Re: [FRIAM] On old question

[glen]

I agree. Purpose imputation is fideistic. >8^D

On October 26, 2018 12:24:39 PM PDT, Marcus Daniels  
wrote:
>Call me old-fashioned.   I don't think it means anything to claim
>understanding of a system unless one can take it apart and put it back
>together; it is what design requires.  There are a lot of systems one
>can’t understand at that level, either because they don’t yield to
>reduction or because one is either not allowed or equipped to take a
>wrench to them.   With those systems, one can only play prediction
>games and ideas about function are just stories people tell themselves
>to keep from going mad!
>
>
>
>On 10/26/18, 1:03 PM, "Friam on behalf of uǝlƃ ☣"
> wrote:
>
>
>
>Well, to be fair, Nick launched the thread with the meaning of
>"function" that includes teleology. And Rosen's whole shtick is an
>attempt to address what it means to leave purpose out of science.  But
>Rosen's formulation of anticipation does identify the temporal part of
>construction.  And he does it in a cool way by talking about how a
>system can "model" it's goal state ... so that vision of the goal state
>kindasorta simulates reverse causation where the (expectation of the)
>future guides the past.
>
>
>
>I don't think that scaffolding relates to anticipation if it's created
>and maintained by *others*.  Anticipation is a kind of
>self-scaffolding, maybe.
>
>
>
>On 10/26/18 11:27 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
>
>> It seems like teleology has been introduced by the word
>/scaffolding/.  I'm not sure how that is useful unless it is just an
>observation that there are components that tend to be introduced
>earlier in the development of an organism.
>
>
>
>
>
>--
>
>☣ uǝlƃ
>
>
>
>
>
>FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
>
>Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
>
>   to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
>
>FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

-- 
glen


FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

Re: [FRIAM] On old question

[Marcus Daniels]

Call me old-fashioned.   I don't think it means anything to claim understanding 
of a system unless one can take it apart and put it back together; it is what 
design requires.  There are a lot of systems one can’t understand at that 
level, either because they don’t yield to reduction or because one is either 
not allowed or equipped to take a wrench to them.   With those systems, one can 
only play prediction games and ideas about function are just stories people 
tell themselves to keep from going mad!



On 10/26/18, 1:03 PM, "Friam on behalf of uǝlƃ ☣"  wrote:



Well, to be fair, Nick launched the thread with the meaning of "function" 
that includes teleology. And Rosen's whole shtick is an attempt to address what 
it means to leave purpose out of science.  But Rosen's formulation of 
anticipation does identify the temporal part of construction.  And he does it 
in a cool way by talking about how a system can "model" it's goal state ... so 
that vision of the goal state kindasorta simulates reverse causation where the 
(expectation of the) future guides the past.



I don't think that scaffolding relates to anticipation if it's created and 
maintained by *others*.  Anticipation is a kind of self-scaffolding, maybe.



On 10/26/18 11:27 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:

> It seems like teleology has been introduced by the word /scaffolding/.  
I'm not sure how that is useful unless it is just an observation that there are 
components that tend to be introduced earlier in the development of an organism.





--

☣ uǝlƃ





FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv

Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College

to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove



FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

Re: [FRIAM] On old question

[uǝlƃ ☣]

Well, to be fair, Nick launched the thread with the meaning of "function" that 
includes teleology. And Rosen's whole shtick is an attempt to address what it 
means to leave purpose out of science.  But Rosen's formulation of anticipation 
does identify the temporal part of construction.  And he does it in a cool way 
by talking about how a system can "model" it's goal state ... so that vision of 
the goal state kindasorta simulates reverse causation where the (expectation of 
the) future guides the past.

I don't think that scaffolding relates to anticipation if it's created and 
maintained by *others*.  Anticipation is a kind of self-scaffolding, maybe.

On 10/26/18 11:27 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> It seems like teleology has been introduced by the word /scaffolding/.  I'm 
> not sure how that is useful unless it is just an observation that there are 
> components that tend to be introduced earlier in the development of an 
> organism.


-- 
☣ uǝlƃ


FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

Re: [FRIAM] On old question

[Marcus Daniels]

It seems like teleology has been introduced by the word scaffolding.  I'm not 
sure how that is useful unless it is just an observation that there are 
components that tend to be introduced earlier in the development of an organism.





FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

Re: [FRIAM] On old question

[uǝlƃ ☣]

Hm.  I'm probably a victim of my own skimming.  Allowing metaphor to run 
rampant ... The scaffolding Nick linked to is definitely *supervised* in what 
seems a fairly biased (maybe in a good way) constraint system.  Granted, the 
DGI stuff seems very constrained, too.  But within the constraints, it seems 
unsupervised.  Perhaps the difference lies only in whatever dynamism/reactivity 
the constraints have?

On 10/26/18 11:07 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> Glen writes:
> 
>And FWIW, your "scaffolding" sounds a lot like "bootstrapping" 
>  to me.
> 
> It sounds to me like the modularity and re-use of neural nets that Roger 
> directed us to.  


-- 
☣ uǝlƃ


FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

Re: [FRIAM] On old question

[Marcus Daniels]

Glen writes:

   And FWIW, your "scaffolding" sounds a lot like "bootstrapping" 
 to me.

It sounds to me like the modularity and re-use of neural nets that Roger 
directed us to.  

Marcus


FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

Re: [FRIAM] On old question

[uǝlƃ ☣]

I think you have the "materialist but not mechanist" gist right.  But it's 
worth a warning that Rosen's definition of mechanism isn't what most people 
mean by that word.  And it's his hijacking of the word into jargon that caused 
so many, for so long, to accuse him of vitalism.  Most people include all 4 
causes in and around their use of "mechanism".  Dictionaries even list the 
arrangements and how the parts fit together as part of the mechanism. (Side 
plug: My colleagues have published a paper calling for a classification of 
"mechanistic models", if anyone's interested: https://arxiv.org/abs/1801.04909)

What Rosen's done is jargonalize "mechanism" to mean only the most ... 
deductive, for a lack of a better word ... causal flow, chopping out the rest 
of what normal people include.  To his credit, the important part of what he 
ablated comes down to impredicative definitions -- where the 
construction/counting of one component is defined in terms of another 
component.  Constructively, such loopy definitions *can* result in deadlock.  
But classically, they're not really a problem at all.  Higher order and 
non-classical logics are well-studied and not as pathological as Rosen seems to 
think.  So he seems to have attributed more power to this criticism of formal 
systems than is warranted.  And given that it's a fundamental part of his 
framework, it calls the entire thing into question.

Whatever, though.  Reframing these questions in the way he did is useful 
because it targets an audience that doesn't  spend much time on them.  But be 
skeptical of his hype.  Formal systems aren't as limited as he claims.  And we 
had these tools, for the most part, while Rosen was writing.  My *hack* opinion 
is that the problem, as always, was one part a) the lack of cross-domain 
pollination and the other part b) Rosen's belief that he was the only one 
having these thoughts.  It's kindasorta ironic that he latched onto category 
theory, which was/is an attempt to unify disparate bodies of math.

And FWIW, your "scaffolding" sounds a lot like "bootstrapping" 
 to me.

On 10/25/18 2:55 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:
> Serendipity!  Your letter struck me like a thunderbolt, because I had 
> dedicated the morning to carefully rereading Rosen's first chapter.  And for 
> the first time, I think I got it! Rosen doesn't put it that way, but I think 
> I want to say that his chapter is all about the distinction between 
> “materialism” -- the belief that all that is consists of matter ==> and its 
> relations <== and “mechanism”, the belief that the nature of parts tells you 
> everything you need to know about the wholes those parts compose.  We need a 
> science of biology that is materialistic but NOT mechanistic.  
> 
> [...]
> 
> To answer the question What is Life? we have so many more tools than we did 
> when Rosen wrote.  The evo-devo literature is full of examples of what I 
> guess I would call organizational serendipity.  The most inspiring example, 
> to me, is the current explanation for the origin of life.  The way the 
> question has always been posed to me before is how did life arise 
> spontaneously from parts. But if life is an organization of things from 
> another organization, the question becomes, “What kind of an organization 
> could scaffold the organization we call life.  Enter the white smokers with 
> their rich source of energetic chemicals and their intricate cellular 
> structure.  So, life is the inadvertent consequence of one kind of 
> organization coming into contact with another kind of parts in such a way 
> that the native possibilities for the parts to work together are scaffolded 
> by the organization.  

