Re: [FRIAM] Robert Rosen
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 Günther Greindl on 01/07/2008 12:57 PM: thanks for taking the time to write such a long response, here some comments: And thank you for pursuing it. Since I'm only slightly versed in RR, I enjoy the opportunity to talk about it. It helps me think clearly. complexity (=uncomputability in the Rosen sense) For my problems with his uncomputability see below. Living systems are just the particular example set of the (possibly very large) category of complex_rr* systems. It doesn't _start_ with life. Life just happens to be what RR (Robert Rosen) was interested in. Ok - but are all Rosenites sure about this? complex_rr is a thesis which I find scientifically ok because it does not introduce an arbitrary distinction between matter in different organizational forms (animate vs inanimate), although I disagree (with complex_rr) ;-) Hmmm. I guess that depends on what you mean by Rosenite. [grin] But off the top of my head, I'd say no. Most Rosenites I've talked to seem to hang the distinction clearly between living and non-living systems. In many cases, I just didn't have the chance to dig deep enough to find out whether they, too, believe that living systems are just a sub-set of complex_rr systems. In the end, I don't know the distribution of Rosenites who think life and complexity_rr are tightly correlated. (see the excellent book by Torkel Franzen: Gödel's Theorem: An Incomplete Guide to Its Use and Abuse http://www.amazon.com/Godels-Theorem-Incomplete-Guide-Abuse/dp/1568812388/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8s=booksqid=1199723625sr=8-1) I second that recommendation. It's a very cool (and small!) book. A better exposition comes in Penrose's work, in which tries to argue that math (as done by humans) regularly involves hopping outside of any given formal system in order to catch a glimpse of a solution, then hopping back inside the formal system in order to develop a formal proof. And in this regard, RR's rhetoric is not inconsistent. The Penrose/Lucas argument has been debunked many times. In the Torkel Franzen book above, in Rudy Rucker's Ininity and the mind (another excellent book, recommended reading, good fun and educational) and in a number of philosophy papers. But it still sticks around :-)) The argument sticks around because the debunking (at least what I've seen) _merely_ targets the validity of the argument, not the truth or falsity of the conclusion. So, it's true that the argument is INVALID; but that doesn't mean the conclusion is false. In any case, my point was that RR's argument is _like_ Penrose's argument. And, to the best of my knowledge, RR's argument hasn't been formalized to the point where we could show it to be invalid. (Kudos should go to anyone who makes their statements clear enough so that their rhetoric can be shown invalid!) I like the holarchy idea, I think this is important, but I don't see why this should not be capturable via computation. We can model formal systems in other formals systems (indeed is being done in foundations of math, as ZFC is currently seen as basis for math together with classical logic, but that is another discussion entirely). I agree completely. In fact, to the best of my knowledge, no Rosenite put that idea into my head. I think it came to me after listening to a presentation by Terry Bristol (entitled Carnot's Epiphany) wherein Bristol tried to make the case that the universe is an engine composed of sub-engines. His talk of symmetry and of energy being an asymmetry had already reminded me of RR because of the central role symmetry plays in RR's work. Then when I asked Terry what happens at the very top of the engine of sub-engines, he said something about it folding back down to the tiniest sub-engines (and vice versa). At that point, I began thinking of RR's efficient causation band-aides as a holarchy. The important point being that if you try to talk to a Rosenite about this holarchy of formal systems, they may not know what you're talking about since it might merely be my extrapolation. [grin] Sorry for my lack of scholarship. Either one is strictly materialist like Dawkins, then natural selection is indeed enough of an explanation. (that what can stay will stay, because if it couldn't it wouldn't) :-)) Or you assume a purpose to the universe, maybe something like Teilhard de Chardin's Omega point (which draws evolution toward it). Maybe Rosen is somewhere in between? Hmmm. I reject the false dichotomy of materialist or not. There is no either-or, here. I can't defend my opinion; but, when people start extrapolating from the very tiny amount we know for sure out into the huge universe of which we're mostly ignorant, my warning bells go off too loud for me to think. So, if anyone (including Dawkins) claims he knows how the universe works well enough to be strictly materialist (or strictly _anything_), then that person loses
Re: [FRIAM] Robert Rosen
Glen E. P. Ropella wrote: But, programmers haven't yet found a way to handle all ambiguity a computer program may or may not come across in the far-flung future. That's in contrast to a living system, which we _presume_ can handle any ambiguity presented to it (or, in a softer sense, many many more ambiguities than a computer program can handle). Perception, locomotion, and signaling are capabilities that animals have evolved for millions of years. It's not fair to compare a learning algorithm to the learning capabilities of a living system without factoring in the fact that robots aren't disposable for the sake of realizing evolutionary selection and search. And even if they weren't, do you want drive over robots on the highway to make it so? Anything that requires significant short term memory and integration of broad but scare evidence is probably something a computer will be better at than a human. It may be that a `programmer' implements a self-organized neural net, or an kernel eigensystem solver but that only concerns the large classes of signals that can be extracted. It's not like some giant if/then statement for all possible cases that a programmer would keep tweaking. My assertion remains that the things computers do are primarily limited by the desire of humans to 1) understand what was learned, and then 2) use it. If those two conditions are removed, then we are talking about a very different scenario. There's little incentive to develop control systems for robots to keep them stumbling around as long as possible, with no limits on the actions they can take. Marcus FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Robert Rosen
I thought the implication was that the organization of life is an inherently ill-posed question from an observer's perspective. To me that either means you accept 'bad answers' or 'better and better answers', and the difference is methodological. Phil Henshaw .·´ ¯ `·. ~~~ 680 Ft. Washington Ave NY NY 10040 tel: 212-795-4844 e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] explorations: www.synapse9.com -- it's not finding what people say interesting, but finding what's interesting in what they say -- -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Glen E. P. Ropella Sent: Tuesday, January 08, 2008 12:24 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Robert Rosen -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 Marcus G. Daniels on 01/08/2008 08:49 AM: As far as detecting (supposedly) ill-posed questions goes, if you are willing to put aside the complex matter of natural language processing, it seems to me it's a matter of similarity search against a set propositions, and then engaging in a dialog of generalization and precisification with the user to identify an unambiguous and agreeable form for the question that has appropriate answers. But the issue isn't about handling ill-posed questions on a case-by-case basis. In fact, the hypothesis is that ill- versus well- posed questions is an unrealistic dichotomy. It's just another form of the excluded middle. A primary point made by RR is that living systems can handle ambiguity where machines cannot. Of course, it's true that if a programmer pre-scribed a method for detecting and handling some particular ambiguity, then the machine will _seem_ like it handles that ambiguity. But, programmers haven't yet found a way to handle all ambiguity a computer program may or may not come across in the far-flung future. That's in contrast to a living system, which we _presume_ can handle any ambiguity presented to it (or, in a softer sense, many many more ambiguities than a computer program can handle). - -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-219-3846, http://tempusdictum.com Almost nobody dances sober, unless they happen to be insane. -- H. P. Lovecraft -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQFHg7G4ZeB+vOTnLkoRAjTtAKCu0nimkhWcQdIYDn8Uy05N6jwaUACfUzUc g6rWx3ZPlmAaayG7qqJHJ1g= =kWTj -END PGP SIGNATURE- FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Robert Rosen
Dear Glen, thanks for taking the time to write such a long response, here some comments: complexity (=uncomputability in the Rosen sense) For my problems with his uncomputability see below. Living systems are just the particular example set of the (possibly very large) category of complex_rr* systems. It doesn't _start_ with life. Life just happens to be what RR (Robert Rosen) was interested in. Ok - but are all Rosenites sure about this? complex_rr is a thesis which I find scientifically ok because it does not introduce an arbitrary distinction between matter in different organizational forms (animate vs inanimate), although I disagree (with complex_rr) ;-) He does, however, seem to avoid being explicit about the influence of Goedel's theorems on his own ideas. As far as I can tell, he never even approaches a technical explanation that extrapolates from Goedel to his work. His exposition is purely philosophical and others claim to be able to map what he said directly to Goedel's results. Yes I did also not find any explicit mapping; but if one is not given, I am always very skeptical, because Gödel is abused for all kinds of things. (see the excellent book by Torkel Franzen: Gödel's Theorem: An Incomplete Guide to Its Use and Abuse http://www.amazon.com/Godels-Theorem-Incomplete-Guide-Abuse/dp/1568812388/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8s=booksqid=1199723625sr=8-1) A better exposition comes in Penrose's work, in which tries to argue that math (as done by humans) regularly involves hopping outside of any given formal system in order to catch a glimpse of a solution, then hopping back inside the formal system in order to develop a formal proof. And in this regard, RR's rhetoric is not inconsistent. The Penrose/Lucas argument has been debunked many times. In the Torkel Franzen book above, in Rudy Rucker's Ininity and the mind (another excellent book, recommended reading, good fun and educational) and in a number of philosophy papers. But it still sticks around :-)) RR's basic claim would be that math is _more_ than computation (automated inference... formal systems... whatever you want to call it). Namely, it involves jumping levels of discourse to provide entailment when none such can be provided inside the formal system. If you take that to its logical conclusion, you can imagine a _holarchy_ of formal systems that each patch up the entailments for other formal systems in the holarchy. In order to avoid an infinite regress or an infinite progression, however, the level hopping _must_ loop back in on itself. I like the holarchy idea, I think this is important, but I don't see why this should not be capturable via computation. We can model formal systems in other formals systems (indeed is being done in foundations of math, as ZFC is currently seen as basis for math together with classical logic, but that is another discussion entirely). The part that RR seems to think is not covered is the force or influence that guides a living system in its behaviors. In many contexts, people tend to make vague claims that natural selection or the environment provide such pressure in the form of limited resources or optimization or even co-evolution. But, those sorts of answers to _why_ a living system assembles and maintains itself are really just question begging... they put off the question without answering it. Either one is strictly materialist like Dawkins, then natural selection is indeed enough of an explanation. (that what can stay will stay, because if it couldn't it wouldn't) :-)) Or you assume a purpose to the universe, maybe something like Teilhard de Chardin's Omega point (which draws evolution toward it). Maybe Rosen is somewhere in between? It's this why that leads him to consider final cause. He takes the most prevalent answer to the why question seriously: living systems do what they do in order to benefit _themselves_. But how can an organism at time t_0 know what actions will benefit that organism at time t_100? It does not know. It it chooses wrongly, it will not be here to complain. The question he asks specifically is: How can we have organization without finality? I.e. How can we say that an activity of an organism is purposeful without some external _agent_ declaring the purpose of the organism? In the end, he comes to the idea that effects cause their causes, which is obviously cyclic. So he not also challenges the mechanist/computationalist thesis but also standard neo-darwinism? makes perfect. These positive feedback loops where the effect of a process is to reinforce the process are the heart of RR's idea. Sounds a bit like converging toward an attractor - that is a nice idea (and would also fit nicely with the Omega point) - but one does not need any final causation for that - rather it is normal causality which inevitably produces a result. Like a stone which is dropped on the Earth will fall toward the Earth and
