maybe an interesting (but relevant) question is also "what is interesting?"
It seems that we, as examples of complex, organized,
far-from-equilibrium, systems of dissipative systems entities find other
examples with similar (subsets) of those properties "interesting"...
I'm not sure what a system without those properties would call
interesting (or if it could/would call anything anything).
I think what you are calling "interesting" are systems exhibiting
nonlinear phenomena, self-organization, and aghast! emergence. I think
therefore that such systems exhibit proto-life-like properties by
definition. Your exclusion of systems arising from biological
(explicitely alive) systems seems to be trying to niggle at the root of
"what is life"?
On 5/25/17 5:59 AM, Steven A Smith wrote:
Russ -
I *think* I know what you are getting at, but I don't think we are
there yet in this discussion.
I think we've come full circle to the challenges we encountered in the
early days of Artificial Life. The first year or two of ALife
conferences had a lot of focus on "what IS life?" It is a bit too
early in the morning for me to give this proper consideration but as I
remember it, there were many examples of systems with life-like or
more to the point proto-life-like properties. I doubt I can put my
hands on my proceedings from ALife I and ALife II easily and couldn't
pull them up online beyond this:
http://alife.org/conferences-isal-past?page=2
I think your intuition that "unless all of physics would be" is
correct, especially when caveated by your own reference to dissipative
systems which go on to imply far-from-equilibrium and irreversible
systems.
A precursor to the ALife work was that of Tibor Ganti:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemoton
which invoked "metabolism" and "self-replication" as qualities of
proto-life.
It seems like Autocatalytics Sets are useful and near-minimal
abstractions?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autocatalytic_set
I feel like my maunderings here are vaguely circular when concatenated
with your own but I hope someone more incisive than I takes an
interest in this discussion and tightens these ideas up a little.
- Steve
On 5/24/17 10:25 PM, Russ Abbott wrote:
I'll buy the ones Steven Smith mentioned. But those are mainly
weather and related. I guess that could be generalized to weather and
geology.
I don't see why formation of galaxies, stars and planets would be
considered a complex system phenomenon unless all of physics would be.
A vortex or hurricane or other dissipative system?
I'd rule out high speed trading since it's done with computers and
works only because it interacts with people trading.
All the examples I like (weather, etc.) are open systems that have
energy flowing through them. That often generates interesting
phenomena. (As we mentioned above dissipative systems
<https://goo.gl/WGAZ9Q>.) Do you think that's enough to qualify a
system as complex? (I know, as Steve said, it's a fuzzy term.) They
all reflect "emergence" of some sort -- even though I don't like that
term these days. But they lack the quality of complexity that we find
in systems containing agents with some degree of autonomy.
Are there any non-biological, non-human, non-computer systems that
would qualify as consisting of autonomous agents?
On Wed, May 24, 2017 at 8:48 PM Gillian Densmore
<[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Although Donder's Son may have a fine example. The clouds (gas
things) Jupiter or saturns weather are fine example of
complicated stuff only those planets make.
On Wed, May 24, 2017 at 9:04 PM, Steven A Smith <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
"Complex Systems" being a somewhat fuzzy concept, this is
hard/easy to answer.
Any physical system comprised of large numbers of similar or
identical elements which interact and yield non-linear
collective behaviour seems like a good enough definition for
your purposes. Sand dune formation and (breaking) waves and
cloud formation/dissipation all seem like pretty good
candidates, not to mention the aforementioned weather in
general. Earthquake/Rift/Mountain formain seems like a good
fit as well as wind/rain erosion of soil in general.
On 5/24/17 8:56 PM, cody dooderson wrote:
Is a vortex like a funnel cloud or the Saturn's hexagon
considered a complex system?
Cody Smith
On Wed, May 24, 2017 at 8:31 PM, Marcus Daniels
<[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
High speed trading comes close to not involving people.
Other examples that come to mind involve some
autonomous (biological) agent creating demand. For
example, energy or data or transportation networks are
responding to a logistical demand created by people.
Netflix (vs. adaptive routing) is a demand created by
people.
As companies like Google begin to build agents that
build models and satisfy constraints the requests they
initiate will become more adaptive.
*From:*Friam [mailto:[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>] *On Behalf Of *Russ
Abbott
*Sent:* Wednesday, May 24, 2017 6:59 PM
*To:* FRIAM <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>>
*Subject:* [FRIAM] Any non-biological complex systems?
Are there any good examples of a complex system that
doesn't involve biological organisms (including human
beings)?
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