Steve Kurtz <[email protected]> wrote:
> Worth reading the 3 pg piece. Free will issue is in the background
> in my view.
>
> http://www.physorg.com/news179521562.html
I'm interested in mathematical models of complex things, my limited
math abilities notwithstanding. Hill-climbing on a rugged landscape,
cellular automata, emergent order and so on. So this biological model
is intrigueing.
But I have some problems with it.
Chief is the athropomorphism. There may be "something it is like to
be a bat" but there is not anything that it like to be a bacterium.
Bacteria don't "decide". What they "do" is the outcome of interaction
between their biochemical state and environmental temperature,
chemical gradients and perhaps physical contact with other cells,
bacterial or otherwise.
Of course, you may say the same of human brains but to do so implies a
great leap over all that we don't understand about the relationship
between brains and ontogeny, epistemology, cognition etc.
Anthropomorphizing the mechanism of a bacterial colony's
population dynamics leads, spuriously I suggest, to just the inference
Steve made, that the next step is a hypothesis about free will.
The interesting element of Prisoner's Dilemma (mentioned in the
article) is that it addresses the behavior of humans who (presumably)
take the payoffs and unpredictability of th eother prisoner's thought
process into account. At the risk of tedious repitition, this might
be a time to excerpt an earlier post [1] I madet to FW:
Pete Vincent wrote:
> When mathematics is applied to the problem of the nature of the physical
> world, it's called physics, and it works pretty well, within its domain.
> When mathematics and sometimes, by extension, physics, are brought to
> bear on problems in the real world, where dirt and warm bodies and
> other inconvenient things get in the way of purely analytic solutions,
> it's called engineering, and that is where economics rightly belongs.
I have a slightly different take on why science, as typified by
physics, doesn't work well when we move it to economics (or the other
so-called social sciences.)
Hard science is essentially statistical in nature. Thermodynamics is
well described by statitical mechanics and math that applies to
large ensembles of indistinguishable particles of ideal gas.
Polymer and Protein chemistry is really about properties of
statistical ensembles of possible molecular spatial conformations or
charge distributions of a single molecule that appear when large
numbers of molecules are put together.
As for solid state physics, it depends on quantum physics and in QP,
*everything* exists smeared out in a haze of ontic probability.
The problem with applying "science" to society is that we profess to
care about the individuals of which it is composed. I don't want to
be sacrificed to the equivalent of the heat sink in order that the
steam engine economy may have the emergent property of producing
usable work. Nor, presumably, does anyone. Our notions of civilized
society suggest that we should not want that for anyone else, either,
and should try so to structure society that it is not the default case
for anyone.
As soon as we commence to derive putative laws of collective human
behavior homologous to the laws of physics, we commence to treat
individuals as inconsequential elements of an ensemble whose emergent
properties we attempt to predict but whose elements we regard as
indistinguisable particles.
In policy making, in political economy, in civitas, we seek -- or
claim to seek -- such good as fairness, justice, compassion and so on.
But justice on the average is no justice. Median fairness is no
fairness. The notions of humanity and those of the statistics of the
aggregate are contradictory. Or rather, they are orthogonal: The
values of humanity project into the phase space of the statistical
aggregate with zero dimension and vanish.
This doesn't say the all of economics is logically false, only that
the things ordinary people think important tend increasingly to vanish
from the models as they are refined.
[snip]
We can use statistical measures -- unemployment, crime rate, poverty
rate, per capita production -- to evaluate the state of affairs. But
when we want to figure out how people, individual people, behave and
why, statistical models inentionally elide all the relevent information
for the sake of applying the methods that work so well with molecules
of ideal gas, proteins or, yes, bacteria.
As an aside, I might opine that the internet is a two-edged sword.
The referenced article is a rather pop-science summary of one
published in PNAS. PNAS is on line but you have to subscribe or pay
per-article fees to read the original work. Before the net, it was
harder to find stuff like this but, once found, you could likely read
the original at the cost of going to the nearest university library.
Now that eveything is on-line, I suspect that if I drive into Halifax,
I'll find that Dalhousie U. has much more rigid restrictions on what I
can read and copy that they did 40 years ago when I could find most
important journals on the shelf and photocopy articles.
Enough for now,
- Mike
[1] Original archived at:
http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg02304.html
--
Michael Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada .~.
/V\
[email protected] /( )\
http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/ ^^-^^
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