Re: [FRIAM] Robert Rosen
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 [EMAIL PROTECTED] on 01/02/2008 05:27 PM: That's nice, describing informality as sneaking in new axioms (or 'understandings', perhaps) in a series of assertions. Of course it's all but impossible to not do that,... given the complex way that ideas arise out of feelings and intents. What then about the invisible assumptions that tend to be numerous in any attempt at making formal statements. Would the likely presence of hidden assumptions make all formal statements presumably informal? Well, with the stronger form of the word formal and the expansion of the word informal to refer to formal systems that allow the introduction of new axioms at will, we'd have to be careful to distinguish ill-formed systems from well-formed but open formal systems. Since adding new axioms as you go along might result in an inconsistent formal system (where the new axiom contradicts another axiom or a theorem derived from previous axioms), it's right to _mistrust_ the truth value of any formal statement unless one can demonstrate that: 1) no new axioms were added since consistency was demonstrated, or 2) if new axioms were added the resulting system is shown to be consistent. But, such mistrust is not the same as declaring the formal statement (or the system in which it's written) to be informal just not worthy of blind trust. In the case of (1), we would NOT accuse the statement or system of being informal in this new sense. In case (2), the _statement_ might not be informal but the system in which it's stated would become informal (in this new softer sense of the word). - -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-219-3846, http://tempusdictum.com In all affairs it's a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted. -- Bertrand Russell -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQFHfVU6ZeB+vOTnLkoRAjesAKDO7DsLZ4HNxF18iWU7cPNQOlnxywCcCm/T Ga+wkjMxw0uYaXsgIzmFPyM= =FQt3 -END PGP SIGNATURE- FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Robert Rosen
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 Phil Henshaw on 01/02/2008 09:25 PM: Yes, sure, that's an option of interpretation, but does it fit with the rest of what I was saying? I think there's an interpretation that fits the data of nature better than any other, so it's reached as a 'conclusion' not as an 'assumption'. For example, can you offer any example of physical growth (accumulative change) without a beginning and end? Hmmm. I suppose that depends on the way beginning and ending are measured. It seems to me that _nothing_ real has a beginning or end. Our models of things begin and end; but, the things themselves don't seem to. For example, I can say that my dad was born. Then many years later, he died. But when did my dad begin? Was he my dad when he was a zygote? A fetus? A gleam in my grand dad's eye? Same questions apply about when he ended. In fact, the difference between an embryo and a fetus presents just such an example of physical growth without a beginning or an end. We don't know when the fetus began and our cut-off point for fetus is artificially designed to coincide with birth. The same is true of any unit you can think of. Sure, by measuring the thing according to some model, you can point to a beginning and end... according to your _model_. But, is the thing being measured actually beginning and ending? Or is it just the way you measure it that results in the measurements? By that reasoning, I can simply pick a model of the world where nothing ever ends and nothing ever begins... i.e. a model that says the world is everywhere continuous. Forces in distant galaxies impact me to some non-zero extent (though they may be _negligible_ for any given purpose). Events in the distant past caused me to, say, get some more coffee... at least to some extent. So my answer is: Sure. Tell me what model you'd like me to use and I can pick a growth process that has neither a beginning nor an end. Complex systems are always poorly represented by our models, but does that restrict them, or just us? :-) That's easy: Both, because we are part of the super-system that includes the sub-system being studied. Well, certainly a term needs to be understood so that when one persons uses it another person can know what is being referred to. But isn't that a normal problem with language, not an inherent flaw in language? In this case I'm using 'feedback loop' in a way I thought would be understood, from your referring to the physical model of the 'chicken egg' cycle. It wasn't that clear perhaps. It's not that it's unclear. It's that the meaning you're using isn't concrete. It's abstract. A feedback loop cannot be picked up, manipulated, eaten, twisted into a pretzel, etc. Hence, it is not concrete. As an abstract thing, all that remains is to figure out whether the thoughts triggered by others by the phrase feedback loop are roughly equivalent to the thoughts triggered in you when you see the phrase feedback loop. Now, concrete things have a natural mechanism for correcting errors in the thoughts of those that manipulate them. E.g. if you pick up a rock, roll it around in your hands, toss it up in the air, drop it on your foot, etc. Then I pick it up, roll it around, etc. There's a good chance that equivalent thoughts pop up when we think about that rock. And we can use the concreteness of the rock to whittle down any differences by designing standard methods for handling the rock. But with abstract things like feedback loop, it's much more difficult. The only methods for ensuring our thoughts are equivalent when the phrase is uttered is to talk about it for extended periods, probably with several conversations (possibly including quizzing each other). We can also help bring the thoughts closer by indirectly using concrete artifacts like drawings, computers, etc. (Point to the feedback loop! ;-) I posit that, in most people, the thoughts evoked by feedback loop are going to be very different, primarily because most people don't work very closely together with most other people. Sure, some people work closely with some other people. But, by and large, an abstract thing like a feedback loop will mean very different things to different people. And one of the main differences will be in thinking about the beginning and the ending of any given feedback loop. Can you think of any regular cycle that does not begin and end with accumulative processes on scales that make them untraceable? I don't really understand what you're asking for. Perhaps if you gave me an example of a regular cycle that has a clear beginning and a clear ending? I draw the conclusion that natural system feedbacks have no efficient cause since it's 'inefficient' to have causes separated from effects. With growth systems there are usually time lags between cause and effect, so any 'cause' is instrumentally disconnected from the process that follows it. Growth systems
Re: [FRIAM] Robert Rosen
Hi, I leafed through some of Rosen's stuff and the Kercel paper, I unfortunately do not have the time at the moment to work through it in detail, but some things which disturb me: 1) The assertion that the incomputable enters with life. Rosen seems aware that he moves into the range of vitalism here, and tries to defend that he says it is not mechanism versus vitalism but simplicity versus complexity (=uncomputability in the Rosen sense) For my problems with his uncomputability see below. 2) Rosen repeatedly refers to Gödel's result and talks about how it shows how impoverished formalization are in regard to real mathematics. This of course leads to the question what real mathematics is. It seems that Rosen is Platonist (how else would he know what real mathematics is?), but this is an opinion one must not share. He also ignores that Gödel's results do not place limits on what one can formally model (in general), but only with regard to a formal system (finitely given, sufficient strenght etc). The question _if_ physics is completely formalizable/computable is indeed an interesting one, but why should this stage only start when life is concerned? (see below) Either it applies to the universe as a whole or it does not. 3) In the Kercel paper, we read: :START QUOTE: Given this, what does the (M,R)-system imply? In this model, the inferential entailments, the metabolism map f, the repair map F, and the replication map b represent the causal entailments in an organism, i.e., the efficient causes of metabolism, repair, and replication, respectively. If the (M,R)-system is actually in a modeling relation with the organism, then the same closed-loop hierarchical structure of containment of entailment must apply to the efficient causes. Just as map F contains map f contains in map b contains map F, ad infinitum, the efficient cause of repair contains the efficient cause of metabolism contains the efficient cause of replication contains the efficient cause of repair, ad infinitum. This is what it means to say that organisms contain the causal counterpart of impredicative loops. Rosen's expression closed to efficient cause now becomes clear. A real-world process is closed to efficient cause when it contains a closed-loop hierarchy of containment of efficient causes. Each efficient cause is contained by all the members of the loop that come before it, and contains all the members of the loop that come after it. :END QUOTE: What I fail to see that life embodies this infinite cycle as in his (M,R) system: after all, life started around 4 billion years ago - so I can _finitely_ list all cycles till some point where we are not interested anymore (depending on which theory of origin of life you prefer, rna first or metabolism first or whatever). 4) An ultrafinitistic view would generally rule out noncomputable models anyway (see for instance the nice essay by Doron Zeilberger: http://www.math.rutgers.edu/~zeilberg/mamarim/mamarimPDF/real.pdf) Or: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultrafinitism So Rosen's model's also make some mathematical assumptions (which, admittedly, are widely shared - but may change, of course) 5) What I also find strange is the opposedness to computation: after all, with computers we are just beginning to find an embarassment of riches; fine to explore other avenues (Rosen), but I think it is much to early to dismiss the computational approach. So why his radical assertion that computational approaches to describe life must fail? 6) A point addressed in the Kercel paper: The ambiguity of language and the definiteness of computation: this is of import for the AI/Alife community, and it is indeed a problem, but is I think addressed if one can control the symbol grounding problem(Harnad, http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/harnad90symbol.html). If one can let an AI/Alife really learn symbols (instead of programming them or assigning meaning to symbols by specification of the prog. language; the learned symbols would not make sense to us then, of course) they would inherently have the same ambiguity as our concepts have for us (because they would be learned in an ambiguous world). Conclusion: I think Rosen's ideas are valuable contributions in that they sensitivize us to certain problems, especially in modelling life. But the case against computatability is unconcinving. I would be very interested in thoughts of other FRIAMers, especially Glen who seems to have read a lot of Rosen's work - maybe you can clear up some things. Regards, Günther Glen E. P. Ropella wrote: -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 Nicholas Thompson on 01/01/2008 10:59 PM: thus, to be a good formalism, a formalism has to be in some sense informal, right? This is a difficult question phrased in a misleadingly simple way. We now know that mathematics is _more_ than formal systems (thanks to Goedel and those that have continued his work). I.e. we cannot completely
