Reply is to both Jon and Glen, though I seem to have deleted Glen’s post in scurrying around trying to shovel the lahar of whichever day it was (are there even different days, or is it just one long day run together?)….
Again, I feel like I am not tracking the language here, so I don’t know if I am getting the point or not. I don’t know what a 1 group symmetry is, though can guess. Also, whether that “1 group” is a reference to the "trivial group" (I would not have guessed that it was). So, admitting that I am responding through my own guesses, I think that Glen’s comment about "Degenerate constructs like a 1 group symmetry feel, to me, like metaphysical commitments…” is close to part of my reason in the original reply (nominally to/for Nick), which I didn’t articulate then: This was why the tenor of the original conversation made me think the right reply was to emphasize that laws are descriptions that can be made within the bounds of almost-entirely-incomplete characterizations of nature. “Very partial” or however I said it. I think this is why the term “cause” often enters people’s informal perception, though I think that is a misappropriation of the term as we have learned to use it technically, and I think the technical usage should expand to become the default one. What is a “cause”, technically?: In Pearl’s formulation (which is close enough for what I want here), causes are associated with some kinds of “enclosing boundaries” that “screen off” an external world from some enclosed variables we call the “system” and whose behavior we want to anticipate or control. The causing boundary is the thing on whose state the internal state depends, conditionally independent of the environment’s state given the state of the boundary. Glen’s page on causal reasoning is just the right source to grind all this out didactically. When people see that there is some “law” of nature, and that the law’s users claim that they can say things from the law, ignoring lots of other stuff about nature, in the common reflex it feels as if the law is somehow “enclosing” or “screening off” the values of the property-of-interest (a momentum in the future: will it be the same as a momentum now?), from all sorts of other distinctions that one could try to make (are we referring to the momentum of a hockey puck or an evangelical etc.) So in a sense common-language impressionists are not vacuous in trying to put this under the broad umbrella-term “cause”. I get why they imagine a family resemblance (Vygotskian term). But compared to “cause” as the term works in dynamics (or even in Darwinism with selection being the cause-by-filtering for adaptation), the laws aren’t determining one outcome among many that could be possible, which all the “real” (IMO) notions of cause are doing. Rather it is describing a pattern (unchanging momentum along trajectories under conditions with translation symmetries etc.) that is always witnessed. This is why I prefer the characterization of it as a description of the standard scientific kind. It would be like the statement that a boundary “has a causal relation” to an interior is the descriptive part — always true of that boundary in relation to that interior — whereas the particular values taken by the boundary actually *cause* the taking of the resulting values in the interior. Small points of sentence semantics, but I think they allow the sentences to conduct a coherent train of thought, rather than cross-cut it. But just my preferences, I guess. ymmv. Eric > On Aug 24, 2024, at 5:52 AM, Jon Zingale <jonzing...@gmail.com> wrote: > > "Degenerate constructs like a 1 group symmetry feel, to me, like metaphysical > commitments..." > > Glen, > > In an attempt to understand Eric's response to me, I got to reading this > group-theory dense paper reasoning with kernels and strata about spontaneous > symmetry breaking[1]. It got me understanding your skepticism toward the > trivial group as an instance of the no-hiding theorem. Can anyone ever really > crumple up a napkin to the point that it becomes different in kind? I am in > San Diego staring at the ocean, watching it tirelessly produce and destroy > novelty all along the shore. > > [1] https://www.ihes.fr/~vergne/LouisMichel/publications/SponSymBr.1985_1.pdf > -. --- - / ...- .- .-.. .. -.. / -- --- .-. ... . / -.-. --- -.. . > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Fridays 9a-12p Friday St. Johns Cafe / Thursdays 9a-12p Zoom > https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fbit.ly%2fvirtualfriam&c=E,1,vU5BEHY5N1_OrtRDCvcOw682FFs3Q2RvJ3pGs1iaDm0LgZM8yvmULo_1rsz95DZK_E0mt6bdH5GrepIWWPJX1LeUt6tnU1mRtYKt4Uw5NP2mkTumw-s,&typo=1 > to (un)subscribe > https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=http%3a%2f%2fredfish.com%2fmailman%2flistinfo%2ffriam_redfish.com&c=E,1,JkZrVJ7qRpTE0b1AhWN0ycl45n_STPyZ8S5Ms1lEQJlyuYgCWTThVvq6cnW_VFhZRtufEelVqgOLVuj3q7VmuzzgYYS8b76vKauJXdfUyAH6qW-2Az1y&typo=1 > FRIAM-COMIC > https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=http%3a%2f%2ffriam-comic.blogspot.com%2f&c=E,1,eC4cy3XsYn1dAVpN-OpJiTfbfmBqR2Vvt4ntrnuD6qvbhwyb265lmgr4jxYTwv6SGwhj_FZjJlmKc-iM88OZmNCvKjrklE-gZJ26cKQJN9w_8tXQXHQrKsHp&typo=1 > archives: 5/2017 thru present > https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fredfish.com%2fpipermail%2ffriam_redfish.com%2f&c=E,1,aw1WQ8DOeIGvKmlGH0VVgPKrQJzLClMaZ5CjO_2Tx8esz7B2h554BFiy17Z9Sp258RtAamc-FSgjDvkDFw4iiigyBwMXmCsnw06_fQ6kO33uFtNI9d43nC1J&typo=1 > 1/2003 thru 6/2021 http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/ -. --- - / ...- .- .-.. .. -.. / -- --- .-. ... . / -.-. --- -.. . 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