Glen
>
> Phil Henshaw on 01/02/2008 09:25 PM:
> > Yes, sure, that's an option of interpretation, but does it fit with
> > the rest of what I was saying? I think there's an interpretation
> > that fits the data of nature better than any other, so it's reached
> > as a 'conclusion' not as an 'assumption'. For example, can you
> > offer any example of physical growth (accumulative change)
> without a
> > beginning and end?
>
> Hmmm. I suppose that depends on the way "beginning" and
> "ending" are measured. It seems to me that _nothing_ real
> has a beginning or end. Our models of things begin and end;
> but, the things themselves don't seem to.
There are several ways, but since they involve physical things rather
than definable things the reasoning is different. With physical things
there are recognizable ridges and valleys. An inflection point on a
curve is a ridge or valley in the derivative. Like with ( ¸¸.o´ ¯ and
¯ `o.¸¸ ) the o's of the beginning and ending developmental phases can
be considered the definable beginning and end and. Then the indefinable
part attached includes all you can find connected to them. That
provides an efficiently reconstructable natural definition of beginning
and end. The more useful part may come later, when you realize that
once you have (¸¸.o) there's simply no avoiding ( o´ ¯ `o.¸¸)coming
right along. Once you see growth you can expect to see the other three
phases of a whole system life-cycle.
> For example, I can say that "my dad" was born. Then many
> years later, he died. But when did "my dad" begin? Was he
> "my dad" when he was a zygote? A fetus? A gleam in my grand
> dad's eye? Same questions apply about when he ended. In
> fact, the difference between an embryo and a fetus presents
> just such an example of physical growth without a beginning
> or an end. We don't know when the fetus "began" and our
> cut-off point for "fetus" is artificially designed to
> coincide with birth.
Well, you can choose. Do you want to apply the rule to your dad as a
whole or to some part? One of the unobservable but theoretically real
thresholds I like for the beginning of an organism is the time when the
egg opens its cell wall for just one sperm. I don't know how many
organisms that actually works for, but I think it works for humans.
>
> The same is true of any unit you can think of. Sure, by
> measuring the thing according to some model, you can point to
> a beginning and end... according to your _model_. But, is
> the thing being measured actually beginning and ending? Or
> is it just the way you measure it that results in the measurements?
What you're talking about is the maturation of your concept of beginning
and ending and hoping that it settles down with something reliable and
definite and not just some arbitrary opinion measure or something. For
the many things that begin with growth it's fairly easy to be clear
about it. That then provides a very large set of examples that other
things can be judged by. I think, though I'm not completely sure, that
everything that begins and ends some other way will turn out to be
trivial, but that needs remain undetermined until it is.
> By that reasoning, I can simply pick a model of the world
> where nothing ever ends and nothing ever begins... i.e. a
> model that says the world is everywhere continuous. Forces
> in distant galaxies impact me to some non-zero extent (though
> they may be _negligible_ for any given purpose). Events in
> the distant past caused me to, say, get some more coffee...
> at least to some extent.
What would be wrong with considering the world without beginnings or
ends is that you're establishing fact without evidence. I choose to
avoid that since it is clearly unproductive. Otherwise you're just
dwelling on incontrovertible conjectures for which there is no evidence,
and that gets boring.
> So my answer is: Sure. Tell me what model you'd like me to
> use and I can pick a growth process that has neither a
> beginning nor an end.
Try one, any one. If all your data shows is the beginning and end of
your recorder being turned on, then you can indeed say that you have not
found the beginning or end of the system in question, just of your
record. All you can ever associate with anything identifiable is what's
connected to it, and that never proves much about what's not connected.
> > Complex systems are always poorly represented by our
> models, but does
> > that restrict them, or just us? :-)
>
> That's easy: Both, because we are part of the super-system
> that includes the sub-system being studied.
>
> > Well, certainly a term needs to be understood so that when
> one persons
> > uses it another person can know what is being referred to.
> But isn't
> > that a normal problem with language, not an inherent flaw
> in language?
> > In this case I'm using 'feedback loop' in a way I thought would be
> > understood, from your referring to the physical model of
> the 'chicken
> > & egg' cycle. It wasn't that clear perhaps.
>
> It's not that it's unclear. It's that the meaning you're
> using isn't concrete. It's abstract. A "feedback loop"
> cannot be picked up, manipulated, eaten, twisted into a
> pretzel, etc. Hence, it is not concrete.
One of the puzzling enduring experiences of nature is looking inside
things to see how they work only to find a whole lot of empty space and
an impossible puzzle. For centuries now we've been looking at systems
that way, seeing the people and unable to find the community, for
example. Then we look in people and find a whole lot of things that
know exactly what to do and have no instructions. We expect to find
inside nature's machines something like the mechanisms of the machines
we build, and only find what mostly looks like an empty box.