Re: [FRIAM] Robert Rosen
Glen, [EMAIL PROTECTED] on 01/02/2008 05:27 PM: That's nice, describing informality as sneaking in new axioms (or 'understandings', perhaps) in a series of assertions. Of course it's all but impossible to not do that,... given the complex way that ideas arise out of feelings and intents. What then about the invisible assumptions that tend to be numerous in any attempt at making formal statements. Would the likely presence of hidden assumptions make all formal statements presumably informal? Well, with the stronger form of the word formal and the expansion of the word informal to refer to formal systems that allow the introduction of new axioms at will, we'd have to be careful to distinguish ill-formed systems from well-formed but open formal systems. Since adding new axioms as you go along might result in an inconsistent formal system (where the new axiom contradicts another axiom or a theorem derived from previous axioms), it's right to _mistrust_ the truth value of any formal statement unless one can demonstrate that: 1) no new axioms were added since consistency was demonstrated, or 2) if new axioms were added the resulting system is shown to be consistent. That's about where I get too, that we need to accept that formal systems are all embedded in informal ones. Introducing new principles in a formal argument is then just an error in constructing the argument from accepted principles. It that occurs it means you need to 'get to know' the new principle or go back to the old ones. But, such mistrust is not the same as declaring the formal statement (or the system in which it's written) to be informal just not worthy of blind trust. In the case of (1), we would NOT accuse the statement or system of being informal in this new sense. In case (2), the _statement_ might not be informal but the system in which it's stated would become informal (in this new softer sense of the word). But then going back to the thread, Rosen's theorem seems to be offered as proof that life requires gaps in efficient causation. Could those gaps be regions? Would it be a corollary to say no formal system can explain emergent organization of self-referencing causal loops, and so maybe make ordinary complex systems which develop by growth a typical case example for Rosen's idea?That would imply a map of the deterministic plane sort of like Swiss cheese, with all individual emergent systems defining 'dark matter' islands of self-organization isolated from efficient causation by the 'white matter' of 'the cheese itself'... ..Whew!... ;-) - -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-219-3846, http://tempusdictum.com In all affairs it's a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted. -- Bertrand Russell -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQFHfVU6ZeB+vOTnLkoRAjesAKDO7DsLZ4HNxF18iWU7cPNQOlnxywCcCm/T Ga+wkjMxw0uYaXsgIzmFPyM= =FQt3 -END PGP SIGNATURE- FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Robert Rosen
Günther Greindl wrote: The question _if_ physics is completely formalizable/computable is indeed an interesting one, but why should this stage only start when life is concerned? (see below) Either it applies to the universe as a whole or it does not. Even in digital systems there are unprovable things, like determining whether a program will stop or behavioral non-determinism from parallelism -- things about the physical hardware not even in the logical programming model. I can see why category theory could be useful to reason about different takes on abstract function, but it's not clear to me that's a better way to understand what and why cells do the things they do, than, e.g. building on solved structures using molecular dynamics simulation, or by instrumenting parts of cells with flourescent nanocrystals, e.g. http://link.aip.org/link/?APPLAB/91/224106/1 Guillaume A. Lessard http://scitation.aip.org/vsearch/servlet/VerityServlet?KEY=ALLpossible1=Lessard%2C+Guillaume+A.possible1zone=authormaxdisp=25smode=strresultsaqs=true, Peter M. Goodwin http://scitation.aip.org/vsearch/servlet/VerityServlet?KEY=ALLpossible1=Goodwin%2C+Peter+M.possible1zone=authormaxdisp=25smode=strresultsaqs=true, and James H. Werner http://scitation.aip.org/vsearch/servlet/VerityServlet?KEY=ALLpossible1=Werner%2C+James+H.possible1zone=authormaxdisp=25smode=strresultsaqs=true /Center for Integrated Nanotechnologies (MPA-CINT), Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, New Mexico 87545, USA/ We^ describe an instrument that extends the state of the art^ in a single-molecule tracking technology, allowing extended observations of single^ fluorophores and fluorescently labeled proteins as they undergo directed and^ diffusive transport in three dimensions. We demonstrate three-dimensional tracking of^ individual quantum dots undergoing diffusion for durations of over a^ second at velocities comparable to those of intracellular signaling processes. Marcus FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Robert Rosen
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 Günther Greindl on 01/03/2008 03:29 PM: 1) The assertion that the incomputable enters with life. Rosen seems aware that he moves into the range of vitalism here, and tries to defend that he says it is not mechanism versus vitalism but simplicity versus complexity (=uncomputability in the Rosen sense) For my problems with his uncomputability see below. Living systems are just the particular example set of the (possibly very large) category of complex_rr* systems. It doesn't _start_ with life. Life just happens to be what RR (Robert Rosen) was interested in. There is a tinge of vitalism in there. And vitalists of all kinds seem to be attracted to RR's writings. But, I believe he was not appealing to any sort of vitalism. There are other, more insidious, assumptions he makes, though. 2) Rosen repeatedly refers to Gödel's result and talks about how it shows how impoverished formalization are in regard to real mathematics. This of course leads to the question what real mathematics is. It seems that Rosen is Platonist (how else would he know what real mathematics is?), but this is an opinion one must not share. He also ignores that Gödel's results do not place limits on what one can formally model (in general), but only with regard to a formal system (finitely given, sufficient strenght etc). The question _if_ physics is completely formalizable/computable is indeed an interesting one, but why should this stage only start when life is concerned? (see below) Either it applies to the universe as a whole or it does not. RR held that it applied to many systems, not necessarily just living ones. He does, however, seem to avoid being explicit about the influence of Goedel's theorems on his own ideas. As far as I can tell, he never even approaches a technical explanation that extrapolates from Goedel to his work. His exposition is purely philosophical and others claim to be able to map what he said directly to Goedel's results. I'm not that smart, though. A better exposition comes in Penrose's work, in which tries to argue that math (as done by humans) regularly involves hopping outside of any given formal system in order to catch a glimpse of a solution, then hopping back inside the formal system in order to develop a formal proof. And in this regard, RR's rhetoric is not inconsistent. RR's basic claim would be that math is _more_ than computation (automated inference... formal systems... whatever you want to call it). Namely, it involves jumping levels of discourse to provide entailment when none such can be provided inside the formal system. If you take that to its logical conclusion, you can imagine a _holarchy_ of formal systems that each patch up the entailments for other formal systems in the holarchy. In order to avoid an infinite regress or an infinite progression, however, the level hopping _must_ loop back in on itself. So, RR's position is that causal loops (a self-justifying rhetorical holarchy of formal systems), if formalized, might provide the mathematical infrastructure necessary to more completely capture (model) living systems. 3) In the Kercel paper, we read: :START QUOTE: Given this, what does the (M,R)-system imply? In this model, the inferential entailments, the metabolism map f, the repair map F, and the replication map b represent the causal entailments in an organism, i.e., the efficient causes of metabolism, repair, and replication, respectively. If the (M,R)-system is actually in a modeling relation with the organism, then the same closed-loop hierarchical structure of containment of entailment must apply to the efficient causes. Just as map F contains map f contains in map b contains map F, ad infinitum, the efficient cause of repair contains the efficient cause of metabolism contains the efficient cause of replication contains the efficient cause of repair, ad infinitum. This is what it means to say that organisms contain the causal counterpart of impredicative loops. Rosen's expression closed to efficient cause now becomes clear. A real-world process is closed to efficient cause when it contains a closed-loop hierarchy of containment of efficient causes. Each efficient cause is contained by all the members of the loop that come before it, and contains all the members of the loop that come after it. :END QUOTE: What I fail to see that life embodies this infinite cycle as in his (M,R) system: after all, life started around 4 billion years ago - so I can _finitely_ list all cycles till some point where we are not interested anymore (depending on which theory of origin of life you prefer, rna first or metabolism first or whatever). The part that RR seems to think is not covered is the force or influence that guides a living system in its behaviors. In many contexts, people tend to make vague claims that natural selection or the environment provide such
Re: [FRIAM] Robert Rosen
Glen E. P. Ropella wrote: Because he'd bought into the idea that effects cause their causes in living systems and he believed computation (as we know it today) cannot represent these causal cycles. You have to remember that he did much of this work in the 70s and 80s Here's a paper by Ken Thompson where he describes a regular expression implementation based on object code generated on-the-fly for the IBM 7094. The 7094 was a 60's mainframe had instructions designed for self-modifying code. (Lisp predates that..) http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=363347.363387 Also note that ~8% of human DNA is highly similar to retroviruses -- we're slowly being rewritten from the outside. http://genomebiology.com/2001/2/6/reviews/1017. ...and even by each other.. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL_udi=B6T3B-47HPGPW-4_user=10_rdoc=1_fmt=_orig=search_sort=dview=c_acct=C50221_version=1_urlVersion=0_userid=10md5=937dc8c7b72003e57bbd2971e7ae71be Marcus FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Robert Rosen
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 What's your point? Oh let me guess. The rest of us are all idiots and this has all been solved already? Marcus G. Daniels on 01/03/2008 08:40 PM: Here's a paper by Ken Thompson where he describes a regular expression implementation based on object code generated on-the-fly for the IBM 7094. The 7094 was a 60's mainframe had instructions designed for self-modifying code. (Lisp predates that..) http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=363347.363387 Also note that ~8% of human DNA is highly similar to retroviruses -- we're slowly being rewritten from the outside. http://genomebiology.com/2001/2/6/reviews/1017. ...and even by each other.. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL_udi=B6T3B-47HPGPW-4_user=10_rdoc=1_fmt=_orig=search_sort=dview=c_acct=C50221_version=1_urlVersion=0_userid=10md5=937dc8c7b72003e57bbd2971e7ae71be - -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-219-3846, http://tempusdictum.com One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important. -- Bertrand Russell -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQFHfb5OZeB+vOTnLkoRAoMKAJwK7LCgsbKcrle0z0AGMXPm3KftbwCfZ/KN NnfZQa+/phj21spObgcwo0A= =NCGS -END PGP SIGNATURE- FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Robert Rosen
