@dcm@social.sunet.se @dcm@bookwyrm.social @NicoleCRust @dsmith @uh they do, but the thing that’s at issue is why they are suddenly all connected. What ‘caused’ that?

@UlrikeHahn @dcm@bookwyrm.social @NicoleCRust @dsmith @uh I looked for videos of this experiment to try and understand it better, but I don't seem to have found one.
I would think that the idea would be that what causes that is just the ensemble of causal relations between the buttons: weight, friction, etc with just the right values to make that happen. But my grasp of the case is not great, so I'm not sure.

@dcm@social.sunet.se @dcm@bookwyrm.social @NicoleCRust @dsmith @uh it’s just a thought experiment, Dimitri. You could replace it with anything that can be described with a network: say a bunch of new people move into a neighbourhood, they bump into each other randomly, two at a time, and become acquainted. When they meet an acquaintance, they pass on new information about the neighbourhood. At some point, when enough of them have become acquainted (ie formed pairwise ties) info will spread to everyone

@UlrikeHahn @dcm@bookwyrm.social @NicoleCRust @dsmith @uh ah, the description on the book seemed to suggest it was an actual experiment/demonstration, since it talks about connecting physical elements to each other and then mentions, implying a partial contrast, results from a simulation of the scenario.
But in the neighbourhood case, what is the puzzle? Information spreads by people meeting each other, right?

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

yes, but the contrast is between the case where information spreads to everyone. (network is connected) and where it does not (network is not connected).

This is where the phase transition as a function of number of pairwise links comes in…

@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).