The feedback loops I'm talking about are highly concrete, but they're in
the animation of the whole, and vanish from view when you only look at
the parts. They don't work on paper, and they don't have any particular
dimensionality at all, unless you project an image of them. You can see
where they operate from growth curves and you can trace them as far as
your budget allows. They're physical things. In the same way as
economies are money in motion, that don't exist if it stops, so are
physical things all energy in motion. It sounds all wrong, but the
apparent fact is that nothing has any parts, only movement.
>
> As an abstract thing, all that remains is to figure out
> whether the thoughts triggered by others by the phrase
> "feedback loop" are roughly equivalent to the thoughts
> triggered in you when you see the phrase "feedback loop".
But even more important is to look at WHEN the responding thoughts
arise. There's always a time lag, a class 'A' gap in efficient
causation. What that means is the 'received' thought is not received at
all, but reinvented, and the gap in efficient cause prevents determining
whether the sent and received message are even similar. There do seem
to be some higher orders involved, of course. With repetition we can
agree on appropriate choices of words for commonly observable things,
for our mental pointers to physical things, but we'll never know each
other's thoughts it seems, and without a physical world for each of our
pointers to point to, then no cross check at all.
> Now, concrete things have a natural mechanism for correcting
> errors in the thoughts of those that manipulate them. E.g.
> if you pick up a rock, roll it around in your hands, toss it
> up in the air, drop it on your foot, etc. Then I pick it up,
> roll it around, etc. There's a good chance that equivalent
> thoughts pop up when we think about that rock. And we can use
> the concreteness of the rock to whittle down any differences
> by designing standard methods for handling the rock.
>
> But with abstract things like "feedback loop", it's much more
> difficult. The only methods for ensuring our thoughts are
> equivalent when the phrase is uttered is to talk about it for
> extended periods, probably with several conversations
> (possibly including quizzing each other). We can also help
> bring the thoughts closer by indirectly using concrete
> artifacts like drawings, computers, etc. ("Point to the
> feedback loop!" ;-)
To me ¸¸.·´ ¯ `·.¸¸ is a sign to a physical object that classifies 4
types of feedback loops. If those familiar irreversible kinds of become
recognized it will be as useful for checking each other's pointers to
complex systems that do that as tossing around a rock.
>
> I posit that, in most people, the thoughts evoked by
> "feedback loop" are going to be very different, primarily
> because most people don't work very closely together with
> most other people. Sure, some people work closely with some
> other people. But, by and large, an abstract thing like a
> "feedback loop" will mean very different things to different people.
Sure, most people don't watch to see how things begin and end.
Thinking in circles that get somewhere is quite difficult, and rational
minds were maybe not made for that. When we see circular causation
that is getting somewhere it does often trigger visceral experience
though, so I'll employ that too.
> And one of the main differences will be in thinking about the
> beginning and the ending of any given feedback loop.
>
> > Can you think of any regular cycle that does not begin and end with
> > accumulative processes on scales that make them untraceable?
>
> I don't really understand what you're asking for. Perhaps if
> you gave me an example of a regular cycle that has a clear
> beginning and a clear ending?
A bell, perhaps, you whack it and it rings. Any measure you have of it
will display ¸¸.·´ ¯ `·.¸¸ and those turning points will be traceable to
changes in the emergent mechanisms of energy flow.
>
> > I draw the conclusion that natural system feedbacks have no
> efficient
> > cause since it's 'inefficient' to have causes separated
> from effects.
> > With growth systems there are usually time lags between cause and
> > effect, so any 'cause' is instrumentally disconnected from
> the process
> > that follows it. Growth systems also usually have complex emergent
> > properties with a complexity not evident in the original
> environment,
> > and so outside cause fails to be 'efficient' for requisite variety
> > too.
> >
> > In the case of a real physical growth system you'd be quite
> right to
> > say that any feedback loop we can define has us as its efficient
> > cause. A physical system's own feedback loops are indeed complex.
> > For talking about them it seems you need words that take
> their meaning
> > from what they refer to rather than be defined so they
> can't. That's
> > an issue, of course.
> >
> > Then I think the best of all evidence is the myriad physical systems
> > that hide their designs inside themselves. That's very
> 'inefficient'
> > isn't it, to have things designed and operating according to
> > principles that are universally invisible from outside? Isn't that
> > typical for physical systems though?