Glen Phil Henshaw on 01/02/2008 09:25 PM: Yes, sure, that's an option of interpretation, but does it fit with the rest of what I was saying? I think there's an interpretation that fits the data of nature better than any other, so it's reached as a 'conclusion' not as an 'assumption'. For example, can you offer any example of physical growth (accumulative change) without a beginning and end? Hmmm. I suppose that depends on the way beginning and ending are measured. It seems to me that _nothing_ real has a beginning or end. Our models of things begin and end; but, the things themselves don't seem to. There are several ways, but since they involve physical things rather than definable things the reasoning is different. With physical things there are recognizable ridges and valleys. An inflection point on a curve is a ridge or valley in the derivative. Like with ( ¸¸.o´ ¯ and ¯ `o.¸¸ ) the o's of the beginning and ending developmental phases can be considered the definable beginning and end and. Then the indefinable part attached includes all you can find connected to them. That provides an efficiently reconstructable natural definition of beginning and end. The more useful part may come later, when you realize that once you have (¸¸.o) there's simply no avoiding ( o´ ¯ `o.¸¸)coming right along. Once you see growth you can expect to see the other three phases of a whole system life-cycle. For example, I can say that my dad was born. Then many years later, he died. But when did my dad begin? Was he my dad when he was a zygote? A fetus? A gleam in my grand dad's eye? Same questions apply about when he ended. In fact, the difference between an embryo and a fetus presents just such an example of physical growth without a beginning or an end. We don't know when the fetus began and our cut-off point for fetus is artificially designed to coincide with birth. Well, you can choose. Do you want to apply the rule to your dad as a whole or to some part? One of the unobservable but theoretically real thresholds I like for the beginning of an organism is the time when the egg opens its cell wall for just one sperm. I don't know how many organisms that actually works for, but I think it works for humans. The same is true of any unit you can think of. Sure, by measuring the thing according to some model, you can point to a beginning and end... according to your _model_. But, is the thing being measured actually beginning and ending? Or is it just the way you measure it that results in the measurements? What you're talking about is the maturation of your concept of beginning and ending and hoping that it settles down with something reliable and definite and not just some arbitrary opinion measure or something. For the many things that begin with growth it's fairly easy to be clear about it. That then provides a very large set of examples that other things can be judged by. I think, though I'm not completely sure, that everything that begins and ends some other way will turn out to be trivial, but that needs remain undetermined until it is. By that reasoning, I can simply pick a model of the world where nothing ever ends and nothing ever begins... i.e. a model that says the world is everywhere continuous. Forces in distant galaxies impact me to some non-zero extent (though they may be _negligible_ for any given purpose). Events in the distant past caused me to, say, get some more coffee... at least to some extent. What would be wrong with considering the world without beginnings or ends is that you're establishing fact without evidence. I choose to avoid that since it is clearly unproductive. Otherwise you're just dwelling on incontrovertible conjectures for which there is no evidence, and that gets boring. So my answer is: Sure. Tell me what model you'd like me to use and I can pick a growth process that has neither a beginning nor an end. Try one, any one. If all your data shows is the beginning and end of your recorder being turned on, then you can indeed say that you have not found the beginning or end of the system in question, just of your record. All you can ever associate with anything identifiable is what's connected to it, and that never proves much about what's not connected. Complex systems are always poorly represented by our models, but does that restrict them, or just us? :-) That's easy: Both, because we are part of the super-system that includes the sub-system being studied. Well, certainly a term needs to be understood so that when one persons uses it another person can know what is being referred to. But isn't that a normal problem with language, not an inherent flaw in language? In this case I'm using 'feedback loop' in a way I thought would be understood, from your referring to the physical model of the 'chicken egg' cycle. It wasn't
Re: [FRIAM] Robert Rosen
What's your point? Oh let me guess. The rest of us are all idiots and this has all been solved already? I was trying to augment the idea below with an example. Boundaries implied by terms like `organism' or `cell' could easily become too rigid.. much as the Central Dogma of Molecular Biology became too rigid given reverse transcriptase. The trouble is that they are not _simply_ self-reinforcing. Each iteration through the cycle _changes_ the system. So, you cannot _finitely_ list all cycles up until some point UNLESS you actually do it. I.e. the end result of the 4 billion years of iteration is not analytically predictable from the very first set of axioms we started with 4 billion years ago. It's incompressible because each iteration changes the building blocks. When I was a kid I used to play Core Wars, where we'd write little programs that fought for memory and processor resources. Even these little programs would show unexpected dynamics when they interacted, sometimes even merging into a sort of superspecies. -- Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.'' Donald Knuth, 1977 FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Robert Rosen
Well, feedback loops begin and end too, and that displays an even greater 'inefficiency' for causation... Just plane old bloody gaps. The rub is that systems of loops originate for no efficient cause. That's why I turned the sci method around to warch them since it's clear we can't explain them. Phil Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry -Original Message- From: Russell Standish [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Mon, 31 Dec 2007 08:56:01 To:[EMAIL PROTECTED], The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group friam@redfish.com Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Robert Rosen On Sun, Dec 30, 2007 at 11:32:33AM -0700, Nicholas Thompson wrote: All, Ok, so my questions about Rosen are of a really fundamental nature. You guys are already WAY down the track. In fact, could somebody clarify, in terms that a former english major would understand, what it means to say, organisms are closed to efficient causation. I read it and I read it and I READ it and it just doesnt STICK! You probably read about Aristotle's four causes - this is the origin of the term efficient causation. closed to efficient causation in my mind simply says that something is its own cause. If we ask why does this chicken exist, the answer is because of an egg existing. When we ask why did the egg exist, the answer is because a chook exists (adult chicken). Causation in this sense is closed. When you ask any question about the causation of life, you ultimately come back on youself. The meaning of life is life itself. It exists because it can. I hope this explanation makes some kind of sense. I beleive that much of Rosen's tortured explanation was trying to formalise this fairly simple and obvious idea. It is worth comparing and contrasting it with the notion of autopoiesis, which is a little better developed. Cheers -- A/Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Mathematics UNSW SYDNEY 2052 [EMAIL PROTECTED] Australiahttp://www.hpcoders.com.au FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Robert Rosen
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 [EMAIL PROTECTED] on 01/02/2008 08:51 AM: Well, feedback loops begin and end too, and that displays an even greater 'inefficiency' for causation... Just plane old bloody gaps. The rub is that systems of loops originate for no efficient cause. That's why I turned the sci method around to warch them since it's clear we can't explain them. I disagree. First, to say that feedback loops begin and end is an _assumption_ of a discrete ontology. I.e. feedback loops may not have a beginning or an end, they may merely be bounded. Second, most of what people seem to point at when they use the phrase feedback loop is an aggregation of phenomena caused by an aggregate set of mechanisms. Hence, even if the ontology is discrete or discretizable, we may not be able to discuss them in the same language (attributes, properties, predicates, operators, etc.) we use to discuss the phenomena and mechanisms of which they're composed. And further, not only may we need a different language, they may not even give rise to the same categorization of actual behaviors. I.e. the components can be very different from the composition. To conflate the two is to commit the fallacy of composition/division. And third, we might posit that feedback loop is _merely_ an ascription having nothing to do with the ontology and _everything_ to do with our psychology. I.e. feedback loops may not actually exist except as a convenient lexical structure we use to describe the world. In the first case, we can't make the logical leap to say that feedback loops have no efficient cause. In the second case, the cause of the loops is _complex_... and we've had that discussion recently. And in the third case, feedback loops do have an efficient cause... _us_. [grin] I'm not saying that any of these are true; but they are certainly defensible positions... as defensible as the assertion that the loops have no efficient cause. - -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-219-3846, http://tempusdictum.com When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators. -- P.J. O'Rourke -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQFHe+JXZeB+vOTnLkoRAhrvAKCNlM31w5lG4mLCJdQh6+8KxMAvggCdFb8r v9bMfdkZPoDUCrJTxolKpWs= =Ji8l -END PGP SIGNATURE- FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Robert Rosen
That's nice, describing informality as sneaking in new axioms (or 'understandings', perhaps) in a series of assertions. Of course it's all but impossible to not do that,... given the complex way that ideas arise out of feelings and intents. What then about the invisible assumptions that tend to be numerous in any attempt at making formal statements. Would the likely presence of hidden assumptions make all formal statements presumably informal? Phil Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry -Original Message- From: Glen E. P. Ropella [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Wed, 02 Jan 2008 10:59:52 To:The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group friam@redfish.com Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Robert Rosen -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 Nicholas Thompson on 01/01/2008 10:59 PM: thus, to be a good formalism, a formalism has to be in some sense informal, right? This is a difficult question phrased in a misleadingly simple way. We now know that mathematics is _more_ than formal systems (thanks to Goedel and those that have continued his work). I.e. we cannot completely separate semantics from syntax. The semantic grounding of any given formalism (regardless of how obvious the grounding is) provides the hooks to the usage of the formalism. Hence, by the very nature of math, any formalism can be traced back to the intentions for the formalism (though the original intentions may be so densely compressed or that uncompressing them may be hard or impossible). And in that sense, including your statement above, all formalisms will then be good formalisms because they all have a semantic grounding. But just because all formalisms assume a semantic grounding doesn't mean they're informal. The hallmark of a formalism is that it encompasses all the assumptions in axioms that are well-understood and clearly stated up front. I.e. a good formalism won't let new axioms slip in anytime during inference. So, that's what it now means to be formal. An informal inferential structure loosens that constraint and will allow one to introduce new semantics as the inference chugs along. - -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-219-3846, http://tempusdictum.com It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful. -- Anton LaVey -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQFHe98oZeB+vOTnLkoRAjKfAJ0fFwhcKlZulDmkoXZaDKb3a/b76QCfXjC5 WZaDT213cIPPOhP1bRH8rQE= =cWA0 -END PGP SIGNATURE- FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Robert Rosen
