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Luiz isn’t a philosopher, but he’s philosophically curious, so I want to push back on this a little bit. I think that part of the problem is with a tacit network of assumptions about what causation is, and what it has to be. 1/8 https://twitter.com/PessoaBrain/status/1340314232622100481
If you think that causation is always a matter of bumping, prodding, and controlling, then I think he’s at least partly right. But there are many ways of thinking about causality that open up alternative possibilities, which have a lot more purchase on biological systems 2/8
The key forms of causation that we need to focus on, it seems to me, are the kinds that sustain patterns of interdependence, the kinds that shape developmental pathways, and the kinds that govern dynamic interactions in complex networks. Once we center these, however 3/8
we need another way of thinking about causation that is multifaceted, constraint-based, and open to complex patterns where multiple causes are necessary for single effects, and where single causes can yield multiple effects. There have been gestures in this direction 4/8
but to the best of my knowledge, there is nothing that really pulls off the whole picture. This is one of the reasons that I am really interested in the complex models of causality that are articulated in the Abhidharma Buddhist framework. Though trying to make it useful from 5/8
a contemporary perspective is no easy task. Ideally, what we want is a story that can explain the complex pathway that leads from a seed, to a sprout, to a fruit, while recognizing that at every point along that pathway, there are multiple branching chains of causality 6/8
which cross-cut the patterns we are interested in when we chose to focus on that pathway (e.g., the ones involved in the regulation of fungal networks in the soil surrounding the developing plant). By making this kind of case a core case of causation, things get interesting. 7/8
But we will also need to refocus the theory of causal relations, in ways that pull us much closer to the kinds of complex interactions that are of most interest to Luiz. (Sorry for the long thread to make such a simple point 
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