Thus spake Russ Abbott circa 09-09-22 01:52 PM: > OK. I don't understand what you mean by either *circular causality* or > *lexical > mismatch*.
Whew! OK. By "circular causality", I mean that a thing is caused by another thing that is caused by itself. Abstractly, let E1, E2, and E3 be events such that E1 causes E2, and E3 causes E3, and E3 causes E1. Of course, you may object that an event can only occur once in the time stream and so E3, having occurred after E2 cannot cause E1. But there are cases for it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retrocausality#Current_topics A more acceptable conception of it comes in the form of non-well-founded sets and impredicative definitions where an object is _defined_ in terms of a quantification over the whole set to which that object belongs, or more simply, a set can be a member of itself. More flaky conceptions of it are autopoiesis and Rosen's closure to efficient cause. A more practical conception of it is co-evolution. By "lexical mismatch", I mean that two languages are different (at least) in terms of their vocabulary. So, a formal system with a set of symbols {x,y,z} is lexically distinct from a formal system with a set of symbols {x,y,p}. It should be clear that sentences formed in the former may not have an equivalent in the latter. Lexical mismatch is the simplest form. There can also be differences in grammar and/or axioms, which would lead to a linguistic mismatch, which may also contribute to complexity. -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-222-9095, http://agent-based-modeling.com ============================================================ 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