Glen, You write: [EMAIL PROTECTED] on 01/02/2008 08:51 AM: Well, feedback loops begin and end too, and that displays an even greater 'inefficiency' for causation... Just plane old bloody gaps. The rub is that systems of loops originate for no efficient cause. That's why I turned the sci method around to warch them since it's clear we can't explain them. I disagree. First, to say that feedback loops begin and end is an _assumption_ of a discrete ontology. I.e. feedback loops may not have a beginning or an end, they may merely be bounded. Yes, sure, that's an option of interpretation, but does it fit with the rest of what I was saying? I think there's an interpretation that fits the data of nature better than any other, so it's reached as a 'conclusion' not as an 'assumption'. For example, can you offer any example of physical growth (accumulative change) without a beginning and end? Second, most of what people seem to point at when they use the phrase feedback loop is an aggregation of phenomena caused by an aggregate set of mechanisms. Hence, even if the ontology is discrete or discretizable, we may not be able to discuss them in the same language (attributes, properties, predicates, operators, etc.) we use to discuss the phenomena and mechanisms of which they're composed. And further, not only may we need a different language, they may not even give rise to the same categorization of actual behaviors. I.e. the components can be very different from the composition. To conflate the two is to commit the fallacy of composition/division. Complex systems are always poorly represented by our models, but does that restrict them, or just us? :-) It's completely normal to discover that in describing one physical thing you often need a combination of different languages of description. For example, you might describe something's chemistry, it's appearance and its various roles in its environment. They're all useful, especially together, though each is highly incomplete and they hardly connect at all in terms of the formalities of each mode of description. And third, we might posit that feedback loop is _merely_ an ascription having nothing to do with the ontology and _everything_ to do with our psychology. I.e. feedback loops may not actually exist except as a convenient lexical structure we use to describe the world. Well, certainly a term needs to be understood so that when one persons uses it another person can know what is being referred to. But isn't that a normal problem with language, not an inherent flaw in language? In this case I'm using 'feedback loop' in a way I thought would be understood, from your referring to the physical model of the 'chicken egg' cycle. It wasn't that clear perhaps. I meant it to refer to the type of feedbacks we commonly find in nature, not a theoretical construct. Like the chicken egg cycle, all cycles in natural systems seem to develop and decay by transient accumulative change processes. The name 'feedback' gets attached since they generally fit the model of exponential-like accumulative change. Can you think of any regular cycle that does not begin and end with accumulative processes on scales that make them untraceable? In the first case, we can't make the logical leap to say that feedback loops have no efficient cause. In the second case, the cause of the loops is _complex_... and we've had that discussion recently. And in the third case, feedback loops do have an efficient cause... _us_. [grin] I draw the conclusion that natural system feedbacks have no efficient cause since it's 'inefficient' to have causes separated from effects. With growth systems there are usually time lags between cause and effect, so any 'cause' is instrumentally disconnected from the process that follows it. Growth systems also usually have complex emergent properties with a complexity not evident in the original environment, and so outside cause fails to be 'efficient' for requisite variety too. In the case of a real physical growth system you'd be quite right to say that any feedback loop we can define has us as its efficient cause. A physical system's own feedback loops are indeed complex. For talking about them it seems you need words that take their meaning from what they refer to rather than be defined so they can't. That's an issue, of course. Then I think the best of all evidence is the myriad physical systems that hide their designs inside themselves. That's very 'inefficient' isn't it, to have things designed and operating according to principles that are universally invisible from outside? Isn't that typical for physical systems though? I'm not saying that any of these are true; but they are certainly defensible positions... as defensible as the assertion that the loops have no efficient cause. When you talk about 'defensible' but ambiguous positions I'm reminded of
[FRIAM] Robert Rosen
Glen, thanks for your fascinating answer. It answers all my questions for the moment. Here is the present state of my thinking of the Praeludium, which I have now read four times and with which my concern is approaching obsession. For what it is worth, I agree with Rosen (Praeludium, Life Itself) that formal systems are examples of models or, more precisely, that the relation of the formal system and the thing it represents is a modeling relation. But the modeling relation is much more ubiquitous than that. Natural selection is an example in good standing of a model but, as Owen Densmore keeps reminding me, is not a formalism. I think it is a general property of models that they are intentional. An intentional relation is one in which the truth or falsity of an assertion depends on the point of view from which he world is seen. The classic philosophical example has to do with Lady Astor* and the Titanic. As an extensional utterance, the statement that Lady Astor booked passage on the Titanic is plainly true. Whatever else one might say about the Titanic does not change the truth value of the utterance. That was the boat she booked herself on and she was on it when it hit the iceberg. However, as an intentional utterance, its truth value is utterly dependant on the point of view from which the titanic is seen. She probably did book passage on the Largest Ship in the White Star Line, and she did book passage on the ship whose maiden voyage was a society event on both sides of the Atlantic. We can have some confidence in these assertions, because behaviors directed toward status are part of what we know about Lady Astor's behavior repertoire.* She did not, in this sense, book passage on the ship that hit an iceberg and sank in the north Atlantic: not, I would assert, that because that idea was not in a mythic place called her mind, or even lodged in her brain, but because nothing in the design of Lady Astor's behavior is congruent with that intent. She was not into risky behavior. Thus, the formalism, Lady Astor Booked Passage On the Titanic is too impoverished in entailments to capture the essential quality of her act. Or to put it round the other way, an infinite number of distinct formalizations ... [would be required ] ... to capture all the qualities ... [of her act.] What Rosen seems to be saying in the Prelude of LI is that formalisms are like other models is this respect. They are intentional in that their truth value depends to some degree on the uses to which the formalism is going to be put, where the formalizer is headed when the formalization is applied. With out that reference any formalism is incomplete. thus, to be a good formalism, a formalism has to be in some sense informal, right? Nick * My deep apologies to Lady Astor and her ancestors. In point of fact, I know nothing of lady Astor ... full stop. With full some prejudice based solely on her Name, I grant her whatever qualities are necessary for my exposition. She is a model, and like every unfortunate thing that has ever been used as a model, she has been abused. For all I know, she may have been a London street urchin whose first name was Lady and who climbed into a trunk on the pier and never knew upon what ship she booked passage. Nicholas S. Thompson Research Associate, Redfish Group, Santa Fe, NM ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) Professor of Psychology and Ethology, Clark University ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Robert Rosen
I missed the implication people are finding in Rosen's idea of non-computable models. Can someone offer some examples of instances where that matters. It sounds like it means something other than 'insoluable'. Could it perhaps include 'internalized' so therefore not accessible? Phil Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry -Original Message- From: Gus Koehler [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Sat, 29 Dec 2007 08:43:31 To:'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group' friam@redfish.com Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Robert Rosen A Living System Must Have Noncomputable Models A. H. Louie Abstract: Chu and Ho's recent paper in Artificial Life is riddled with errors. In particular, they use a wrong definition of Robert Rosen's mechanism. This renders their critical assessment of Rosen's central proof null and void. http://www.panmere.com/rosen/Louie_noncomp_pre_rev.pdf Gus Koehler, Ph.D. President and Principal Time Structures, Inc. 1545 University Ave. Sacramento, CA 95825 916-564-8683, Fax: 916-564-7895 Cell: 916-716-1740 www.timestructures.com Save A Tree - please don't print this unless you really need to. -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Joost Rekveld Sent: Saturday, December 29, 2007 5:34 AM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Robert Rosen Hi, apparently these articles have given rise to rebuttals, see http:// www.panmere.com/?cat=18 for a survey of this discussion. I read 'Life Itself' a while ago, found it extremely interesting but not an easy read either. Later I read some of the essays from 'Essays on Life Itself, which helped. The biggest problem with Rosen's writing was for me that it is very concise; for a layman (like me) it would have been good to have a bit more flesh around his central argument, in the form of historical references and examples. Later I discovered the writings of Howard Pattee (an essay in the first Artificial Life proceedings) and Peter Cariani (his thesis from 1989 http://homepage.mac.com/cariani/CarianiWebsite/Cariani89.pdf and a later article for example http://homepage.mac.com/cariani/ CarianiWebsite/Cariani98.pdf. I found both their writings more digestible. hope this helps, Joost. On Dec 29, 2007, at 5:03 AM, Russell Standish wrote: By all means have a discussion. Rosen is not an easy read, nor easy to talk about even. I have some grumbles with Rosen, which I mention in my paper On Complexity and Emergence, but these are fairly muted. There've been some interesting articles recently in Artificial Life by Chu Ho that appear to disprove Rosen's central theorem. I suspect their rather more rigourous approach crystalises some of my grumbles, but I haven't found the time yet to try out the analysis more formally myself. Cheers On Fri, Dec 28, 2007 at 08:41:43PM -0700, Nicholas Thompson wrote: All, On the recommendation of somebody on this list, I started reading Rosen's Life Itself. It does indeed, as the recommender suggested, seem to relate to my peculiar way of looking at such things as adaptation, motivation, etc. The book is both intriguing and somewhat over my head. Pied Piperish in that regard. So I am wondering if there are folks on the list who wold like to talk about it. By the way, does the fact that I am attracted to Rosen make me a category theorist? I am told that that is somewhat to the left of being an astrologer. Nick --- Joost Rekveld ---http://www.lumen.nu/rekveld --- This alone I ask you, O reader, that when you peruse the account of these marvels that you do not set up for yourself as a standard human intellectual pride, but rather the great size and vastness of earth and sky; and, comparing with that Infinity these slender shadows in which miserably and anxiously we are enveloped, you will easily know that I have related nothing which is beyond belief. (Girolamo Cardano) --- FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Robert Rosen