-- 
☣ uǝlƃ


FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

Re: [FRIAM] On old question

[Eric Smith]

Hi Nick,

Thank you for this.  There have been many things crossing my mind in reading 
the exchanges on the thread, but I have been run ragged on a trip and am behind 
on things due, so I gave up intenting to engage.

There was one thing in one of the very earliest posts that seemed relevant to 
topics raised.  I forget who exactly related the definition (by Rosen) of 
function as defined in terms of the difference in a system’s structure or 
dynamics (or something) with vs. without a particular component.  

This seems to me like a general approach to a definition that could be 
formalized in many ways depending on what “laws of the universe” your system 
obeys, and what you want to highlight.  In the world of game theory (which 
allows one to strip out many specifications and work with only a few 
distinctions), something that seems to me like one such formalization is the 
Shapley value in the context of coalitional-form solution concepts (also termed 
“cooperative game theory”, but I avoid that term because people who don’t work 
in the area often think “cooperative” means something different than this usage 
intends):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shapley_value
Martin Shubik used to prefer to call this just “the Value”, since he and 
Shapley were working together at the time, and the Value was the basis for a 
measure of an agent’s power in a system known as the Shapley-Shubik power index:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shapley%E2%80%93Shubik_power_index

I don’t know if this is interesting or makes a contribution to the discussion 
you want to pursue, but in case so….

The concepts you mention also make sense together to me, though I probably 
think of Serendipity in its common-language sense and do not know how it is 
used as a term of art, Spandrel I am fairly familiar with as established by the 
Gould paper, and Scaffolding is again a term I could see using in many ways.  
The way you used it in your description of Origin of Life is quite close to one 
usage that I also like.

I know this doesn’t add anything to what you have already said.  I will 
continue to follow, and if I think I can say anything small and specific, will 
try.

Best,

Eric


> On Oct 26, 2018, at 11:35 AM, Nick Thompson  
> wrote:
> 
> Thanks, Eric, 
>  
> Interesting. 
>  
> When I saw your message, I was excited because I thought you might comment on 
> the role of serendipity in evolution.  There are three ideas rattling around 
> in my head right now chafing against one another: Serendipity, Spandrel, 
> andScaffolding.  All of which seem to describe ways in which one form of 
> organization can affect a subsequent one.  Any thoughts?  
>  
> I will not say more lest I overly … um … structure your response. 
>  
> Nick 
>  
> Scaffolding.
>  
>  
> Nicholas S. Thompson
> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
> Clark University
> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
>  
>  
> -Original Message-
> From: Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of Eric Smith
> Sent: Thursday, October 25, 2018 5:30 PM
> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group 
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] On old question
>  
> > I am not at all sure where this leaves us with “natural programming.”  As 
> > you point out, my concept of natural may be complete at odds with yours.  
> > Mine grows out of the following analogy:  Artificial selection : natural 
> > selection : : artificial design  : natural design.  If artificial design – 
> > the appropriateness of a domestic species to the needs of the breeder -- is 
> > what is explained by artificial selection, what is explained by natural 
> > selection?  What precisely is natural design?  In the absence of a God to 
> > tell us what s/he wants, how do we read off of nature itself the demands to 
> > which her/his  creatures are adapted?  
>  
> In reading Dave’s note it seemed to me that his distinction of natural from 
> artificial was much like the one meant by Simon in Sciences of the 
> Artificial, somewhat like — with respect to any particular discussion frame — 
> some things can be “organic” in the sense of inherited by that conversation, 
> while others are “built” within the frame of the conversation.
>  
> https://www.amazon.co.jp/Sciences-Artificial-MIT-Press/dp/0262691914
>  
>  
>  
> 
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe 
> http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
> 
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> t

Re: [FRIAM] On old question

[Nick Thompson]

Thanks, Eric, 

 

Interesting. 

