And BTW, the section in the paper linked on the topic of "the Modeling
Relation"
//
/1.1.3 The modeling relation: how we perceive /
//
The modeling relation is based on the universally accepted belief that
the world has some sort of order associated with it; it is not a
hodge-podge of seemingly random happenings. It depicts the elements of
assigning interpretations to events in the world . The best treatment of
the modeling relation appears in the book /Anticipatory Systems /(Rosen,
1985, pp 45-220). Rosen introduces the modeling relation to focus
thinking on the process we carry out when we "do science". In its most
detailed form, it is a mathematical object, but it will be presented in
a less formal way here. It should be noted that the mathematics involved
is among the most sophisticated available to us. In its purest form, it
is called "category theory" [Rosen, 1978, 1985, 1991]. Category theory
is a stratified or hierarchical structure without limit, which makes it
suitable for modeling the process of modeling itself.
mr.gif (4013 bytes)
reminded me of the work by our own (for a while at least) Vadas
Gintautas vi LANL on what he (and Hubler) referred to as "interreality":
Mixed Reality States in a Bidirectionally Coupled Interreality
System <https://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0611293>
?
On 10/24/18 2:29 PM, Steven A Smith wrote:
>
> Glen/Nick/Marcus/Dave/et alia -
>
> For reasons I can't begin to enumerate here, I have been unable to
> keep up with this list beyond reading/skimming every day or three and
> each time I formulate a response or contribution to a thread, it sits
> for another cycle (1-3 days) and feels stale or misbegotten before I
> get it sent. This one may fall to the same fate... if you are
> reading this, then I suppose it did not.
>
> I have always struggled to understand the multiple/myriad
> understandings of Rosen's work and it's importance among this
> group... and this time I feel like I'm doing a *little* better.
> I've always been fascinated by all variants on the question "what is
> life?" (or replace "life" with: "consciousness", "complex systems",
> "nature", "reality", etc.) and the structure/function (or
> entropy/anentropy if you prefer) duality.
>
> This paper:
>
> Robert Rosen: The Well Posed Question and it's Answer - Why are
> Organisms Different from Machines
> <http://www.people.vcu.edu/%7Emikuleck/PPRISS3.html>
>
> http://www.people.vcu.edu/~mikuleck/PPRISS3.html
>
> seems to have helped me track some of the things youse guys rattle on
> about when referencing Rosen... I'd be at least interested in a few
> opinions about how well this guy (or just this paper) reflects your
> own understanding of Rosen's work and it's relevance to "Life Itself" ?
>
>
> - Steve
>
>
> On 10/24/18 8:49 AM, ∄ uǝʃƃ wrote:
>> My comment may be addressed a bit by the 2nd paper Roger posted (DGI). But
>> my 1st reaction to your comment was an attempt to reconstruct what Rosen
>> *might* have intended re: function and organization. I'm running with my
>> gestalt memory, but I'll challenge it against his text later. A relational
>> conception of function and organization would necessarily be temporal and
>> situational. So, the function of any one component would depend
>> fundamentally on how the components were related in that *specific* context
>> (either a good colloidal mix or segregated). And such definitions would not
>> be (arbitrarily) dependent on how the system is observed (as long as the
>> system is robust to any manipulation involved in the observation). E.g. the
>> role/function of a vortex in a sink drain isn't "to drain fast", perhaps
>> it's to equalize pressure. And it may not even be that. These
>> purposes/roles/functions are examples of preemptive registration ... imputed
>> by the observer.
>>
>> The (M,R)-system model is (I think) an attempt to describe organization such
>> that it is robust to changes in both material components (N different things
>> playing the same function/role) and situational context (persistence over
>> time and robust to "damage"). If I'm right, then Rosen's conception of
>> organization wouldn't credit salad dressing to be more or less organized in
>> either the settled or shaken state.