All, Ok, so my questions about Rosen are of a really fundamental nature. You guys are already WAY down the track. In fact, could somebody clarify, in terms that a former english major would understand, what it means to say, organisms are closed to efficient causation. I read it and I read it and I READ it and it just doesnt STICK! Would that amount to saying that Rosen believes that nothing is entailed by the fact that you just poked a tiger with a pool cue? Whereas, much is entailed by saying that you have just poked a pool ball with the same cue? If I changed the words above from entailed by to implied by or inferable from, does Rosen get off the boat? Would anybody who accepted organisms are closed claim be willing to enter a tiger's cage with a pool cue KNOWING THAT the tiger had just been poked with the same pool cue? For the new year, I dream of a world in which no two people are allowed to argue in my electronic presence until the key AGREEMENTS that make their argument possible are made explicit. That is probably amounts to asking you all to be as dumb as I am. Hey! I can ask! Nick OTHER STUFF FROM THIS THREAD -- Message: 10 Date: Sat, 29 Dec 2007 08:43:31 -0800 From: Gus Koehler [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Robert Rosen To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group' friam@redfish.com Message-ID: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii A Living System Must Have Noncomputable Models A. H. Louie Abstract: Chu and Ho's recent paper in Artificial Life is riddled with errors. In particular, they use a wrong definition of Robert Rosen's mechanism. This renders their critical assessment of Rosen's central proof null and void. http://www.panmere.com/rosen/Louie_noncomp_pre_rev.pdf Gus Koehler, Ph.D. President and Principal Time Structures, Inc. 1545 University Ave. Sacramento, CA 95825 916-564-8683, Fax: 916-564-7895 Cell: 916-716-1740 www.timestructures.com Save A Tree - please don't print this unless you really need to. -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Joost Rekveld Sent: Saturday, December 29, 2007 5:34 AM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Robert Rosen Hi, apparently these articles have given rise to rebuttals, see http:// www.panmere.com/?cat=18 for a survey of this discussion. I read 'Life Itself' a while ago, found it extremely interesting but not an easy read either. Later I read some of the essays from 'Essays on Life Itself, which helped. The biggest problem with Rosen's writing was for me that it is very concise; for a layman (like me) it would have been good to have a bit more flesh around his central argument, in the form of historical references and examples. Later I discovered the writings of Howard Pattee (an essay in the first Artificial Life proceedings) and Peter Cariani (his thesis from 1989 http://homepage.mac.com/cariani/CarianiWebsite/Cariani89.pdf and a later article for example http://homepage.mac.com/cariani/ CarianiWebsite/Cariani98.pdf. I found both their writings more digestible. hope this helps, Joost. On Dec 29, 2007, at 5:03 AM, Russell Standish wrote: By all means have a discussion. Rosen is not an easy read, nor easy to talk about even. I have some grumbles with Rosen, which I mention in my paper On Complexity and Emergence, but these are fairly muted. There've been some interesting articles recently in Artificial Life by Chu Ho that appear to disprove Rosen's central theorem. I suspect their rather more rigourous approach crystalises some of my grumbles, but I haven't found the time yet to try out the analysis more formally myself. Cheers On Fri, Dec 28, 2007 at 08:41:43PM -0700, Nicholas Thompson wrote: All, On the recommendation of somebody on this list, I started reading Rosen's Life Itself. It does indeed, as the recommender suggested, seem to relate to my peculiar way of looking at such things as adaptation, motivation, etc. The book is both intriguing and somewhat over my head. Pied Piperish in that regard. So I am wondering if there are folks on the list who wold like to talk about it. By the way, does the fact that I am attracted to Rosen make me a category theorist? I am told that that is somewhat to the left of being an astrologer. Nick --- Joost Rekveld --- http://www.lumen.nu/rekveld --- This alone I ask you, O reader, that when you peruse the account of these marvels that you do not set up for yourself as a standard human intellectual pride, but rather the great size and vastness of earth and sky; and, comparing with that Infinity these slender shadows in which miserably and anxiously we are enveloped, you will easily know that I have related nothing which is beyond belief. (Girolamo Cardano
Re: [FRIAM] Robert Rosen
There is a school of thought called strong ALife, stating that computational systems can be alive, given the right program. It is analogous (but not equivalent to) the better known strong AI position, sometimes known as computationalism. Rosen's result essentially says that strong ALife is impossible. Hence the interest in it, particularly from ALifers. There is also interest from AI people and more importantly philosphers of the mind, as it is often thought that the parallels between ALife and AI are strong enough to carry results from one field to the other (which personally I'm a bit dubious about). Of course, it doesn't help that nobody has a really good definition of life... On Sun, Dec 30, 2007 at 06:23:52PM +, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I missed the implication people are finding in Rosen's idea of non-computable models. Can someone offer some examples of instances where that matters. It sounds like it means something other than 'insoluable'. Could it perhaps include 'internalized' so therefore not accessible? Phil -- A/Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Mathematics UNSW SYDNEY 2052 [EMAIL PROTECTED] Australiahttp://www.hpcoders.com.au FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Robert Rosen
On Sun, Dec 30, 2007 at 11:32:33AM -0700, Nicholas Thompson wrote: All, Ok, so my questions about Rosen are of a really fundamental nature. You guys are already WAY down the track. In fact, could somebody clarify, in terms that a former english major would understand, what it means to say, organisms are closed to efficient causation. I read it and I read it and I READ it and it just doesnt STICK! You probably read about Aristotle's four causes - this is the origin of the term efficient causation. closed to efficient causation in my mind simply says that something is its own cause. If we ask why does this chicken exist, the answer is because of an egg existing. When we ask why did the egg exist, the answer is because a chook exists (adult chicken). Causation in this sense is closed. When you ask any question about the causation of life, you ultimately come back on youself. The meaning of life is life itself. It exists because it can. I hope this explanation makes some kind of sense. I beleive that much of Rosen's tortured explanation was trying to formalise this fairly simple and obvious idea. It is worth comparing and contrasting it with the notion of autopoiesis, which is a little better developed. Cheers -- A/Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Mathematics UNSW SYDNEY 2052 [EMAIL PROTECTED] Australiahttp://www.hpcoders.com.au FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Robert Rosen
Dear Nick, have you read this?: http://www.panmere.com/rosen/closed_eff.htm#en01 and this: http://www.panmere.com/rosen/mhout/msg00412.html I think this clears it up - the concept is not so mysterious after all ;-) I think this organisms are closed to efficient causation is just a descriptive principle - if Rosen says you can't compute it anyway, in what sense would it be a formalization? Apart from that, I don't yet see why it shouldn't be computable, but I have not yet found the time to read the Chu Ho Paper and the Louie rebuttal. The only thing off the top of my head which comes to my mind is Kleene's Recursion principle - a proof that every formal system can reproduce itself, so why not also an (M,R) system? (But again Caveat: I have not read the above papers yet, maybe I am missing the point ;-)) Regards, Günther Nicholas Thompson wrote: All, Ok, so my questions about Rosen are of a really fundamental nature. You guys are already WAY down the track. In fact, could somebody clarify, in terms that a former english major would understand, what it means to say, organisms are closed to efficient causation. I read it and I read it and I READ it and it just doesnt STICK! Would that amount to saying that Rosen believes that nothing is entailed by the fact that you just poked a tiger with a pool cue? Whereas, much is entailed by saying that you have just poked a pool ball with the same cue? If I changed the words above from entailed by to implied by or inferable from, does Rosen get off the boat? Would anybody who accepted organisms are closed claim be willing to enter a tiger's cage with a pool cue KNOWING THAT the tiger had just been poked with the same pool cue? For the new year, I dream of a world in which no two people are allowed to argue in my electronic presence until the key AGREEMENTS that make their argument possible are made explicit. That is probably amounts to asking you all to be as dumb as I am. Hey! I can ask! Nick OTHER STUFF FROM THIS THREAD -- Message: 10 Date: Sat, 29 Dec 2007 08:43:31 -0800 From: Gus Koehler [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Robert Rosen To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group' friam@redfish.com mailto: friam@redfish.com Message-ID: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii A Living System Must Have Noncomputable Models A. H. Louie Abstract: Chu and Ho's recent paper in Artificial Life is riddled with errors. In particular, they use a wrong definition of Robert Rosen's mechanism. This renders their critical assessment of Rosen's central proof null and void. http://www.panmere.com/rosen/Louie_noncomp_pre_rev.pdf http://www.panmere.com/rosen/Louie_noncomp_pre_rev.pdf Gus Koehler, Ph.D. President and Principal Time Structures, Inc. 1545 University Ave. Sacramento, CA 95825 916-564-8683, Fax: 916-564-7895 Cell: 916-716-1740 www.timestructures.com http://www.timestructures.com Save A Tree - please don't print this unless you really need to. -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] [ mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] ] On Behalf Of Joost Rekveld Sent: Saturday, December 29, 2007 5:34 AM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Robert Rosen Hi, apparently these articles have given rise to rebuttals, see http:// http:// www.panmere.com/?cat=18 http://www.panmere.com/?cat=18 for a survey of this discussion. I read 'Life Itself' a while ago, found it extremely interesting but not an easy read either. Later I read some of the essays from 'Essays on Life Itself, which helped. The biggest problem with Rosen's writing was for me that it is very concise; for a layman (like me) it would have been good to have a bit more flesh around his central argument, in the form of historical references and examples. Later I discovered the writings of Howard Pattee (an essay in the first Artificial Life proceedings) and Peter Cariani (his thesis from 1989 http://homepage.mac.com/cariani/CarianiWebsite/Cariani89.pdf http://homepage.mac.com/cariani/CarianiWebsite/Cariani89.pdf and a later article for example http://homepage.mac.com/cariani/ http://homepage.mac.com/cariani/ CarianiWebsite/Cariani98.pdf. I found both their writings more digestible. hope this helps, Joost. On Dec 29, 2007, at 5:03 AM, Russell Standish wrote: By all means have a discussion. Rosen is not an easy read
Re: [FRIAM] Robert Rosen
Nick, what got my interest is the similarity of meaning between 'closed to efficient causation' and 'have their own behavior', the property of physical organisms we constantly have to remind ourselves of whenever dealing with organisms... Phil Henshaw .·´ ¯ `·. ~~~ 680 Ft. Washington Ave NY NY 10040 tel: 212-795-4844 e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] explorations: www.synapse9.com -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Russell Standish Sent: Sunday, December 30, 2007 4:56 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Robert Rosen On Sun, Dec 30, 2007 at 11:32:33AM -0700, Nicholas Thompson wrote: All, Ok, so my questions about Rosen are of a really fundamental nature. You guys are already WAY down the track. In fact, could somebody clarify, in terms that a former english major would understand, what it means to say, organisms are closed to efficient causation. I read it and I read it and I READ it and it just doesnt STICK! You probably read about Aristotle's four causes - this is the origin of the term efficient causation. closed to efficient causation in my mind simply says that something is its own cause. If we ask why does this chicken exist, the answer is because of an egg existing. When we ask why did the egg exist, the answer is because a chook exists (adult chicken). Causation in this sense is closed. When you ask any question about the causation of life, you ultimately come back on youself. The meaning of life is life itself. It exists because it can. I hope this explanation makes some kind of sense. I beleive that much of Rosen's tortured explanation was trying to formalise this fairly simple and obvious idea. It is worth comparing and contrasting it with the notion of autopoiesis, which is a little better developed. Cheers -- -- -- A/Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Mathematics UNSW SYDNEY 2052 [EMAIL PROTECTED] Australiahttp://www.hpcoders.com.au -- -- FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Robert Rosen
