"Aliveness" - It's interesting to me that *my* "mentor" on "aliveness" is a Portland-based MMA fighter, not a
geo-spatial index or locality within an environment (built or natural). I hate the word "affordances". But maybe it's the only
word I have by which to target this concept of relaxing into a living system. Your invocation of duality is good. But one thing SteveG
continues to emphasize that's not captured by the unqualified "duality" is the "relaxing into" duality. The path
integral seems instantaneously complete, but ants following pheromones settle into their dual paths. Things like the Necker cube (or
particle-wave) *don't* show us the plasticity ... the process or evolution from unfit to fit, from noise to pattern.
An environment could only be alive in this sense if it adapted to me proportionally to our respective
momentums. So, for example, arranging the furniture in a man cave might make you comfortable, "your
space". And that comfort might give you the illusion of some sort of "aliveness". But, I only
feel it when it's obvious my environment is also adapting. And this, I think, is the heart of why people like
you call people like me "contrarian". You can only feel/see that the environment is adapting
if/when it's *not* affine, not affording you, not aligned with you. You only feel the aliveness of the
environment when it's *not* spiritual, full of grace, or a sense of wholeness.
Aliveness comes through adversarial relationships, albeit those with some sort of Good Faith shared
values ... like 2 fighters in the ring who merely want to beat each other, not kill each other. For
environments, especially "natural" ones, "adversarial" is high-dimensional, not
merely pair-wise. So the fighting analogy fails immediately and we have to resort to things like
fitness or [cough] affordances.
On 9/27/22 10:23, Steve Smith wrote:
On 9/26/22 6:13 PM, glen wrote:
I'd appreciate you (and SteveS) throwing some words at it. In particular, since software patterns are *supposed* to be linked to the geometric patterns of architecture,
I'm not at all an expert on software patterns... maybe DaveW can speak more to
this and I will ask the question of Richard Gabriel when he visits here with
Jenny in a couple of weeks maybe...
*where* or *how* has it gone wrong in extrapolation? Did Alexander go wrong in
his extrapolation? Or did others [mis]interpret?
Alexander's patterns are much more about relationships than geometry in my
perception. Spatially *constrained* relationships yes, but relationships
nonetheless... it spans the same agent/field particle/wave dualities that we
find in some simulation and quantum conceptions.
I don't think trying to emulate *architectural patterns* for software was ever
a good idea. Reading from the Wikipedia article on Pattern Languages (and
remembering from the introductory sections of Alexander's work):
/A pattern language can also be an attempt to express the deeper wisdom of what brings
aliveness within a particular field of human endeavor, through a set of interconnected
patterns. Aliveness is one placeholder term for "the quality that has no name": a
sense of wholeness, spirit, or grace, that while of varying form, is precise and empirically
verifiable.//^[1] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pattern_language#cite_note-1>
//Alexander claims that ordinary people can use this design approach to successfully solve very
large, complex design problems./
You may well be right about there having been a misapprehension on the part of the Go4
when they put it all together... it feels "off" to me as well, but I always put
that up to having too many pre-existing opinions about Pattern Languages and about
Software Design when they introduced the two...
(I've purposefully left the Subject the same because it definitely relates to Chan's morphology
based taxonomy and my argument with my meso-biologist friend about "species diversity"
versus "phylogenetic diversity".)
I'm not a thread-hygiene fiend, but do appreciate it when others make the effort. My
offerage of *another* subject was to try to respect the possibility that this was a
tangent. I do think this conversation *can* remain tied to the diversity theme.
Alexander's work is based in the *idea* that he and his team(s) did the ethnographic work
in studying extant "built environments" to obtain the *essence* of what built
human living environments
(regional/urban/neighborhood/compound/home/office/room/furniture) that can be found and
used rather than a profession/industry (architecture/building) deciding somewhat a-priori
or to-their-convenience what people need/want to live in/amongst.
Alexander was pretty clear (I think) that everyone should take his work with a
grain of salt and seek to add their own patterns, generate their own pattern
languages, etc.
The QWAN (quality without a name) business probably tweaks into our "effing the
ineffable" thread for better or worse... but it *is* the first place *I* found myself
accepting that kind of mystical "mouth movement sounds" as maybe having more to them than
just hand-waving and carpet under-sweeping.
On 9/26/22 15:35, Prof David West wrote:
I am a patterns and Alexander expert. glen's uncertainty / mild antipathy is
spot on. Software patterns are an oxymoron.
Strong words, but happy to back them up with dozens of papers written/presented
and hours of discussion.
davew
On Mon, Sep 26, 2022, at 6:29 AM, glen wrote:
Very cool! Thanks.
