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Goodbye Jesus

Mechanism, Magic, And Complexity


Legion

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Alright, Vigile suggested that we begin an exploration here. And I agree. I could go into some depth here, but I fear that some may get the impression that I am showing off my extensive scientific and philosophical dick. But we need some motivating words for the discussion, right?

 

The question before us seems to be this... How does causality operate? What is its nature?

 

I can see this going in all kinds of directions. And that's cool by me. Let me offer some things which I hold to be useful and we'll see where it goes.

 

We have a number of "impediments" keeping us from seeing causality directly. First as Kant pointed out. We do not percieve the world as it is, rather it is filtered through our senses and whatnot. He called the things as they are... noumena. What we sense are called... phenomena.

 

Okay, now here comes another something else. Causality is generally assumed to be the relations between phenomena, more specifically it is held to be the entailments between phenomena. And these are not directly percieved either. Rather they must be inferred.

 

Whew... I still have a long way to go, and I wanted to keep this brief. Think Legion. Keep it brief.

 

Alright, so let's suppose we have a model (an explicit understanding) of a natural system. This means we can explain and predict some facet or facets of its behavior. Once we've built (or discovered) a model our tendency is to look at the implications which inher to the language of the model and we then say, "The model captures the causal relations between the phenomena associated with the natural system." In other words... We tend to build a map of reality, and then call the map itself... reality.

 

Now where?

 

Uh... Ah! The language of the model. Newton built models. In fact this is the job and calling of science. But here's the thing. If our language is impoverished, then what it can possibly model will be limited. Newton and many who followed were using, and continue to use, an impoverished language to model nature. It's becoming clearer (first through biology and increasingly to other fields of inquiry) that in order to understand causality we will have to expand or enrich the languages we use. But there's a danger here that we will "over enrich it." We need formal languages which will support or allow "paradox" but not all paradox. Some paradoxes "make sense" and others do not. And it's not at all clear at the moment which is which. In biology we require closed loops of entailment, but apparently not all self-referential statements can be permitted.

 

I could go on, but I'll stop there for the moment. I hope that's enough to motivate the discussion. Thanks Vigile.

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Uh...yeah! You mentioned noumena and phenomena! And cause and effect! And yes with my impediments I've built up a map of reality and callrd the map itself a reality? Because my language is impoverished, then what it can possibly model will be limited? I do not percieve the world as it is, rather it is filtered through my senses and whatnot?

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Maybe cause and effect is simply a matter of how things fit together. Consider that a single point in 3 dimensions is a curve in 4 dimensional space, and we only see a series of cross sections of 4 dimensional space. (And 3 dimensional curves are 4 dimensional curvy sheets. Anyone want to start worshiping the Flying Lasagna Monster?) Perhaps what is cause and effect from our perspective is simply the way these 4 dimensional curves fit together from a static 4 dimensional perspective.

 

Also, consider this. In three dimensional space, there is no universal z, y, and z axes. I think it's obvious enough that there is also no universal time axis for the fourth dimension either. I tend to think there might be time lines radiating in all directions from the point of the big bang, but that's very speculative. But perhaps each particle has it's own time line, though enough particles can run parrallel or close enough to parallel in the time dimension for us to have very close approximations of the same perspective of time. Now folks who are familiar with my posts might remember my ideas about the non-existence of randomness in the strictest sense. But consider if a particle were to extend through 4d space in a way that is perpendicular to our nearly common time lines, and right through the 4d location of some phenomena we are observing. The way everything would fit together in 4d space may look like some random event to our series-of-3d-cross-section perspectives. And because the particle's (or bundle of particles?) have a time line perpendicular to ours, we'd never again get to observe anything about the particle.

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Uh...yeah! You mentioned noumena and phenomena! And cause and effect! And yes with my impediments I've built up a map of reality and callrd the map itself a reality? Because my language is impoverished, then what it can possibly model will be limited? I do not percieve the world as it is, rather it is filtered through my senses and whatnot?

:HaHa:

 

That's a curious response in my opinion Noumena. I did have the thought that you might read this OP and be spurred to action.

 

Where did you disagree? Where did you agree? And why?

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Maybe cause and effect is simply a matter of how things fit together.

MagicMonkey, please consider this if you will...

 

Imagine we are examining a complex organized natural system in its associated environment (e.g. an organism, an ecosystem, a society, etc.). How can we observe them so as to make their organization apparent? What kind of formal languages might we use to draw inferences about these observations? And above all, under what conditions can we truthfully claim to hold an understanding of them?