>>
>> To boot, his ideas around closure imply that components would be defined in
>> a particular way. For example, your idea of "draining the water out" treats
>> the water layer as a component, rather than treating each H2O molecule as a
>> component. Obviously, the ontological status of the "water layer" is
>> fragile, whereas that of the molecules is robust. Your idea of hierarchy
>> should play well, here. Except that a *strict* hierarchy disallows
>> heterogeneous operands. If a closure happens to rely on components that are
>> also closures, then the you'd expect the functions/roles of those components
>> to have inputs/outputs that are mixed, some of the functions operate over
>> simple materials (like molecules) and others operate over closures. And
>> some functions would operate over a mix of simple components and whole
>> closures. A strict hierarchy would only allow, for example, a 2nd order
>> function to operate over 1st order components. I've only skimmed the DGI
>> paper. But it seems like the patches were defined homogeneously (e.g. 2 hop
>> subgraphs), rather than allowing any sub-graph to be of arbitrary topology.
>>
>>
>>
>> On 10/23/18 11:21 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:
>>> Dear Roger, and anybody else who wants to play,
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> While waiting for my paper, /Signs and Designs/, to be rejected, I have
>>> gone back to thinking about an old project, whose working title has been
>>> “/A Sign Language/.” And this has led me back to Robert Rosen, whose /Life
>>> Itself/ I bought almost 9 years ago and it has remained almost pristine,
>>> ever since. In the chapter I am now looking at, Rosen is talking about
>>> “organization.” Now, I have been thinking about organization ever since I
>>> read C. Ray Carpenter’s early work on primate groups back in the late 50’s.
>>> It seemed to me at the time, and it seems to me reasonable now, to define
>>> the organization of a set of entities as related in some way to the degree
>>> to which one can predict the behavior of one entity from knowledge about
>>> another. Now the relationship is not straightforward, because neither
>>> total unpredictability (every monkey behaves exactly the same as every
>>> other monkey in every situation) nor total unpredictability (no monkey
>>> behaves like any other monkey in ANY
>>> situation) smacks of great organization. The highest levels organization,
>>> speaking inexpertly and intuitively, seem to correspond to intermediate
>>> levels of predictability, where there were several classes of individuals
>>> within a group and within class predictability was strong but cross-class
>>> predictability was weak. On my account, the highest levels of organization
>>> involve hierarchies of predictability. Thus honey bees and ants are more
>>> organized than starling flocks, say.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> This is where the matter stood at the point that I came to Santa Fe and
>>> started interacting with you guys 14 years ago. You-all introduced me to a
>>> totally different notion of organization based – shudder – on the second
>>> law. But I have never been able to deploy your concept with any assurance.
>>> So, for instance, when I shake the salad dressing, I feel like I am
>>> disorganizing it, and when it reasserts itself into layers, I feel like it
>>> ought to be called more organized. But I have a feeling that you are going
>>> to tell me that the reverse is true. That, given the molecules of fat and
>>> water/acid, that the layered state is the less organized state.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Now this confusion of mine takes on importance when I try to read Rosen.
>>> He defines a function as the difference that occurs when one removes a
>>> component of a system. I can see no reason why the oil or the water in my
>>> salad dressing cannot be thought of components of a system and if, for
>>> instance, I were to siphon out the water from the bottom of my layered
>>> salad dressing, I could claim that the function of the water had been to
>>> hold the water up. This seems a rather lame notion of function.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Some of you who have been on this list forever will remember that I raised
>>> the same kind of worry almost a decade back when I noticed the drainage of
>>> water from a basin was actually /slowed /by the formation of a vortex.
>>> This seemed to dispel any notion that vortices are structures whose
>>> function is to efficiently dispel a gradient. It also violated my
>>> intuition from traffic flows, where I imagine that rigid rules of priority
>>> would facilitate the flow of people crossing bridges to escape Zozobra.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> It’s quite possible that my confusions in this matter are of no great
>>> general applicability, in which case, I look forward to being ignored.
>
>
>
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