Jack,

Although we have different meta views in detail, I basically agree with what Len says here. The distinction is not going to be that clean unless you go to some very fundamental principle that doesn’t always show up in a practical engineering case. E.g., we know material in general is vacuum energy and quantum uncertainties, but we don’t need to worry about that at the scale of building construction.

I also agree that we should consider information relations as causes, but of course that runs into trouble culturally because the word “cause” has been so strongly associated with efficient cause. There is also a difference in how immediate and predictable, i.e., singular the “cause” is. When a macroscopic object moves under a gravitational force we can safely attribute efficient cause to gravity and its law is pretty darn exact at that scale. If we consider General Relativity at the cosmological scale there is the shape of space-time, which is more informational and has a feedback to dynamics. Configuration of masses warps space-time, which changes the coordinate system for describing the configuration of masses. This is not really a dynamical entailment because space-time is contextual, being the general reality in which the masses behave (and some models even say the existence of mass depends on this relation in a complex non-computable way).

Where Len and I might (I’m not sure) have different ideas is in distinguishing the types of causality, if that is useful or valid, how the causes might entail each other, and/or if they should instead be limited to one dynamical category for epistemological reasons.

Cheers,
John

PS I hope this is all helping the discussion in some way that is being tracked ..It should not be just a chat as we all are spending a lot of time going back and forth. I know it helps me sort out my own ideas, which do change as we proceed. To preserve that, I’m copying my responses to the Relational Science Blog site as a documented stream – I hope that is OK (I’m deleting the history, however, so its just my comments I’m posting).