 

I say this instead of directly addressing what you've said because I think you're operating "a step up" on a series of assumptions about how nature is observed and what sorts of inferences are being used on them.

 

Also! What do you think of Aristotle's four causal categories?

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Uh...yeah! You mentioned noumena and phenomena! And cause and effect! And yes with my impediments I've built up a map of reality and callrd the map itself a reality? Because my language is impoverished, then what it can possibly model will be limited? I do not percieve the world as it is, rather it is filtered through my senses and whatnot?

GONZ9729CustomImage1539775.gif

 

That's a curious response in my opinion Noumena. I did have the thought that you might read this OP and be spurred to action.

 

Where did you disagree? Where did you agree? And why?

 

 

hahaha! I didn't put much thought into it really. I'm a lazy thinker. wink.png I'm gonna move on now...I really don't like being disruptive. tongue.png

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hahaha! I didn't put much thought into it really. I'm a lazy thinker. wink.png I'm gonna move on now...I really don't like being disruptive. tongue.png

Well, I hope people here will TRY to be disruptive. The idea is to rip these ideas I've presented to shreds.

 

But you'll have to think to do so. ;)

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I like to point to the similaritiws of physics and economics. Most economical laws, such as the laws of supply and demand exist on thr assumption that the people involved will act rationally when msking purchases. This is of course not the wsy it works. Some people will pay extra for some things based on irrational personal preferences, but on the whole, things average out that these rational laws hold.

 

This is very similar to the easiest to understand spontaneity we see in nature. The idea of nuclear decay. We dont know when it is going to happen, in fact, it appears entirely spontaneous, as if there is no cause for the effect, but we have an idea of a half life, so we can make models to fit what we see.

 

The mistak, I think, is always chalking up the outliers to mistakes.

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I like to point to the similaritiws of physics and economics. Most economical laws, such as the laws of supply and demand exist on thr assumption that the people involved will act rationally when msking purchases. This is of course not the wsy it works. Some people will pay extra for some things based on irrational personal preferences, but on the whole, things average out that these rational laws hold.

 

This is very similar to the easiest to understand spontaneity we see in nature. The idea of nuclear decay. We dont know when it is going to happen, in fact, it appears entirely spontaneous, as if there is no cause for the effect, but we have an idea of a half life, so we can make models to fit what we see.

 

The mistak, I think, is always chalking up the outliers to mistakes.

Noggy do you think in terms of probabilites and such?

 

Also, something you said reminded me of a paper I read once on looking at metabolism in terms of supply and demand.

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Noggy do you think in terms of probabilites and such?

 

Also, something you said reminded me of a paper I read once on looking at metabolism in terms of supply and demand.

 

In real life, no. I assume that the laws of physics hold all the time, it would be rqther unpractical and unwieldy to think in probablities.

 

However, in a search for truth, probabilities seem to be a much better model for our universe than linear determinism. But its still just that, a model. Cause and effect is just a logical model that we assume holds, and when it doesnt we just assume we did something wrong, or we need better tools. Seems a pretty huge assumption, to me.

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However, in a search for truth, probabilities seem to be a much better model for our universe than linear determinism. But its still just that, a model. Cause and effect is just a logical model that we assume holds, and when it doesnt we just assume we did something wrong, or we need better tools. Seems a pretty huge assumption, to me.

Again I want to stress... I'm not looking for "truths" per se, but rather models. But that small quibble aside... I think there is a place for probabilities. I particularly like the idea of Bayes and conditional probablitites. Using Bayes' theorem we can discover relations of entailment between phenomena. And that's what I think it's all about. This entails that. I increasinly think of causality in these terms.

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Ooh, I'm going to latch on to the "the map is not the territory" comment and go off on my own soapbox based on that one statement because many years ago I read an awesome semantics book with that phrase, and it's stuck with me since. Maybe by the end of this I'll say something relevant to the rest of the thread.

 

So, the universe is a huge complex mess, but enough things that happen are repeatable and consistent that we assume that some sort of cause and effect exists. So we try to come up with really simple scenarios that always obey these casual laws. Those are our models (spherical cows, frictional planes, massless rods, etc). They are incredibly useful. Not one of them is "real" in any sense of "ultimate reality". But that's cool, because they describe a useful piece of that ultimate reality. The import part is just knowing what the limitations of our models are.