In particular, our property abuts "the ravine", which is a semi-wild
place. The permaculture categories might help me orient my own
intuition (that everything in the ravine should be left alone) with my
neighbor's (clearing the whole area and reintroducing natives). He owns
the majority of it. So, c'est la vie ... or perhaps "telle est la
mort". (Don't blame me. I don't know French.) One thing this zone 0-5
model might permit is modularity. That blog post implies such with the
inverted garden interface. But it seems like there could be pockets of
zone0es in wild areas and pockets of zone5s in urban areas,
particularly in sprawling cities like LA or Houston. Growing up in
Houston, where every square inch of semi-abandoned land seemed rapidly
reclaimed by the swamp, is probably the source of my skepticism with my
friends' diversity doctrine.
There's a lot to digest in the biophilia links. I have to confess, I
haven't given pattern languages much attention. It always seems
motivated by geometry, which fails for me. Of course, I'm familiar
enough with software patterns. But that's always failed for me as well.
They seem too ephemeral, unstable ... i.e. not real, convenient
fiction, and *perfect* opportunity for gurus to blind others with their
gobbledygook mouth sounds. I guess it reminds me of category theory,
too abstract for my ape brain. But maybe some of his earlier work on
Clifford algebras might motivate me? I could start here, I guess:
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4757-1472-2_41
Thanks again.
On 9/24/22 10:29, Steve Smith wrote:
On 9/24/22 9:49 AM, glen wrote:
Such efforts seem so inherently metaphorical it's difficult for me to approach
a concrete conversation. For example, I have a couple of biologist friends, one
meso (bugs) and one macro (ungulates), who thought I was being contrarian when
I challenged their assertion that biodiversity in urban areas was *obviously*
lower than that of natural areas like forests. Of course, I admit my ignorance
up front. Maybe they are. But it's just not obvious to me.
This may seem a little tangential but the realm of Permaculture Design has a
suite of truisms on these topics, though they are articulated in their unique
language which can be a little hard to translate sometimes. I think the
permaculture community represent a fertile laboratory for doing *some*
experiments as implied by Glen's questions.
A good example which gestures toward the Chan work at least morphologically is
maybe worth a scan if not a full read here:
https://aflorestanova.wordpress.com/2016/04/08/zones-in-permaculture-design/
Permaculture's 5 zone quantization doesn't preclude a recognition of there being continuous
gradients in many dimensions from a locus of "technological closed-loop" (zone 0) and
"biological closed loop" (zone 5).
There is a *lot* of talk in the literature about the interfaces around zone 0, 1, 2
techno-structures creating localized ecozones that harbor diversity (desired and
undesired == vermin) which I think provide some good anecdotal evidence about
biodiversity in transition zones and acute technological interfaces (e.g. roofs, walls,
corners, posts, fences, etc). Permaculture is a domain of recognizing and exploiting
"happy accidents".
It is also worth noting the diversity spike that happens in estuarial
contexts...
A more formal study of Urban/Architectural design with an eye to *health* (human-centric view) is the
domain of Biophilic Design
<https://www.terrapinbrightgreen.com/report/biophilia-healing-environments/>. Nikos Salingaros is
a hard-core Mathematician at UT-San Antonio who addresses abstractions of Complexity
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikos_Salingaros#Complexity> and Pattern Languages
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pattern_language> as well as Architecture and Urbanism. He also
has some interesting opinions <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikos_Salingaros#Philosophy> about
post modernism as well as Dawkins Atheism.
Since then, they've presented (meso and macro) arguments that justify their position. It
does seem obvious that urban areas trend to more adaptable animals like coyotes and
raccoons and less so to, say, deer. The bugs are more interesting. Meso guy found some
articles that show "species" diversity in urban areas is roughly the same as
natural areas. But phylogenetic diversity is clearly lower in urban areas. That seems
counter intuitive to me. It's a cool result.
My main point when I originally expressed skepticism, though, was about
microbial diversity. Is it possible that bug-layer and microbe-layer (including
what lives in/on large animals like rats and humans) diversity makes up for
lower diversity in large-layers?
I *feel* that projects like Chan's could help with this question since it seems
prohibitively expensive to sample and test enough microbial populations of
urban and wild areas, especially if we include intra-animal populations. I'm
just not sure *how* they could help.
On 9/24/22 03:38, David Eric Smith wrote:
It’s funny; I know Bert.
One of our colleagues played a role in bringing him out to work at Google in
Tokyo.
A mathematician (Will Cavendish) who has part-time support at IAS
https://www.ias.edu/scholars/will-cavendish
<https://www.ias.edu/scholars/will-cavendish>
is also interested in the mathematical dimensions of this, though I have only a
glancing exposure to how those two together are trying to frame the problems.
Because Bert has come at it more from the ALife/engineering approach, and
Will’s interests run more in the direction of proving capabilities of broad
classes of systems, often interested in their aggregation as categories (and
also about the role of simulation as a replacement for proof in systems that
produce complicated enough state spaces), it should be a productive and
interesting collaboration. I don’t know how engaged others are in the Google
group on this specific project, because I am too far outside that loop.
Eric
--
ꙮ Mɥǝu ǝlǝdɥɐuʇs ɟᴉƃɥʇ' ʇɥǝ ƃɹɐss snɟɟǝɹs˙ ꙮ
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