@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 no idea what J. thinks, but my GoL take was that patterns are, in effect, epiphenomenal vis a vis the fundamental layer (and all ‚patterns‘ are equally real…). That intuition hinges for me on the lack of ‚rules‘ in the system that attach to those patterns. So the possibility I just described with recursion and the causal impact of the statistics of the environment seems a new conceptual step beyond the basic GoL model. 1/2

@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…

@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.

@dcm @uh @SylviaFysica

so the big question is what gives rise to the high-level laws as types, right? This is where the notion of constraint seems potentially essential and missing from that standard non-reductionist picture since constraints are (metaphysically) neither 'objects' nor laws ('rules')?

and we would want to distinguish as different two metaphysical pictures: one where constraints constrain the fundamental level objects and another where the constrain higher level types qua type?

@UlrikeHahn @uh @SylviaFysica yes, that sounds like a great way of putting it. In my neck of the woods, the high level types are typically taken as being chiefly a matter of epistemic fruitfulness, generalisation power, etc (which + scientific realist commitments leads to seeing them as real too). Constraints I think definitely count as candidate posits with the required epistemic virtues in this regard.

@UlrikeHahn @uh @SylviaFysica but then constraints are on a par with generalisations, laws, causal relations, etc, not something more basic.

I wouldn't say discussion of constraints is missing from this literature (see eg. the Bechtel paper on constraints and mechanisms, and the DST work), but it's not the main focus in much of mainstream phil of science at any rate.