 

The next point I was trying to make has been made already by people smarter and more eloquent than me, so here's a link:

http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm

 

The summary of that link is that Asimov says that wrong is relative - it's not wrong to think of the earth as flat when you're just using a map to get to the other side of your city. The earth is so huge that over that distance, the earth is close enough to flat for your navigational purposes. To connect it back to my statement, a model is only "wrong" when you're using it for a situation it doesn't apply to. For slow moving objects, for example, we can ignore relativity because the corrections would be inconsequentally small.

 

So here's my soapbox point. I'm a materialist, and I think all our models are wrong, for some value of wrong. I'm a materialist not because I think science has the world figured out, but because science has a lot of models that are incredibly useful in their limited sphere of applicability. The fun part of science is watching reality smash those models, then building better ones. It's an amazingly powerful cycle of death/destruction and rebirth.

 

Ok, back to the rest of this thread. Probabilities. I do think that, so far, quantum mechanics is the lowest level model we can be sure of. The standard model steadfastly refuses to break despite the fact that we KNOW that it can't be the final answer because for certain situations, it gives us nonsense answers. Well, the LHC might be getting close to breaking the standard model; we'll see. According to this model, you can say that probabilies are "more real" than deterministic cause and effect. My prefered model of the model is to say that matter in the classical sense doesn't realy exist; the "ultimate reality" is wave functions, and matter is just an illusion generated by a large number of interacting and collapsing wavefunctions.

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I'm glad you dropped in here VacuumFlux.

 

Ooh, I'm going to latch on to the "the map is not the territory" comment and go off on my own soapbox based on that one statement because many years ago I read an awesome semantics book with that phrase, and it's stuck with me since. Maybe by the end of this I'll say something relevant to the rest of the thread.

 

So, the universe is a huge complex mess, but enough things that happen are repeatable and consistent that we assume that some sort of cause and effect exists. So we try to come up with really simple scenarios that always obey these casual laws. Those are our models (spherical cows, frictional planes, massless rods, etc). They are incredibly useful. Not one of them is "real" in any sense of "ultimate reality". But that's cool, because they describe a useful piece of that ultimate reality. The import part is just knowing what the limitations of our models are.

I think this is a remarkable set of statements. I'd like to quote Robert Rosen here from his book Life Itself. He is speaking here to those who are skeptical of causal relations in nature...

 

"Nevertheless, it is hard to believe, for instance, that we could use natural language in its semantic role of bringing external referents inside, if there were not a great many phenomenal entailments; semantic language by its very nature imputes hordes of entailments to the ambience, without going really dramatically astray. For this, and similar (albeit subjective) reasons we will suppose that relations of entailment do indeed exist between phenomena; the question then becomes not whether, but when, such relations hold."

 

... a model is only "wrong" when you're using it for a situation it doesn't apply to.

We seem to be in agreement here VacuumFlux. A model will only produce accurate predictions under certain conditions and even when these conditions are met, the model will typically only address a fraction of the phenomena associated with the natural system being modelled.

 

I might get to some of the rest of your post later. I'd like to think about it first though.

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Maybe cause and effect is simply a matter of how things fit together.
MagicMonkey, please consider this if you will... Imagine we are examining a complex organized natural system in its associated environment (e.g. an organism, an ecosystem, a society, etc.). How can we observe them so as to make their organization apparent? What kind of formal languages might we use to draw inferences about these observations? And above all, under what conditions can we truthfully claim to hold an understanding of them?

 

I think we use science for that. I know that's a simplistic response, but that seems to be basically what science does. As far as the findings are concerned, we may always be mostly constrained to dealing with degrees of certainty rather than actual absolute certainty, but I think we can live with that.

 

 

I say this instead of directly addressing what you've said because I think you're operating "a step up" on a series of assumptions about how nature is observed and what sorts of inferences are being used on them.

 

 

No doubt I was speculating. ;)

 

Also! What do you think of Aristotle's four causal categories?

 

I honestly don't know much about that, but after a quick look, I think there is maybe a problem with the idea that you can't know something without it's cause. Of course, you can know a lot about something without knowing it's cause. You can't know everything there is to know about something without knowing it's cause, and certainly knowledge of the cause of a thing is damn significant. But every cause can be several factors with their own causes and so forth. You cannot know the entire tree of causal factors and events.

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hahaha! I didn't put much thought into it really. I'm a lazy thinker. wink.png I'm gonna move on now...I really don't like being disruptive. tongue.png

Well, I hope people here will TRY to be disruptive. The idea is to rip these ideas I've presented to shreds.

