers.org/archive/BICONO.pdf
But the context-dependent/independent thing is beyond me for now (Bich & Bechtel do not seem to use that distinction, in any case)