Hi, > Well, my primary objection is that "A" is only post-observation > description or pre-observation prescription determined to be a _unit_. > My original point was that all cause is complex and all effect is > complex. Perhaps I didn't say that clearly.
Ok - we agree so far. > This means that there really isn't an "A" as an (a single, autonomous) > effect. "A" is a _situation_ that obtains. And that situation consists > of many things. I.e. "A" is embedded inextricably in a context. Agreed. > Granted, one can hyper-focus some observation so as to artificially > label some slice of the situation and call that slice the unit "A". > But, that's an act of either description or prescription and is merely a > _model_ of the situation (often an impoverished one at that). > Hence, what you really have in the light cone is a gooey glob of effects > and causes that are related by partial order. This will be true as long > as the "locality" is not small enough to hit the quantum discretization > boundary. > > Does that make more sense? Ok - but the gooey glob is also only a description - we can extend the gooey glob to contain the whole universe (the Hubble volume). Would you say that at that level we have total ordering? I guess the problem boils back down to the question of a deterministic universe or an indeterministic one. Only if you subscribe to indeterminism partial ordering arises. And to the hammer/nail question: in the macroworld determinism well established (because even if one assumes totally indet. quantum fluctuations they would cancel out). How could you ever get a partial odering in the hammer/nail question? Regards, Günther -- Günther Greindl Department of Philosophy of Science University of Vienna [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.univie.ac.at/Wissenschaftstheorie/ Blog: http://dao.complexitystudies.org/ Site: http://www.complexitystudies.org ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