 

But you'll have to think to do so. wink.png

 

I like that attitude. Having one's ideas ripped to shreds isn't always fun, but forces one to be intellectually honest and allows one to refine his or her ideas. One think I've noticed is that if I post something on facebook, most of my friends won't even know what the hell I'm talking about, many are simply bored with what I say, and some might simply agree. I have had a few people there challenge me on a thing or two (usually ex-c'ers who are also fb friends). But if I post something of any significance here, I'm almost certainly going to be challenged!

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This is very similar to the easiest to understand spontaneity we see in nature. The idea of nuclear decay. We dont know when it is going to happen, in fact, it appears entirely spontaneous, as if there is no cause for the effect, but we have an idea of a half life, so we can make models to fit what we see.

 

I know this is off topic, but the concepts of half lifes are an excellent way to introduce people to differential equations. Of course, teaching them to solve differential equations is a different matter, but half lifes are a good way of explaining what one is.

 

The mistak, I think, is always chalking up the outliers to mistakes.

 

I say this often enough that I'm starting to annoy my own self, but that reminds me of a Sapolsky lecture (can't think of which one).

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However, in a search for truth, probabilities seem to be a much better model for our universe than linear determinism.

 

I don't know that it's better in the sense that it's more accurate, but I think it is more useful, simply because the branching chains of causality are often way to complex to follow.

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I think we use science for that. I know that's a simplistic response, but that seems to be basically what science does.

Now, now, MagicMonkey, don't make me shame you here. Let us not abrogate natural philosophy to the scientists alone. We are proud heathens. We know our shit. We know what's what and why it is. Right?

 

Also! What do you think of Aristotle's four causal categories?

 

I honestly don't know much about that, but after a quick look, I think there is maybe a problem with the idea that you can't know something without it's cause. Of course, you can know a lot about something without knowing it's cause. You can't know everything there is to know about something without knowing it's cause, and certainly knowledge of the cause of a thing is damn significant. But every cause can be several factors with their own causes and so forth. You cannot know the entire tree of causal factors and events.

Thank you for this! Let me think about this further before commenting.

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I think we use science for that. I know that's a simplistic response, but that seems to be basically what science does.

Now, now, MagicMonkey, don't make me shame you here. Let us not abrogate natural philosophy to the scientists alone. We are proud heathens. We know our shit. We know what's what and why it is. Right?

 

 

Well, one doesn't have to have a PhD and do research for a University or large corporation to be a scientist, though they certainly have more resources at their disposal. But my point was scientists are providing an example of how to do what you seemed to be talking about. And they are expanding our language as they do it.

 

 

Also! What do you think of Aristotle's four causal categories?

 

I honestly don't know much about that, but after a quick look, I think there is maybe a problem with the idea that you can't know something without it's cause. Of course, you can know a lot about something without knowing it's cause. You can't know everything there is to know about something without knowing it's cause, and certainly knowledge of the cause of a thing is damn significant. But every cause can be several factors with their own causes and so forth. You cannot know the entire tree of causal factors and events.

Thank you for this! Let me think about this further before commenting.

 

:)

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Well, one doesn't have to have a PhD and do research for a University or large corporation to be a scientist, though they certainly have more resources at their disposal. But my point was scientists are providing an example of how to do what you seemed to be talking about. And they are expanding our language as they do it.

But you're still saying "they". This is how I feel about it. I have reaped the benefits of science. And I feel semi-obligated to return the favor with not only being a part-time scientific banner carrier but also thinking about how I can do what little I can to actually further the endeavor. Sometimes that's as simple as offering words of encouragement to a beleaguered researcher.

 

To me, they are not "they". We're us. Wendyshrug.gif

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Well, one doesn't have to have a PhD and do research for a University or large corporation to be a scientist, though they certainly have more resources at their disposal. But my point was scientists are providing an example of how to do what you seemed to be talking about. And they are expanding our language as they do it.

But you're still saying "they". This is how I feel about it. I have reaped the benefits of science. And I feel semi-obligated to return the favor with not only being a part-time scientific banner carrier but also thinking about how I can do what little I can to actually further the endeavor. Sometimes that's as simple as offering words of encouragement to a beleaguered researcher.

 

To me, they are not "they". We're us. Wendyshrug.gif

 

Heheh, ok. I certainly wasn't making assumptions about how you may or may not be included in science.

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Heheh, ok. I certainly wasn't making assumptions about how you may or may not be included in science.

No, dingleberry :HaHa: I'm talking about how YOU may or may not be included in science. Do you feel that if you were presented with cutting edge ideas that you could make a contribution to either natural philosophy or to science proper?

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Heheh, ok. I certainly wasn't making assumptions about how you may or may not be included in science.

