Both your and Jon's responses are helpful. I'm still very confused about the difference between triviality and degeneracy.
FWIW, I dug up the concept of "degeneracy pressure" <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degenerate_matter>. Am I
talking about that? I think so, in some weird way. Claiming you can derive anything from P^¬P seems similar (if opposite) to
collapsing into a singularity. And I apologize for my sloppy words. By "1 group" I do mean C₁ or the zero group. I
should have said something like "1 element symmetry" or "group of size 1" or somesuch. Sorry.
Anyway, I'm glad Eric took it back to telicity and cause. The distinction between
"always observed" and scoped counterfactuals might be what I'm looking for. But
I have nothing further I can contribute. I did need to post the apology and thanks for
the help, though.
On 8/23/24 17:21, Santafe wrote:
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
--
ꙮ Mɥǝu ǝlǝdɥɐuʇs ɟᴉƃɥʇ' ʇɥǝ ƃɹɐss snɟɟǝɹs˙ ꙮ
-. --- - / ...- .- .-.. .. -.. / -- --- .-. ... . / -.-. --- -.. .
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Fridays 9a-12p Friday St. Johns Cafe / Thursdays 9a-12p Zoom
https://bit.ly/virtualfriam
to (un)subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
archives: 5/2017 thru present https://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/
1/2003 thru 6/2021 http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/
