Regarding Bob's, then Pedro's
>"As Ladyman and Ross write, in the book that I learned about in this group,
>we radically need to change our metaphysics about what a thing is, or
>rather is not, and what patterns can be understood as the active
>entities of both knowledge and existence."
>
>It wasn't clear to me whether this was Joe or Pedro writing, but I
>concur whole-heartedly! Popper was suggesting the same thing in his
>last book, "A World of Propensities".
>
>In fact, I would go even further to suggest that we free ourselves of
>our fixation with "things" (objects) and opt instead for a metaphysics
>predicated on processes (and configurations thereof.) (That's what my
>latest book is all about. :)
I just want to remind us about Whitehead's 'Philosophy of
Organism', which had the same aim. On this topic, I would also
remind us that in systems that can be modeled using compositional
hierarchies, high level entities will appear as 'things' to lower
level ones (viz our view of the solar system), while lower level
entities will appear as processes to higher level ones (viz our view
of (what we model as) electrons. Thus, in this format, things and
processes are the result of observation.
----------------------------------------------
Replying on this topic to Pedro, who said --
>
>PS. From Stan, "Hierarchy theorists propose.. that higher levels make
>ensemble representations of lower level configurations, while lower
>levels are affected by higher level informational constraints in the
>form of impinging boundary conditions." It is really intriguing; would
>it apply to the division of work among the cells in a multicell
>organism? Who is lower and higher level there?
S: In the scale (compositional) hierarchy applied in this
context the template would be: [organism [organ [cell
[macromolecules]]]], based on average order of magnitude differences
in the processes at each level in the system. That is, in this
hierarchy, a higher level has orders of magnitude slower rates, which
therefore contextualize the systems with faster rates of activity.
Regarding
< Is the neuron "higher level" than the hepatocist, the brain than the liver?
I suppose this could be answered given some data. Neurons generally
are quite rapid in their activity if I understand it aright, but
functional units in the nervous system may rather be modules within
the brain, which may also be deployed at significantly different
rates. It is interesting to note that Howard Pattee's rate-dependent
dynamics versus rate-independent informational constraints looks a
bit more complicated in this hierarchical context. If there is a
very slow rate, it could be detected by lower level fast rate
entities as imposing a rate independent constraint.
STAN
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