 

When I saw your message, I was excited because I thought you might comment on 
the role of serendipity in evolution.  There are three ideas rattling around in 
my head right now chafing against one another: Serendipity 
<https://www.google.com/search?ei=S3vSW8PPF46HjwSvm72gAQ=define+serendipity=define+serendipity_l=psy-ab.1.0.0l7j0i22i30l3.93078.147504..152136...0.0..0.124.1823.10j82..01..gws-wiz...0i71j35i39j0i131j0i67j0i131i20i264j0i131i67j0i10j0i20i264.VDBSf3ELx5s>
 , Spandrel 
<https://www.google.com/search?ei=KHvSW7bsFqrEjwT4zqiYAQ=spandrel+%28biology%29=spandrel+%28biology%29_l=psy-ab.3.1.0i22i30l2.26180.33029..33723...0.0..0.115.1009.3j7..01..gws-wiz...0j0i71j0i20i264j0i67j0i22i10i30.U-x5bcygWno>
 , and Scaffolding 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_of_proximal_development#Scaffolding> .  All 
of which seem to describe ways in which one form of organization can affect a 
subsequent one.  Any thoughts?  

 

I will not say more lest I overly … um … structure 
<https://www.google.com/search?source=hp=snzSW8T8O8zXjwS9zYPoCw=define+structure+%28verb=Google+Search=define+structure+%28verb_l=psy-ab.3..0i22i30.2628.11840..24994...9.0..0.133.3340.10j222..01..gws-wiz.6..0j35i39j0i67j0i131j0i20i264j0i131i20i264j0i131i67j0i10j0i20i263j0i22i10i30._IT0yNPtViI>
  your response. 

 

Nick 

 

Scaffolding.

 

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

 

-Original Message-
From: Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of Eric Smith
Sent: Thursday, October 25, 2018 5:30 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group 
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] On old question

 

> I am not at all sure where this leaves us with “natural programming.”  As you 
> point out, my concept of natural may be complete at odds with yours.  Mine 
> grows out of the following analogy:  Artificial selection : natural selection 
> : : artificial design  : natural design.  If artificial design – the 
> appropriateness of a domestic species to the needs of the breeder -- is what 
> is explained by artificial selection, what is explained by natural selection? 
>  What precisely is natural design?  In the absence of a God to tell us what 
> s/he wants, how do we read off of nature itself the demands to which her/his  
> creatures are adapted?  

 

In reading Dave’s note it seemed to me that his distinction of natural from 
artificial was much like the one meant by Simon in Sciences of the Artificial, 
somewhat like — with respect to any particular discussion frame — some things 
can be “organic” in the sense of inherited by that conversation, while others 
are “built” within the frame of the conversation.

 

 <https://www.amazon.co.jp/Sciences-Artificial-MIT-Press/dp/0262691914> 
https://www.amazon.co.jp/Sciences-Artificial-MIT-Press/dp/0262691914

 

 

 



FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv

Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe  
<http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com> 
http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

FRIAM-COMIC  <http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/> 
http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove


FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

Re: [FRIAM] On old question

[Nick Thompson]

The book I ordered that was recommended by Marcus was on information theory
as a mode of analysis for social sciences.  So, I don't think it's
particularly relevant to Rosen.  But we'll see.  It should be here by
Monday.  I will let you know. 

 

Rosen died in 1998.  Life Itself seems to have been his last monograph, and
it presents itself as a summary of his previous work.  There are several
posthumous publications, but these seem mostly to be republications of the
works on which LI was based.  So, LI might be your best shot.  

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

 <http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/>
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of John Kennison
Sent: Thursday, October 25, 2018 4:13 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group 
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] On old question

 

Hi Nick,

 

I'm thinking I should look at a newer book by Rosen and see if it seems.
better than "Life Itself". Do you think that the book you ordered (I'm not
certain what it was) would be good? Or, alternatively, what is the best
recent book by Rosen?

 

--John   

  _  

From: Friam mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com> >
on behalf of Nick Thompson mailto:nickthomp...@earthlink.net> >
Sent: Wednesday, October 24, 2018 3:38:32 PM
To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group'
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] On old question 

 

Thanks, Marcus, 

 

I ordered the book.  Time I revived old memory traces.  