Hi, apparently these articles have given rise to rebuttals, see http:// www.panmere.com/?cat=18 for a survey of this discussion. I read 'Life Itself' a while ago, found it extremely interesting but not an easy read either. Later I read some of the essays from 'Essays on Life Itself, which helped. The biggest problem with Rosen's writing was for me that it is very concise; for a layman (like me) it would have been good to have a bit more flesh around his central argument, in the form of historical references and examples. Later I discovered the writings of Howard Pattee (an essay in the first Artificial Life proceedings) and Peter Cariani (his thesis from 1989 http://homepage.mac.com/cariani/CarianiWebsite/Cariani89.pdf and a later article for example http://homepage.mac.com/cariani/ CarianiWebsite/Cariani98.pdf. I found both their writings more digestible. hope this helps, Joost. On Dec 29, 2007, at 5:03 AM, Russell Standish wrote: By all means have a discussion. Rosen is not an easy read, nor easy to talk about even. I have some grumbles with Rosen, which I mention in my paper On Complexity and Emergence, but these are fairly muted. There've been some interesting articles recently in Artificial Life by Chu Ho that appear to disprove Rosen's central theorem. I suspect their rather more rigourous approach crystalises some of my grumbles, but I haven't found the time yet to try out the analysis more formally myself. Cheers On Fri, Dec 28, 2007 at 08:41:43PM -0700, Nicholas Thompson wrote: All, On the recommendation of somebody on this list, I started reading Rosen's Life Itself. It does indeed, as the recommender suggested, seem to relate to my peculiar way of looking at such things as adaptation, motivation, etc. The book is both intriguing and somewhat over my head. Pied Piperish in that regard. So I am wondering if there are folks on the list who wold like to talk about it. By the way, does the fact that I am attracted to Rosen make me a category theorist? I am told that that is somewhat to the left of being an astrologer. Nick --- Joost Rekveld ---http://www.lumen.nu/rekveld --- “This alone I ask you, O reader, that when you peruse the account of these marvels that you do not set up for yourself as a standard human intellectual pride, but rather the great size and vastness of earth and sky; and, comparing with that Infinity these slender shadows in which miserably and anxiously we are enveloped, you will easily know that I have related nothing which is beyond belief.” (Girolamo Cardano) --- FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Robert Rosen v. Chu
I really like the array of issues raised by Tim Gwynn in quoting Dominique Chu and Wen Kin Ho's statement about Rosen's central conclusion: Robert Rosens central theorem states that organisms are fundamentally different from machines, mainly because they are closed with respect to efficient causation. The proof for this theorem rests on two crucial assumptions. The first is that for a certain class of systems (mechanisms) analytic modeling is the inverse of synthetic modeling. The second is that aspects of machines can be modeled using relational models and that these relational models are themselves refined by at least one analytic model. We show that both assumptions are unjustified. We conclude that these results cast serious doubts on the validity of Rosens proof. (from http://www.panmere.com/?cat=18) The interesting question is if there might reasonably be no means of proving a theorem about things you can't observe as that puts them beyond your 'box' of definitions for proof... I think Rosen's conclusion that organisms are closed with respect to efficient causation is decidedly true, but unprovable because it's true. It's implied by observing inaccessible organizational development, missing content on nature 'between our models', but proof rests on things within a model. Phil Henshaw .·´ ¯ `·. ~~~ 680 Ft. Washington Ave NY NY 10040 tel: 212-795-4844 e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] explorations: www.synapse9.com -- it's not finding what people say interesting, but finding what's interesting in what they say -- -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Joost Rekveld Sent: Saturday, December 29, 2007 8:34 AM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Robert Rosen Hi, apparently these articles have given rise to rebuttals, see http:// www.panmere.com/?cat=18 for a survey of this discussion. I read 'Life Itself' a while ago, found it extremely interesting but not an easy read either. Later I read some of the essays from 'Essays on Life Itself, which helped. The biggest problem with Rosen's writing was for me that it is very concise; for a layman (like me) it would have been good to have a bit more flesh around his central argument, in the form of historical references and examples. Later I discovered the writings of Howard Pattee (an essay in the first Artificial Life proceedings) and Peter Cariani (his thesis from 1989 http://homepage.mac.com/cariani/CarianiWebsite/Cariani89.pdf and a later article for example http://homepage.mac.com/cariani/ CarianiWebsite/Cariani98.pdf. I found both their writings more digestible. hope this helps, Joost. On Dec 29, 2007, at 5:03 AM, Russell Standish wrote: By all means have a discussion. Rosen is not an easy read, nor easy to talk about even. I have some grumbles with Rosen, which I mention in my paper On Complexity and Emergence, but these are fairly muted. There've been some interesting articles recently in Artificial Life by Chu Ho that appear to disprove Rosen's central theorem. I suspect their rather more rigourous approach crystalises some of my grumbles, but I haven't found the time yet to try out the analysis more formally myself. Cheers On Fri, Dec 28, 2007 at 08:41:43PM -0700, Nicholas Thompson wrote: All, On the recommendation of somebody on this list, I started reading Rosen's Life Itself. It does indeed, as the recommender suggested, seem to relate to my peculiar way of looking at such things as adaptation, motivation, etc. The book is both intriguing and somewhat over my head. Pied Piperish in that regard. So I am wondering if there are folks on the list who wold like to talk about it. By the way, does the fact that I am attracted to Rosen make me a category theorist? I am told that that is somewhat to the left of being an astrologer. Nick --- Joost Rekveld ---http://www.lumen.nu/rekveld --- This alone I ask you, O reader, that when you peruse the account of these marvels that you do not set up for yourself as a standard human intellectual pride, but rather the great size and vastness of earth and sky; and, comparing with that Infinity these slender shadows in which miserably and anxiously we are enveloped, you will easily know that I have related nothing which is beyond belief. (Girolamo Cardano) --- FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
Re: [FRIAM] Robert Rosen
A Living System Must Have Noncomputable Models A. H. Louie Abstract: Chu and Ho's recent paper in Artificial Life is riddled with errors. In particular, they use a wrong definition of Robert Rosen's mechanism. This renders their critical assessment of Rosen's central proof null and void. http://www.panmere.com/rosen/Louie_noncomp_pre_rev.pdf Gus Koehler, Ph.D. President and Principal Time Structures, Inc. 1545 University Ave. Sacramento, CA 95825 916-564-8683, Fax: 916-564-7895 Cell: 916-716-1740 www.timestructures.com Save A Tree - please don't print this unless you really need to. -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Joost Rekveld Sent: Saturday, December 29, 2007 5:34 AM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Robert Rosen Hi, apparently these articles have given rise to rebuttals, see http:// www.panmere.com/?cat=18 for a survey of this discussion. I read 'Life Itself' a while ago, found it extremely interesting but not an easy read either. Later I read some of the essays from 'Essays on Life Itself, which helped. The biggest problem with Rosen's writing was for me that it is very concise; for a layman (like me) it would have been good to have a bit more flesh around his central argument, in the form of historical references and examples. Later I discovered the writings of Howard Pattee (an essay in the first Artificial Life proceedings) and Peter Cariani (his thesis from 1989 http://homepage.mac.com/cariani/CarianiWebsite/Cariani89.pdf and a later article for example http://homepage.mac.com/cariani/ CarianiWebsite/Cariani98.pdf. I found both their writings more digestible. hope this helps, Joost. On Dec 29, 2007, at 5:03 AM, Russell Standish wrote: By all means have a discussion. Rosen is not an easy read, nor easy to talk about even. I have some grumbles with Rosen, which I mention in my paper On Complexity and Emergence, but these are fairly muted. There've been some interesting articles recently in Artificial Life by Chu Ho that appear to disprove Rosen's central theorem. I suspect their rather more rigourous approach crystalises some of my grumbles, but I haven't found the time yet to try out the analysis more formally myself. Cheers On Fri, Dec 28, 2007 at 08:41:43PM -0700, Nicholas Thompson wrote: All, On the recommendation of somebody on this list, I started reading Rosen's Life Itself. It does indeed, as the recommender suggested, seem to relate to my peculiar way of looking at such things as adaptation, motivation, etc. The book is both intriguing and somewhat over my head. Pied Piperish in that regard. So I am wondering if there are folks on the list who wold like to talk about it. By the way, does the fact that I am attracted to Rosen make me a category theorist? I am told that that is somewhat to the left of being an astrologer. Nick --- Joost Rekveld ---http://www.lumen.nu/rekveld --- This alone I ask you, O reader, that when you peruse the account of these marvels that you do not set up for yourself as a standard human intellectual pride, but rather the great size and vastness of earth and sky; and, comparing with that Infinity these slender shadows in which miserably and anxiously we are enveloped, you will easily know that I have related nothing which is beyond belief. (Girolamo Cardano) --- FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Robert Rosen v. Chu
On Sat, Dec 29, 2007 at 10:40:23AM -0500, Phil Henshaw wrote: The interesting question is if there might reasonably be no means of proving a theorem about things you can't observe as that puts them beyond your 'box' of definitions for proof... I think Rosen's conclusion that organisms are closed with respect to efficient causation is decidedly true, but unprovable because it's true. It's implied by observing inaccessible organizational development, missing content on nature 'between our models', but proof rests on things within a model. I don't think that living systems being closed to efficient causation is necessarily being disputed (although I think it is far from proven). Rather, what is being disputed is Rosen's result that machines cannot be closed to efficient causation. From what I understand, things like the SCL artificial chemistry (which is definitely a type of machine) is closed to efficient causation in Rosen's sense, but again it must be admitted my understanding of such matters is a little foggy. Cheers -- A/Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Mathematics UNSW SYDNEY 2052 [EMAIL PROTECTED] Australiahttp://www.hpcoders.com.au FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Robert Rosen
