Hi Nick,

I'm thinking I should look at a newer book by Rosen and see if it seems. better 
than "Life Itself". Do you think that the book you ordered (I'm not certain 
what it was) would be good? Or, alternatively, what is the best recent book by 
Rosen?


--John

________________________________
From: Friam <friam-boun...@redfish.com> on behalf of Nick Thompson 
<nickthomp...@earthlink.net>
Sent: Wednesday, October 24, 2018 3:38:32 PM
To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group'
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] On old question


Thanks, Marcus,



I ordered the book.  Time I revived old memory traces.



Nick



Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/



From: Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of Marcus Daniels
Sent: Wednesday, October 24, 2018 12:56 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <Friam@redfish.com>; 
Roger Critchlow <r...@elf.org>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] On old question



Nick,



It sounds like you are describing mutual information.  This is ancient, but a 
nice overview of related topics:



https://www.amazon.com/Information-Theory-Qualitative-Quantitative-Applications/dp/0803921322



Marcus



From: Friam <friam-boun...@redfish.com<mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com>> on 
behalf of Nick Thompson 
<nickthomp...@earthlink.net<mailto:nickthomp...@earthlink.net>>
Reply-To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group 
<Friam@redfish.com<mailto:Friam@redfish.com>>
Date: Wednesday, October 24, 2018 at 12:22 AM
To: Roger Critchlow <r...@elf.org<mailto:r...@elf.org>>, Friam 
<Friam@redfish.com<mailto:Friam@redfish.com>>
Subject: [FRIAM] On old question



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.



Nick



Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/


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