 

Nick 

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

 <http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/>
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of Marcus Daniels
Sent: Wednesday, October 24, 2018 12:56 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group mailto:Friam@redfish.com> >; Roger Critchlow mailto:r...@elf.org> >
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] On old question

 

Nick,

 

It sounds like you are describing mutual information.  This is ancient, but
a nice overview of related topics:

 

https://www.amazon.com/Information-Theory-Qualitative-Quantitative-Applicati
ons/dp/0803921322

 

Marcus

 

From: Friam mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com> >
on behalf of Nick Thompson mailto:nickthomp...@earthlink.net> >
Reply-To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
mailto:Friam@redfish.com> >
Date: Wednesday, October 24, 2018 at 12:22 AM
To: Roger Critchlow mailto:r...@elf.org> >, Friam
mailto:Friam@redfish.com> >
Subject: [FRIAM] On old question

 

Dear Roger, and anybody else who wants to play, 

 

While waiting for my paper, Signs and Designs, to be rejected, I have gone
back to thinking about an old project, whose working title has been "A Sign
Language."  And this has led me back to Robert Rosen, whose Life Itself I
bought almost 9 years ago and it has remained almost pristine, ever since.
In the chapter I am now looking at, Rosen is talking about "organization."
Now, I have been thinking about organization ever since I read C. Ray
Carpenter's early work on primate groups back in the late 50's.  It seemed
to me at the time, and it seems to me reasonable now, to define the
organization of a set of entities as related in some way to the degree to
which one can predict the behavior of one entity from knowledge about
another.  Now the relationship is not straightforward, because neither total
unpredictability (every monkey behaves exactly the same as every other
monkey in every situation) nor total unpredictability (no monkey behaves
like any other monkey in ANY situation) smacks of great organization.  The
highest levels organization, speaking inexpertly and intuitively, seem to
correspond to intermediate levels of predictability, where there were
several classes of individuals within a group and within class
predictability was strong but cross-class predictability was weak.  On my
account, the highest levels of organization involve hierarchies of
predictability.  Thus honey bees and ants are more organized than starling
flocks, say.  

 

This is where the matter stood at the point that I came to Santa Fe and
started interacting with you guys 14 years ago.  You-all introduced me to a
totally different notion of organization based - shudder - on the second
law.  But I have never been able to deploy your concept with any assurance.
So, for instance, when I shake the salad dressing, I feel like I am
disorganizing it, and when it reasserts itself into layers, I feel like it
ought to be called more organized.  But I have a feeling that you are going
to tell me that the reverse is true.  That, given the molecules of fat and
water/acid, that the layered state is the less organized state.  

 

Now this confusion of mine takes on importance

Re: [FRIAM] On old question

[Eric Smith]

> I am not at all sure where this leaves us with “natural programming.”  As you 
> point out, my concept of natural may be complete at odds with yours.  Mine 
> grows out of the following analogy:  Artificial selection : natural selection 
> : : artificial design  : natural design.  If artificial design – the 
> appropriateness of a domestic species to the needs of the breeder -- is what 
> is explained by artificial selection, what is explained by natural selection? 
>  What precisely is natural design?  In the absence of a God to tell us what 
> s/he wants, how do we read off of nature itself the demands to which her/his  
> creatures are adapted?  

In reading Dave’s note it seemed to me that his distinction of natural from 
artificial was much like the one meant by Simon in Sciences of the Artificial, 
somewhat like — with respect to any particular discussion frame — some things 
can be “organic” in the sense of inherited by that conversation, while others 
are “built” within the frame of the conversation.

https://www.amazon.co.jp/Sciences-Artificial-MIT-Press/dp/0262691914




FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

Re: [FRIAM] On old question

[Marcus Daniels]

“But serendipity by definition is a violation of design.  The serendipitous 
structure is one that makes something happen without being designed to do so.  
Translating that into the CP domain, your problem is to write a program that 
somehow promotes serendipity given that the serendipity involves, inherently, a 
discontinuity between what you seek and what are likely to find. “

In vivo, there’s the need to ensure an energy source.In silico, costs can 
take the form of regularization terms to drive down complexity.
For example, a mechanism that can be described by a tree with 100 nodes might 
cost 10 times more than one with 10 nodes.  Sometimes complexity is justified, 
sometimes it just slows down the (virtual) creature.

Marcus


FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

Re: [FRIAM] On old question

[John Kennison]

Hi Nick,


I'm thinking I should look at a newer book by Rosen and see if it seems. better 
than "Life Itself". Do you think that the book you ordered (I'm not certain 
what it was) would be good? Or, alternatively, what is the best recent book by 
Rosen?


--John


From: Friam  on behalf of Nick Thompson 

Sent: Wednesday, October 24, 2018 3:38:32 PM
To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group'
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] On old question


Thanks, Marcus,



I ordered the book.  Time I revived old memory traces.



