I’m cross-posting this from another discussion (in summary form) for any comments…

The discussion was about ‘a-causality’ in physics….here is my somewhat cavalier response:

In particular I find the terminology fascinating. The very idea of ‘a-causal’ is a curious one. It is called a-causal in physics because physics denied the existence of two of Aristotle’s causalities – formal and final. Then the term “causal” or “causality” was co-opted to refer only to efficient and material causes, which I would call ‘rigid causality’ or entailment. When it was discovered that the formal context for physics was not a singular system and could not be formalized as such (giving us incompleteness, uncertainty, relativity, and duality), the lack of rigid causality was called ‘uncertainty’, meaning we didn’t know what it was. The concept of randomness, which underlies statistical and probability theory, gained prominence.

In other words, the higher causes, which are informational in nature, having been pejoratively labeled as ‘not causes’ and ‘not science’, were brought back into physics as ‘not information’ (uncertainty) and are now referred to as a-causal ….are they acausal effects? acausal behaviors?  ‘acausal’ causes? I think they are causes that are not rigidly entailed. We’ve known about them in general terms for at least 8,000 years and in very specific terms since Aristotle, 350BC. So, it is hardly a new discovery.

In R-theory, a cause is either an entailment (rigid cause or necessary relation of the form “if A then B”), or an information relation, which is between entailment categories (as technically defined in Category theory). Relations are an induction of similar or analogous pattern. However, there is no ‘mechanism’ for such induction directly between material systems, which is why it is not a rigid entailment or ‘causality’ in the modern terminology. The relation is mediated by context, which in physics is the entire domain in which natural law ‘exists’.

Physics unfortunately adopted the view that natural law MUST exist outside and prior to any physical system, and that, hopefully, it MUST have a single knowable syntax (otherwise we’d be in trouble expecting any exact explanations). That was proven wrong – laws are part of nature. They are the higher causes, formal and final. And furthermore, the rigid causes can’t be fundamental; all four work together at every level.

I think Einstein was correct that nature/God does not play dice – randomness is a natural mythology, and at best a property of our mode of description. BUT ‘not-random’ does NOT mean predictable. It simply means ’caused within nature.’ If your ideas influence my ideas, that is a causality in nature. But still the final idea is not predictable from initial conditions, which was what physics was initially trying to achieve.

Its nice to see some new thinking, but there’s a long way to go. Probability and fuzzy logic are ways of dealing with non-rigid causes, or information relations in nature. I maintain they are very limited, but often effective approaches to dealing with such problems, which we can call ‘complexity’. Agent Based Modeling, if made general, is a more robust approach. But there may be an even more direct way of dealing with these higher causes, which is what I’m exploring with R-theory.

John Kineman

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Above comments were in reference to:
Source as a TeX file: http://www.cs.utep.edu/pub/reports/tr96-5b.tex

Acausal Processes and Astrophysics:
Case When Uncertainty is Non-Statistical (Fuzzy?)

Abstract

In Newtonian physics, if we know the state of the world at some moment
of time, then we can precisely predict the state of the world at all
future times. In this sense, Newtonian physics is deterministic. In
modern physics (starting with quantum mechanics), theories are usually
non-deterministic in the sense that even if we know exactly the
initial state of the world, we cannot uniquely predict the future
state of the world. In quantum mechanics (and in most modern
quantum-based physical theories), the best we can get is probabilities
of different future states. In this sense, in the majority of modern
physical theories, uncertainty is of statistical nature.

Lately, a new area of acausal (causality violating) processes has
entered mainstream physics. This area has important astrophysical
applications. In this paper, we show that acausal processes lead to
non-statistical uncertainty.

The main purpose of this paper is to inform specialists in uncertainty
representation about this situation, with a hope that formalisms for
describing non-statistical uncertainty that have been developed to
represent uncertainty of human knowledge (such as fuzzy logic) will
help in formalizing physical non-statistical uncertainty as well.

HTML version:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:aArqAbFMmxMJ:www.cs.utep.edu/pub/reports/tr96-5b.tex+acausal+statistics&cd=4&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-a