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A similar point holds for explanations of the behavior of other sorts of complex systems, such as those studied in biology and economics. Consider the standard explanation, in terms of an upward shift of the supply curve, with an unchanged demand curve, for the increase in the price of oranges following a freeze. Underlying the behavior of this market are individual spatio-temporally continuous causal processes and interactions in Salmon's sense — there are a myriad of individual transactions in which money in some form is exchanged for physical goods, all of which involve transfers of matter or energy, there is exchange of information about intentions or commitments to buy or sell at Scientific software various prices, all of which must take place in some physical medium and involve transfers of energy, and so on. However, it also seems plain that producing a full description of these processes (supposing for the sake of argument that it was possible to do this) will produce little or no insight into why these systems behave as they do. Again, this is not just because any such “explanation” will overwhelm our information processing abilities. It is also the case that a great deal of the information contained in such a description will be irrelevant to the behavior we are trying to explain, for the same reason that a detailed description of the individual molecular trajectories will contain information that is irrelevant to the behavior of the gas. For example, while the detailed description of the individual causal processes involved in the operation of the market for oranges presumably mathlab will describe whether individual consumers purchase oranges by cash, check, or credit card, whether information about the freeze is communicated by telephone or email, and so on, all of this is to a first approximation irrelevant to the equilibrium price — given the supply and demand curves, the equilibrium price will be the same as long as there is a market in which consumers are able to purchase oranges by some means, information about the freeze and about prices is available to buyers and sellers in some form, and so on.[ 15 ] Moreover, those factors that are explanatorily relevant to the equilibrium price, such as the shape of the demand and supply curves, are not in any obvious sense themselves connected by spatio-temporally continuous processes to the price (it is unclear what this claim even means), although as emphasized above, the unknown processes underlying the attainment of equilibrium are presumably spatio-temporally continuous.
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