Nick



Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/



From: Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of Marcus Daniels
Sent: Wednesday, October 24, 2018 12:56 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group ; 
Roger Critchlow 
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] On old question



Nick,



It sounds like you are describing mutual information.  This is ancient, but a 
nice overview of related topics:



https://www.amazon.com/Information-Theory-Qualitative-Quantitative-Applications/dp/0803921322



Marcus



From: Friam mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com>> on 
behalf of Nick Thompson 
mailto:nickthomp...@earthlink.net>>
Reply-To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group 
mailto:Friam@redfish.com>>
Date: Wednesday, October 24, 2018 at 12:22 AM
To: Roger Critchlow mailto:r...@elf.org>>, Friam 
mailto:Friam@redfish.com>>
Subject: [FRIAM] On old question



Dear Roger, and anybody else who wants to play,



While waiting for my paper, Signs and Designs, to be rejected, I have gone back 
to thinking about an old project, whose working title has been “A Sign 
Language.”  And this has led me back to Robert Rosen, whose Life Itself I 
bought almost 9 years ago and it has remained almost pristine, ever since.  In 
the chapter I am now looking at, Rosen is talking about “organization.”  Now, I 
have been thinking about organization ever since I read C. Ray Carpenter’s 
early work on primate groups back in the late 50’s.  It seemed to me at the 
time, and it seems to me reasonable now, to define the organization of a set of 
entities as related in some way to the degree to which one can predict the 
behavior of one entity from knowledge about another.  Now the relationship is 
not straightforward, because neither total unpredictability (every monkey 
behaves exactly the same as every other monkey in every situation) nor total 
unpredictability (no monkey behaves like any other monkey in ANY situation) 
smacks of great organization.  The highest levels organization, speaking 
inexpertly and intuitively, seem to correspond to intermediate levels of 
predictability, where there were several classes of individuals within a group 
and within class predictability was strong but cross-class predictability was 
weak.  On my account, the highest levels of organization involve hierarchies of 
predictability.  Thus honey bees and ants are more organized than starling 
flocks, say.



This is where the matter stood at the point that I came to Santa Fe and started 
interacting with you guys 14 years ago.  You-all introduced me to a totally 
different notion of organization based – shudder – on the second law.  But I 
have never been able to deploy your concept with any assurance.  So, for 
instance, when I shake the salad dressing, I feel like I am disorganizing it, 
and when it reasserts itself into layers, I feel like it ought to be called 
more organized.  But I have a feeling that you are going to tell me that the 
reverse is true.  That, given the molecules of fat and water/acid, that the 
layered state is the less organized state.



Now this confusion of mine takes on importance when I try to read Rosen.  He 
defines a function as the difference that occurs when one removes a component 
of a system.  I can see no reason why the oil or the water in my salad dressing 
cannot be thought of components of a system and if, for instance, I were to 
siphon out the water from the bottom of my layered salad dressing, I could 
claim that the function of the water had been to hold the water up.  This seems 
a rather lame notion of function.



Some of you who have been on this list forever will remember that I raised the 
same kind of worry almost a decade back when I noticed the drainage of water 
from a basin was actually slowed by the formation of a vortex.  This seemed to 
dispel any notion that vortices are structures whose function is to efficiently 
dispel a gradient.  It also violated my intuition from traffic flows, where I 
imagine that rigid rules of priority would facilitate the flow of people 
crossing bridges to escape Zozobra.



It’s quite possible that my confusions in this matter are of no great general 
applicability, in which case, I look forward to being ignored.



Nick



Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Pr

Re: [FRIAM] On old question

[Nick Thompson]

Hi, David, 

 

Serendipity!  Your letter struck me like a thunderbolt, because I had dedicated 
the morning to carefully rereading Rosen's first chapter.  And for the first 
time, I think I got it! Rosen doesn't put it that way, but I think I want to 
say that his chapter is all about the distinction between “materialism” -- the 
belief that all that is consists of matter ==> and its relations <== and 
“mechanism”, the belief that the nature of parts tells you everything you need 
to know about the wholes those parts compose.  We need a science of biology 
that is materialistic but NOT mechanistic.  

 

Now, if ever there was an idea that would fit with you, I would think this 
would be it.  CS, it seems to me, is all about cutting loose the program … the 
relations … from the machine.  That is explains why Rosen and others are so 
hard on the Turing MACHINE metaphor.  They think that metaphor traps us in a 
focus on parts, rather than relations.  A program need not be faithful to the 
machine on which it runs if it encodes the relations that need to be achieved.  

