> > Thanks, Colin, > I feel we also agree in your last sentence statement, however I could not > decide whether "abstraction" is reductionist model forming or a > generalization into wider horizons? Patterns - I feel - are IMO definitely reductive.
Abstraction I would characterise as a mapping into a representational domain. As to the level of reduction, that would depend on the domain of symbols and their mapping to the mapped domain. The questions to ask yourself are: a) Who decides what the lowest level domain is to be? b) What do you lose when you choose? Let's look at abstracting a whole human: a-1) Say we 100% abstract a human down to a representation of cells. Cells would be the base level descriptive domain. Organs would be data patterns that the cells express under the rules of the abstraction. And so on. You are not letting the natural rules run. You are merely moving symbols around. No matter how powerful the computer and how detailed (lowest level domain) the abstraction is just the computer's representation of the symbols being moved around. a) If you build a squillion little computers, each to act 'as-if' they were the, say, the cell level of the abstraction with a little physical interface that meant it was just like a cell from the outside, then you have reinstated some level of the natural world's involvement...the resulting human may be indistinguiishable from a human. Organs are an emergent property of these collaborating 'Turing Cells'. b) Then again, if you reduced the abstraction level to build tiny computers that become substitute molecules, so to all intents they looked like molecules...the human would look the same. Cells are an emergent property of collaborations of these 'Turing Molecules'. (please ignore the need for fluids and food etc in this body for the moment!) If you inspected the human a-1) at the molecular level all you see is a computer playing with patterns depending on the chosen abstraction domain. If you inspected human a) at the molecular level you would see only the computer that runs cells, but the cells would look normal. There are no human molecules here, only the molecules of the computers inside the cells. If you inspected human b) at the molecular level you would see what appears to be real molecules. The cells would look normal. However, look for atoms and you won't find any. Q. What is it like to be human a-1) cf a) cf b) and how well does each human operate cognitively? You could extend the argument to simulated Turing-quarks and Turing-leptons... and so on... at some point the human would acquire consciousness. What level of Turing-granularity is that? My answer to this would be probably waaaaaay down deep below where the matter and the space differentiate their behaviour. We have no justification that any one level of organisation is an end-point. > > that scale-game (40-50 orders of m. down) seems to me valid within the physical explanatory equationalized circumstances - so I scrutinize it (accept it within physics-thinking). It does not refer to 'time' (whichever > you prefer). I had the notion that there 'is' only "change" ie. movement and > space is a time-coordinate of it, while time is a space-coordinate of it, Change as a structural primitive is quite workable. Imagine being human shaped water in one place in a waterfall... i.e. regular structure within change. At any instant there is a human, but the water is flowing, so the componentry of the human is dynamically refreshed. Think of "humanity". Humanity survives where all the humans in it don't. Same thing at all scales. An infinity of potential collaborations of that one tiny change primitive that have a net value of "1 change primitive" can be substituted for any other change primitive. This recursiveness is the basis of a calculus/logic. In this system time results merely from the state of the collaboration undergoing a transition as the change primitive does what it does (eg changes from state A to B then back to A). There's not such thing as time in this structure. If the state changes happen at a regular enough rate then equations with a "t" in it are possible as descriptors. The universe acts 'as-if' there was time. If you are made of a pile of these changes then, if there was an observation faculty, all you would see is the collaboration evolving according to the rules of the structural primitives. You would need to "see" only the structural regularity, not the change primitives. In the waterfall metaphor, two humans as regularity in this waterfall would not see any water. They would see only each other and the space in between. This is nature of In this structural domain these things are really simple. Also: If you take a slice _across_ this structure around the level of atoms, photons etc and devise mathematical descriptions for the behaviour of identified structures you get quantum mechanics. QM says absolutely nothing about 'what it is that is behaving quantum mechanically. There is nothing there but the one single change primitive. Call it X. Everything is merely organisations of X. Stare at a human and all you are staring at is X. There are no 'things' atoms. The atoms are all X behaving like atoms. That is where I would take you idea of change. You can relate this directly to the 'Turing-granulation' discussion above easily enough. > as > long as we think in terrestrially (not even of THIS universe) formed explanations of those figments we conclude upon the latestly primitive instrumental observations in our reductionist science domain. > Matter and its 'behavior' is similarly 'concluded' to reflect the 'personal' > experiencing of the unknown effects. > > I am deterred by the semantic direction of 'computing'. If it is Bruno's manipulation of ordinary numbers, I feel OK, but then I feel domains of incompetence. Your "as-if" changes that and I felt lost. Why use a word with 'other' meaning 'as - if'? It is a cheap excuse that we have no better > one <G>. > > Sorry for just "multiplying the words" in this exchange. > John M > I'm having trouble following your issue. My background is one of a huge involvement in software and computers from the very highest to the very lowest levels. There's nothing like building basic aritmetic out of logic gates to get you understanding what is going on! I find it easy to see that none of the mathematical domains we define, including the natural numbers, are ever actually reified in computing. Take a variable X that is supposed to represent a quanity. There is a memory location where some electrons are thrown in pattern of electron buckets that by our agreed convention encodes the quantity as a binary representation. We then have another pointer called X that says where the buckets are. We write progams to manipulate the electron buckets. The pattern in the electron buckets acts 'as-if' or stands for a real platonic 'thing' that is intrinscally a quanitiy X. I find it impossible to imagine this platonic object that is intrinsically "X_quantityness". What I do know for sure is that nowhere in the computer is this platonic "thing". All there is are electron buckets going through a pattern contrived to behave in the same way as the platonic object would if it existed. Not sure if that helps... but the idea of abstractions being 'as-if' representations seems a useful way of grounding ourselves.. to beware that the so-called reality we are part of is implemented in a domain unlike any we currently explore, and that it is validly considered to be computation, it's just that the computation is very different. Not sure if that helps... but... well it was fun to write! cheers colin hales --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---