@uh @dcm @SylviaFysica

one thing that struck me is that recursion potentially seems like one answer to the question we struggled with in GoL, namely 'how do you get higher level regularities or patterns to be genuinely causally efficacious?' given there is 'no space' or gap in the low level deterministic rules. Recursion implemented through something like a context vector in a conn. network could easily be added to agents in an ABM and makes behaviour non-markovian opening up that space (??)

@UlrikeHahn @uh @SylviaFysica wouldn't then be the context vector to be causally efficacious?

Just finished reading the chapter, and for a book on ontology, there's very little discussion of ontology. At some point, J. claims that possibility spaces are real. But how? What about the possibilities that never happen? In what sense are they real? No detailed argument, actually no argument, is provided, thus they remain undefended statements.

#juarrerobook

@dcm @uh @SylviaFysica

Dimitri, my thinking on the recursion and the context vector was this: yes, it's the context vector input that is causally efficacious in first instance. But I think just focussing on that might miss what the context vector does: in the context of art. neural networks, it makes the system sensitive to a whole new dimension -time- and statistical properties of the environment inherent in the time dimension.

1/2

@dcm @uh @SylviaFysica

2/2 this means also that "patterns' have a whole new route for potential efficacy/realism.

Again, it's not particularly well-articulated in the book, but I think there might genuinely be something there.

Imagine a NN that, due to context vectors, becomes sensitive to the possibility of long range dependencies in language.

That is starting to feel like expanding the 'rule set' in some way, and making patterns more real

@UlrikeHahn @uh @SylviaFysica I agree, my point was just that, from the point of view of current phil of science, there's nothing very controversial there in terms of ontology, as J. wants to make it. No strong emergence or some such, no top down causation, etc.
The causal sensitivity you mention seems capturable by notions like structuring causes.

@dcm @uh @SylviaFysica 2/2 it might well be that such effects are well-described as structuring caused. But there‘s a ‚gap‘ in my metaphysical/ontological intuitions whereby I know them to be explanatorily indispensable for explaining behaviour, but have no deep view on how ‚real‘ they are or how they fit into a metaphysical picture (could be: as real as other causes, less real, it‘s all epiphenomenal bar the fundamental level GoL style)….

@dcm @uh @SylviaFysica I suspect if one concludes recursion can introduce sensitivity to patterns in ways that makes them ‚more real‘, one would have -by virtue of that- both some kind of emergence and cross-level causal effects… but I haven‘t got that far…

@UlrikeHahn @uh @SylviaFysica I don't think those things need go that way. One can recognise patterns and non-fundamental kinds as real and causally efficacious (tables, organisms, trains, etc) and think that they are realized without remainder by lower-level stuff. Only very strong versions of reductionism, currently rather unpopular, would deny that.

@dcm @uh @SylviaFysica is saying they are „realised without remainder by lower level stuff“ the same as saying that ‘system rules’ at the fundamental level suffice? I thought it is the opposite: to be non-reductionist is to believe that higher level laws do not follow from component parts and lower level laws. But then I have both the problem of how higher level laws are even possible and what impact they can have on lower level ‘stuff’, no?

@UlrikeHahn @uh @SylviaFysica it just means that the high level laws are realised by lower level ones, but there is no type-type mapping. So high level laws cannot be reduced to lower level ones, but the former are token realised by complex conjunctions of the latter. That does mean though that there can be no top-down causation.