 

To answer the question What is Life? we have so many more tools than we did 
when Rosen wrote.  The evo-devo literature is full of examples of what I guess 
I would call organizational serendipity.  The most inspiring example, to me, is 
the current explanation for the origin of life.  The way the question has 
always been posed to me before is how did life arise spontaneously from parts. 
But if life is an organization of things from another organization, the 
question becomes, “What kind of an organization could scaffold the organization 
we call life.  Enter the white smokers with their rich source of energetic 
chemicals and their intricate cellular structure.  So, life is the inadvertent 
consequence of one kind of organization coming into contact with another kind 
of parts in such a way that the native possibilities for the parts to work 
together are scaffolded by the organization.  

 

I am not at all sure where this leaves us with “natural programming.”  As you 
point out, my concept of natural may be complete at odds with yours.  Mine 
grows out of the following analogy:  Artificial selection : natural selection : 
: artificial design  : natural design.  If artificial design – the 
appropriateness of a domestic species to the needs of the breeder -- is what is 
explained by artificial selection, what is explained by natural selection?  
What precisely is natural design?  In the absence of a God to tell us what s/he 
wants, how do we read off of nature itself the demands to which her/his  
creatures are adapted?  

 

But serendipity by definition is a violation of design.  The serendipitous 
structure  is one that makes something happen without being designed to do so.  
Translating that into the CP domain, your problem is to write a program that 
somehow promotes serendipity given that the serendipity involves, inherently, a 
discontinuity between what you seek and what are likely to find.  

 

If I, in my enthusiasm, have run all over your nice clean though with my muddy 
feet, please forgive me.  

 

Nick 

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

 

-Original Message-
From: Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of Prof David West
Sent: Thursday, October 25, 2018 12:10 PM
To: friam@redfish.com
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] On old question

 

I would like to introduce a bit of a zig or zag into the conversation by 
bringing up something a bit far afield and then relating it back to the thread.

 

In a direct message to Nick I mentioned that I was doing a workshop (January, 
in Amsterdam, at Domain-Driven Design Europe) on ‘Natural System Design’. Being 
the prolific author he is, he directed me to several papers of his on the same 
subject. Of course we are using the same phrase in quite different ways.

 

My use derives from software development and the first business computer LEO, 
(Lyons Electronic Office), was built by J. Lyons and Company in 1951. The same 
team built the hardware, programmed system software, and programmed a set of 
applications that included: payroll, order entry, inventory control, production 
scheduling, etc.

 

A number of assumptions made at that time have shaped Comp Sci and Soft Eng 
ever since: e.g., programming is all about the machine – taking a complete, 
consistent, and unambiguous set of requirements and then programming to satisfy 
them — totally isolating the programmer from the domain: and second, assuming 
that there is no difference between ‘application’ programming and ‘system’ 
programming; which is to deny any qualitative or substantive difference between 
a ‘natural’ domain like a business or business process and an ‘artificial’ 
domain like a network router and protocol.

 

Carnegie-Mellon had a contract a while back from DoD to study Ultra-Large

Re: [FRIAM] On old question

[Prof David West]

I would like to introduce a bit of a zig or zag into the conversation by 
bringing up something a bit far afield and then relating it back to the thread.

In a direct message to Nick I mentioned that I was doing a workshop (January, 
in Amsterdam, at Domain-Driven Design Europe) on ‘Natural System Design’. Being 
the prolific author he is, he directed me to several papers of his on the same 
subject. Of course we are using the same phrase in quite different ways.

My use derives from software development and the first business computer LEO, 
(Lyons Electronic Office), was built by J. Lyons and Company in 1951. The same 
team built the hardware, programmed system software, and programmed a set of 
applications that included: payroll, order entry, inventory control, production 
scheduling, etc.

A number of assumptions made at that time have shaped Comp Sci and Soft Eng 
ever since: e.g., programming is all about the machine – taking a complete, 
consistent, and unambiguous set of requirements and then programming to satisfy 
them — totally isolating the programmer from the domain: and second, assuming 
that there is no difference between ‘application’ programming and ‘system’ 
programming; which is to deny any qualitative or substantive difference between 
a ