The model as I understand it this far begins by considering a room with a thermostat which regulates the temperature of the room via a mechanism involving a bent piece of metal. Further, there is a dial on the thermostat so that a person that is dissatisfied with the present goals of the thermostat can change those goals by acting on the dial functionally.
A list of functions that the thermostat may serve include: keeping the metal bent a certain amount, keeping the room at 70, keeping the room at 80, increasing the entropy of the universe contingently, etc... While some of these functions persist for any perturbation of the list (keeping the metal bent and increasing the entropy of the universe, say), a person in the room may select functionality for less trivial reasons, they wish to be cooler in the room and a rigor-centric thinker may like a way to speak carefully about these less stable, more transient, and functions of human interest. Evolutionary theorists, for instance, may wish to understand how the goals of organisms across generations change as environmental forces act on the class of the organisms possible functions, how the functions vary from generation to generation. I am starting this thread with the intention to develop a language for speaking about control systems like the thermostat and to explore a function-goal distinction. The way I can imagine one getting away with excluding the collection of functions from the collection of goals is that they may actually be of a different type. This isn't to say that we can't wrap goals up in the clothes of a function and thus construe goals as functions, but doing so is a very real operation across categories. It is in this sense that I wish to begin exploring Nick's insistence that function and goal be treated as different. -- Sent from: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. . FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
