SG -
Better answers I think.
Is it time to spawn a new thread that addresses the (I think) closely
related questions of "what is information?" and what might be complex
systems which are not biological life?
My leanings come from the ALife movement to simply think of any
non-biological complex systems with life-like properties as "proto-life"
or maybe more aptly since I can't know that they will continue to evolve
to become "life itself", "meta-life".
Prefixing weasel words (proto/meta) to a vague word (life) doesn't
necessarily help... I'm just reporting my tendencies.
- SS
On 5/28/17 10:39 AM, Stephen Guerin wrote:
So, what constitutes a system is arbitrary? In the mind of the
beholder?
I remember when we used to argue about this at The Complex.
I always wanted to argue that a system is in some sense
“self-bounding”. It consists of a group of entities that are
interacting more intimately with one another than they are with
entities outside the system.
In the context of complex systems research, a *system* is an
abstraction of a set of connected components and its boundary. The
system's boundary can be defined as open, closed or isolated to flows
of quantities of energy, mass, information, symbols etc. Defining
information is a different thread ;-)
A *model* is the mathematical/computational formalization of the system.
/Is what constitutes a system arbitrary?/
George Box famously said "all models are wrong, but some are useful
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_models_are_wrong>". Given that
models are formalizations of systems and if arbitrary means: "based on
random choice or personal whim, rather than any reason or system.", I
would say researchers use reason and systemic thought to develop
"useful" system descriptions. So, system descriptions are not
arbitrary. They are designed to be useful for the question being
asked. No system description nor model can answer all questions - they
are specifically designed for a problem at hand.
Relatedly, a*simulation,* in the way we use it, is a single instance
of a model run based on initializing a model's parameters computing
next states to observe its behavior/dynamics.
The *phase space* is the behavior of the model over all possible input
states.
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