No, dingleberry GONZ9729CustomImage1539775.gif I'm talking about how YOU may or may not be included in science. Do you feel that if you were presented with cutting edge ideas that you could make a contribution to either natural philosophy or to science proper?

 

Dingleberry, huh! *flings feces* ;)

 

I think given my current resources, my contributions would be mostly theoretical or philosophical rather than scientific. I know this isn't exactly what you are talking about, but I think it would be fun to do science the way the mythbusters do it. Granted, their scientific endeavors can't be as thorough as scientists at a research facility can do, and their scope may be more limited. But I think they look at things that no one else takes the time to do, and I think many of their results are perfectly valid. And, with viewer feedback, they get plenty of ideas about what they could do better.

 

I don't know that I have much to contribute in the way of figuring out the grand scheme of everything, though I enjoy sharing my thoughts about reality. One simple thing I thought about doing that is scientific - testing to see if hexfet vertical MOSFETs really are subject to thermal runaway. MOSFETs have a reputation for being free from this problem. Some DIY audio guys think you can simply use them in the output stages of an amplifier without doing much in the way of ensuring thermal stability to prevent catastrophic thermal runaway - a situation where the gain of the device increases as it gets hotter, causing it to conduct more current, which causes it's temperature to rise, which causes even more gain, etc, until it gets hot enough to burn up the device. The generalization about MOSFETs IS known to be true for lateral MOSFETs, which aren't nearly as numerous, but are made for audio amplication purposes. They're also much more expensive. Vertical HEXFET MOSFETs are common and cheap enough that you can even find one at Radio Shack. But from what I've read, the generalization that MOSFETS have a negative temperature coefficient isn't true for these MOSFETS.

 

So I figured rather than argue with folks about it, I might just set up a test. For budgetary reasons, I'm simply going to assume what's known about lateral MOSFETs is a given. I hate making assumptions, but it's something pretty well established, and I don't want to fork out $10 or $20 dollars plus shipping for one. But I have a few IRF510's and can easily pick one up from RadioShack if needed. I can simply set up a source follower with a power resistor as a load. I can perhaps find a thermistor or something to measure the temperature of the heat sink (real world apps will use heatsinks to keep such devices cool, of course). I could use my laptop or some other computer along with an arduino board for data aquisition to log temperature changes along with the current through the load resistor. Of course, I'd bias the MOSFET to where the current is initially less than the maximum specified for the device. I would then simply let it run until the temperature either stabilizes or the device fails. For the sake of being thorough, I could then repeat (with a different MOSFET if I fry the one used in the first test) to see how it behaves with an audio signal on it's gate and a speaker tied between the source and load resistor (coupled via a capacitor of course).

 

It wouldn't be something that would change the world by any means, but if I confirm that the most common type of power MOSFET does indeed have a positive temperature coefficient and is indeed subject to thermal runaway, I might save a few DIY'ers some wasted time, money, and effort.

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I think given my current resources, my contributions would be mostly theoretical or philosophical rather than scientific.

 

.... MOSFETs ....

Could you list some material, efficient, formal and final causes of these MOSFETs? There may be more than four answers.

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I think given my current resources, my contributions would be mostly theoretical or philosophical rather than scientific.

 

.... MOSFETs ....

Could you list some material, efficient, formal and final causes of these MOSFETs? There may be more than four answers.

 

Well, I can make a very simplistic statement about their cause. They were caused by the results of semiconductor research, the desire to apply that research, the resulting manufacturing processes, economics, the need to reduce power consumption in electronic devices (essentially no gate current compared to significant base current in Bipolar Junction Transistors (BJT's). As far as the research goes, it can be traced back to the desire to create semiconductor replacements for vacuum tubes at Bell Laboratories (people have no idea what great things came from Bell Labs). By the way, if I remember correctly, Field Effect Transistors, though not of the MOSFET variety were actually invented (or maybe just theorized) before Bipolar Junction Transistors. The first semiconductor material used, I think, was diamond. I don't feel motivated enough to verify all this right now. Of course, various factors lead to the existence of the semiconductor materials being used. The birth, education, etc. of the people who concieved semiconductor devices and later MOSFETs specifically are causal factors. Ultimately, there is a complex branching chain of causal factors leading all the way back to the big bang. Who could possibly follow them all. But even if we can't, there may be some use in examining what we can easily follow.

 

However, to simply know how MOSFET's function, what their electrical properties are, how they can be applied to circuit design, etc., one doesn't have to know what caused their existence.

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