This was Chu and Ho's earlier paper they published last year. I was somewhat dissatisfied with both that paper, and Louie's rebuttal, however Chu and Ho's paper that just recently came out is a stronger paper. Cheers On Sat, Dec 29, 2007 at 08:43:31AM -0800, Gus Koehler wrote: A Living System Must Have Noncomputable Models A. H. Louie Abstract: Chu and Ho's recent paper in Artificial Life is riddled with errors. In particular, they use a wrong definition of Robert Rosen's mechanism. This renders their critical assessment of Rosen's central proof null and void. http://www.panmere.com/rosen/Louie_noncomp_pre_rev.pdf Gus Koehler, Ph.D. President and Principal Time Structures, Inc. 1545 University Ave. Sacramento, CA 95825 916-564-8683, Fax: 916-564-7895 Cell: 916-716-1740 www.timestructures.com Save A Tree - please don't print this unless you really need to. -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Joost Rekveld Sent: Saturday, December 29, 2007 5:34 AM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Robert Rosen Hi, apparently these articles have given rise to rebuttals, see http:// www.panmere.com/?cat=18 for a survey of this discussion. I read 'Life Itself' a while ago, found it extremely interesting but not an easy read either. Later I read some of the essays from 'Essays on Life Itself, which helped. The biggest problem with Rosen's writing was for me that it is very concise; for a layman (like me) it would have been good to have a bit more flesh around his central argument, in the form of historical references and examples. Later I discovered the writings of Howard Pattee (an essay in the first Artificial Life proceedings) and Peter Cariani (his thesis from 1989 http://homepage.mac.com/cariani/CarianiWebsite/Cariani89.pdf and a later article for example http://homepage.mac.com/cariani/ CarianiWebsite/Cariani98.pdf. I found both their writings more digestible. hope this helps, Joost. On Dec 29, 2007, at 5:03 AM, Russell Standish wrote: By all means have a discussion. Rosen is not an easy read, nor easy to talk about even. I have some grumbles with Rosen, which I mention in my paper On Complexity and Emergence, but these are fairly muted. There've been some interesting articles recently in Artificial Life by Chu Ho that appear to disprove Rosen's central theorem. I suspect their rather more rigourous approach crystalises some of my grumbles, but I haven't found the time yet to try out the analysis more formally myself. Cheers On Fri, Dec 28, 2007 at 08:41:43PM -0700, Nicholas Thompson wrote: All, On the recommendation of somebody on this list, I started reading Rosen's Life Itself. It does indeed, as the recommender suggested, seem to relate to my peculiar way of looking at such things as adaptation, motivation, etc. The book is both intriguing and somewhat over my head. Pied Piperish in that regard. So I am wondering if there are folks on the list who wold like to talk about it. By the way, does the fact that I am attracted to Rosen make me a category theorist? I am told that that is somewhat to the left of being an astrologer. Nick --- Joost Rekveld ---http://www.lumen.nu/rekveld --- This alone I ask you, O reader, that when you peruse the account of these marvels that you do not set up for yourself as a standard human intellectual pride, but rather the great size and vastness of earth and sky; and, comparing with that Infinity these slender shadows in which miserably and anxiously we are enveloped, you will easily know that I have related nothing which is beyond belief. (Girolamo Cardano) --- FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org -- A/Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Mathematics UNSW SYDNEY 2052 [EMAIL PROTECTED] Australiahttp://www.hpcoders.com.au FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures
Re: [FRIAM] Robert Rosen v. Chu
it is because of references like these that I like to lurk on lists like this one. thank you, Joost. On Dec 30, 2007, at 1:11 AM, Russell Standish wrote: From what I understand, things like the SCL artificial chemistry (which is definitely a type of machine) is closed to efficient causation in Rosen's sense, --- Joost Rekveld ---http://www.lumen.nu/rekveld --- “This alone I ask you, O reader, that when you peruse the account of these marvels that you do not set up for yourself as a standard human intellectual pride, but rather the great size and vastness of earth and sky; and, comparing with that Infinity these slender shadows in which miserably and anxiously we are enveloped, you will easily know that I have related nothing which is beyond belief.” (Girolamo Cardano) --- FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
[FRIAM] Robert Rosen
All, On the recommendation of somebody on this list, I started reading Rosen's Life Itself. It does indeed, as the recommender suggested, seem to relate to my peculiar way of looking at such things as adaptation, motivation, etc. The book is both intriguing and somewhat over my head. Pied Piperish in that regard. So I am wondering if there are folks on the list who wold like to talk about it. By the way, does the fact that I am attracted to Rosen make me a category theorist? I am told that that is somewhat to the left of being an astrologer. Nick Nicholas S. Thompson Research Associate, Redfish Group, Santa Fe, NM ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) Professor of Psychology and Ethology, Clark University ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Robert Rosen
Try http://www3.vcu.edu/complex/ However, you'll probably find it easier to borrow one of Rosen's books from the library and read that, rather than to try to understand what others make of him. It's sort of the reverse of David Bohm... Cheers On Wed, Nov 28, 2007 at 11:46:55AM -0700, Nicholas Thompson wrote: Glen , Everybody but me seems to know what Robert Rosen work you are referring to. If I apologize for being an ill-educated bounder, could you provide me with a netref or two to work with? I apologize. Nick (if you give me the reference, will that be an instance of causality?) [Original Message] From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: friam@redfish.com Date: 11/28/2007 10:04:16 AM Subject: Friam Digest, Vol 53, Issue 25 Send Friam mailing list submissions to friam@redfish.com To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to [EMAIL PROTECTED] You can reach the person managing the list at [EMAIL PROTECTED] When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific than Re: Contents of Friam digest... Today's Topics: 1. Natural Design as a primitive property (was FRIAM and Causality) (Nicholas Thompson) 2. [Fwd: New AAAI Conference - ICWSM 2008] (Robert Cordingley) 3. Re: Natural Design as a primitive property (was FRIAM and Causality) (Robert Cordingley) 4. Re: Natural Design as a primitive property (was FRIAM and Causality) (Glen E. P. Ropella) 5. some thoughts on the educational aspect of 632 (Prof David West) 6. Re: Natural Design as a primitive property (was FRIAM andCausality) (Nicholas Thompson) 7. one laptop per child (Marcus G. Daniels) 8. Re: one laptop per child (Carl Tollander) 9. Re: one laptop per child (Alfredo Covaleda) 10. My employer in the news (Douglas Roberts) -- Message: 1 Date: Tue, 27 Nov 2007 11:22:54 -0700 From: Nicholas Thompson [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [FRIAM] Natural Design as a primitive property (was FRIAM and Causality) To: friam@redfish.com Cc: echarles [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED] Message-ID: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII All, I confess I have not followed the mathematical side of this discussion into the blue underlined stuff. Nor do I claim to understand all of the plain text. However, I am tempted by the idea of a mathematical formalization of natural design. Here is the argument: What EVERYBODY --from the most dyed in the wool Natural Theologist to the most flaming Dawkinsian -- agrees on is that there is some property of natural objects which we might roughly call their designedness. Tremendous confusion has been sewn by biologists by confusing that property -- whatever it might be -- with the CAUSES of that property, variously God or Natural selection, or what-have-you. So much of what passes for causal explanation in biology is actually description of the adaptation relation or what I call, just to be a trouble-maker, natural design. It seems to me that you mathematicians could do a great deal for biology by putting your minds to a formalization of natural design. It would put Darwin's theory -- natural selection begets natural design out of the reach of tautology once and for all. What I am looking for here is a mathematical formalization of the relations --hierarchy of relations, I would suppose -- that leads to attributions of designedness. Assuming that one had put a computer on a British Survey Vessel and sent it round the world for five years looking at the creatures and their surroundings, what is the mathematical description of the relation that would have to be obtained before the computer would come home saying that creatures were designed (and rocks weren't). Then -- and only then -- are we in a position to ask the question, is natural selection the best explanation for this property. My supposition is that ALL current theories will not survive such an analysis. Indeed, we may need a new metaphor altogether. Many of you will be familiar with the notion of fitness landscape. For intuitive purposes, let me turn the landscape upside down, so its peaks are chasms and its valleys are peaks. Now, drop a ball at random into the upside down landscape. Assuming that the landscape is rigid, the ball will roll around until it finds a local minimum. If you put some jitter in the rolling, it might, depending on the size of the jitter and the roughness of the landscape, find the absolute minimum. But all of this assumes that the ball has no effect on the landscape! If we turn the landscape into a semi-rigid net so that the ball
Re: [FRIAM] Robert Rosen
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 For some reason, I didn't receive this message from Nick. Nor did I receive Phil's last post. I wonder what's going on... perhaps my server was unavailable and the messages are frozen in the redfish.com spool? Anyway, Russell's right. I wouldn't recommend Mikulecky's site until/unless you've read some of Rosen's works directly. I also would NOT recommend Rosen's daughter's website: http://www.rosen-enterprises.com/. But, Tim Gwinn's site is pretty good: http://www.panmere.com/ Reading Rosen can be problematic. So, you might want to start with Tim's site and if anything seems interesting go directly to Rosen's words, rather than what others say about his work. That's because (in my not so humble opinion) most Rosenites wildly misinterpret or over-extrapolate what Rosen said to fit their own private world view. If you're like me and you prefer original material, then I recommend his book: Fundamentals of Measurement and Representation of Natural Systems first and foremost. Then for a lighter meal, try his Essays on Life Itself, second. And third, I'd recommend Anticipatory Systems. If you get through all that, then you should be well equipped to partially parse Life Itself. When I was in Santa Fe, the SFI library only had Life Itself. But that book is a bit dense in Rosen's private vocabulary, which is why I think there's so much ambiguity around what Rosen was trying to say. (There also seems to be many people who _claim_ to understand what Rosen was saying; but some deep poking often shows them to have only a vague understanding, unfortunately. For myself, I only understand a few of the basic concepts and have over-extrapolated his work to fit my own world view, which is more akin to non-well-founded set theory. ;-) To jump to the point, though. My misrepresentation of his work is that he was doing 2 things: 1) building an argument that acyclic inference is inadequate for representing certain systems (e.g. life), and 2) using category theory (or whatever else might work) as the jumping off point for building a new body of math to handle cyclic inference. This hypothetical body of new math would allow us to handle cause-effect cycles (e.g. what Rosen calls anticipation). And in such cycles, we can build systems where the end purpose _causes_ the beginning and middle effects that then cause the cause, as it were. That's why I suggest that your call for a hierarchy of relations that lead to attributions of 'designedness'. Russell Standish on 11/28/2007 02:10 PM: Try http://www3.vcu.edu/complex/ However, you'll probably find it easier to borrow one of Rosen's books from the library and read that, rather than to try to understand what others make of him. It's sort of the reverse of David Bohm... Cheers On Wed, Nov 28, 2007 at 11:46:55AM -0700, Nicholas Thompson wrote: Glen , Everybody but me seems to know what Robert Rosen work you are referring to. If I apologize for being an ill-educated bounder, could you provide me with a netref or two to work with? I apologize. Nick (if you give me the reference, will that be an instance of causality?) - -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-219-3846, http://tempusdictum.com The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly, is to fill the world with fools. -- Herbert Spencer -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQFHTfT5ZeB+vOTnLkoRAswOAJ9/H3V50oEqvcsmne/s+JmvgWg2nACg1wDY JacO4IWrJ97B6Quvo5uXIFQ= =WDWr -END PGP SIGNATURE- FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
