Yes, that's a well-placed example. I recently accused Nick of Foundationalism.
But my accusation isn't quite right. It's more like you say the general gist
that platforms are good (or useful). The trick is the ability to doff and don
platforms, which assumes a plurality of platforms. Maybe it's like a sparse
graph in a dense space. Where there *is* a platform on which to stand, that
gets you 80% to the place you want to be, don it. Where there isn't one, doff
'em all and walk the graph to the last common ancestor and build from there.
My problem is I'm not creative enough to build my own, and pain tolerant enough
that I'm satisfied with even 30% of the way there, building a one-off nobody
would ever bother to read or use. So I'm too pluralist ... too willing to play
others' games.
On 3/30/22 09:12, Marcus Daniels wrote:
Here is a situation I frequently experience with software development where I
try to adopt some code, even my own. I stare at the code and..
1) It becomes clear how to assemble it into to what I want
2) I become confused or frustrated. As a ritual, I remove it from my sight
and open a blank editor window to start over. Sometimes I must walk away from
the screen to think, until I want to type.
I think the reason I dwell in #2 space is because I believe in #1. That is,
when I have just the right combinator library things just snap into place. I
seem to spend a lot of time trying to convince myself of why it can't work, and
whether it is a bad fit or something that needs to be fixed in the platform.
What is important, in this value system, is that platforms are good, not that
this or that problem gets solved. I think it is basically the Computer
Science value system in contrast to the Computational Science value system.
To [re]abstract and [re]concretize can be expensive and those who don't do it
have a productivity advantage, as well as the benefit of having particulars to
work from. I don’t think it is a case of confusing the sign for the object.
It is a question of what kind of problem one wants to solve.
In contrast, I have met several very good computational people that hate
abstraction and indirection. They want code to be greppable even if it that
means it is baroque and good for nothing else.
-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <[email protected]> On Behalf Of glen
Sent: Wednesday, March 30, 2022 8:40 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] To repeat is rational, but to wander is transcendent
Of all the words being bandied about (quality, property, composition, domain, continuity, intensity, general, special, iteration,
etc.) EricC's "contextless" stands out and reflects EricS' initial target of dimension analysis. The conversation seems
to be about essentialism. Maybe that's a nice reflection that we're sticking to the OG topic "analytic idealism". But
maybe it's Yet-Another example of our pareidolia to see patterns in noise and then to *reify* those patterns. [Re]Abstracting and
[re]concretizing heuristics across contexts may well be what separates us from other life forms. But attributions of the
"unreasonable effectiveness" of any body of heuristics is the most dangerous form of reification. The superhero ability
to [re]abstract and [re]concretize your pet heuristics convinces you they are "properties" or "qualities" of
the world, rather than of your anatomy and physiology. Arguing with myself, perhaps Dave's accusation is right. Maybe this is an
example of swapping the sign for the object, or reworded prioritizing for the description over the referent, confusing the
structure of the observer with the structure of the observed.
Those of us with less ability tend to attribute (whatever haphazard heuristics
they've landed on) to the world *early*. Those of us with more ability continue
the hunt for Truth, delaying attribution to the world until we get too old to
play that infinite game any more.
I think Possible Worlds helps, here, too:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/possible-worlds/ Patterns are simply
(non-degenerate) quantifiers over possible worlds.
Regardless, I'd like to ask whether the formulation of intensive properties as
derivatives of entropy w.r.t. extensive properties is formalized somewhere? If
so, I'd be grateful for pointers. I'm used to the idea that the intensives
divide out the extensives. But I haven't seen them formulated as higher order
derivations from entropy.
Thanks.
-glen
On 3/29/22 14:37, David Eric Smith wrote:
[snip]
1. One first has to have a notion of a macrostate; all these terms
only come into existence with respect to it. (They are predicates of
what are called “state variables” — the intensive ones and the
extensive ones — and that is what the “state” refers to.)
2. One needs some criterion for what is likely, or stable, which in general
terms is an entropy (extending considerably beyond the Gibbs equilibrium
entropy, but still to be constructed from specific principles), and on the
macrostates _only_, the entropy function (which may be defined on many other
states besides macroststates as well) becomes a _state function_.
3. Then (actually, all along since the beginning of the construction)
one needs to talk about what kind of aggregation operator we can apply
to systems, and quantities that do accumulate under aggregation become
the arguments of the state-function entropy, and the extensive state
variables. (I say “accumulate” in favor of the more restrictive word
“add”, because what we really require is that they are what are termed
“scale factors” in large-deviation language, and we can admit a
somewhat wider class of kinds of accumulation than just addition,
though addition is the extremely common one.)
4. Once one has that, the derivatives of the entropy with respect to the
extensive variables are the intensive state variables. It is precisely the
duality — that one is the derivative of a function with respect to the other,
which is the argument of that function — that makes it not bizarre that both
exist and that they are different. But as EricC rightly says, if one just uses
phenomenological descriptions, why any of this should exist, and why it should
arrange itself into such dual systems, much less dual systems with always the
same pair-wise relations, seems incomprehensible. For some of the analogistic
applications, there may not be any notions of state, or of a function doing
what the entropy does, or of aggregation, or an associated accumulation
operation, or gradients, or any of it. Some of the phenomenology may seems to
kinda-sorta go through, but whether one wants to pin oneself down to narrow
terms, is less clear.
[snip]
On Mar 30, 2022, at 5:04 AM, Eric Charles <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
That is a bizarre distinction, that can only be maintained within some sort of odd,
contextless discussion. If you tell me the number of atoms of a particular substance that
you have smushed within a given space, we can, with reasonable accuracy, tell you the
density, and hence the "state of matter". When we change the quantity of matter
within that space, we can also calculate the expected change in temperature.
--
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