>
> You seem to be using the word "efficient" as it's used in
> everyday language rather than as the peculiar meaning it
> takes on when used in the phrase "efficient cause". An
> "efficient cause" need not be efficient. Such a cause needs
> only to meet Aristotle's (or Robert
> Rosen's) definition of such causes.
>
> >> I'm not saying that any of these are true; but they are certainly
> >> defensible positions... as defensible as the assertion
> that the loops
> >> have no efficient cause.
> >
> > When you talk about 'defensible' but ambiguous positions
> I'm reminded
> > of questions like whether trees falling in the woods make a sound if
> > no one hears them. The interest in that question seems to rest
> > entirely on the argument for either position being completely
> > 'incontrovertible', i.e. defensible by being impossible to
> contradict.
>
> I apologize. That's not how I intend it. When I say
> something is defensible or reasonable, I mean that a diligent
> person can make a persuasive argument that it's true. The
> introduction of a contrary fact can demolish such defensible
> positions, turning them indefensible. But absent such
> contrary facts, the position is defensible. And any given
> topic can tolerate several defensible but contradictory positions.
>
> > To me people seem interested in that because it turns on
> whether the
> > universe is composed of information or things. If just
> information,
> > then the unobserved falling tree makes no sound. If you
> approach the
> > world as composed of things, then it does.
>
> Not necessarily. If the whole universe is information, then we
> (observers) are information. And if we're information, then
> other things (also information) might also be like us.
> Hence, if a tree falls in the forest and no human is there
> but some non-human information globule with the power to
> observe is present, then it still makes a sound.
But if the universe were 'information' would its missing pieces exist
when they're unknown? They shouldn't should they? Otherwise you no
longer have a useful definition of information. If they exist when
they're unknown then they must be physical. Certainly one of the most
enduring features of nature is that good hints of where to look helps
you find stuff, and anywhere you look closely you find much more than
you initially realized was there. These are features of ordinary
physical stuff, no?
>
> So, even if the world is composed entirely of information, the tree
> (information) may make a sound even if no "one" is there to
> hear it. For example, even though wood molecules (also
> information) can't _hear_, they can certainly react to the
> physical pressures (also information) that might result from
> the falling tree. I.e. the tree, itself, is an observer or
> is composed of observers .... even if it's dead.
So you seem to be calling physical things, that are discoverably complex
beyond our imagination, to be information. That seems to be discarding
the useful definition of information, as either located in a mind or
conveying an aspect of one thing to another. Now you're talking about
information as physical stuff, and positing that information is not only
a pointer to where the cookie jar is, but also the cookies. Anything
that is everything is nothing in particular as far as I can tell.
> In short, everything being information doesn't change the
> answer. Events can either be sensed by an observer or they
> can't, regardless of what the universe is composed of.
It seems to be composed of organized motion, which may disappoint a
common 100,000 year old assumption, perhaps, but seems to be correct
none the less.
> > Why anyone would even wonder about that might be
> > that our mental pointers to physical things get mazes of
> > self-references attached to them, so our thoughts can
> wander without
> > end looking for what's real, and find nothing but themselves to
> > connect to. When you strip the interpretations from the pointers,
> > they can work again. I find it gives reality great substance, and
> > having pointers reliably lead to where there are new things to
> > discover very useful.
> >
> > Do you think Rosen is thinking at all about this issue? It sounds
> > like he's looking at an equally central problem of explanation I
> > think.
>
> Yes. He explicitly talks about this (meters and observables)
> in Fundamentals ... as well as Life Itself. The presentation
> in Fundamentals ... is more explicit.
I should read it... What's 'Fundamentals'?
For me fundamentals are the pointers out into the fog that I learn to
trust will connect me with something I didn't make up on my own. I can
invent an ontology around them, but that's artificial, and not what they
are, where to find them or where they come from. I don't think they
come from my discovery of them either (over and over and over!) but are
just ordinary stuff. What would Ocham not like about that? When I'm
curious I can even observe the 'non-efficient' causation of my own
ideas. How they develop exposes their independent growth eruptions and
fading decays. Since they develop and decay on their own in the same
manner as every other kind of organization they seem made of ordinary
stuff too. :-)
Phil
>
> - --
> glen e. p. ropella, 971-219-3846, http://tempusdictum.com
> There's no sense in being precise when you don't even know
> what you're talking about. -- John Von Neumann
>
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
> Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (GNU/Linux)
> Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org
>
> iD8DBQFHfWaGZeB+vOTnLkoRAp3uAKDbRaRWXNT0OJvEABZBe4BtnJIMNACgnfSl
> vKe+CHfNs+Ka3dGkTBXElpw=
> =xcZh
> -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
>
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
>
>
============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
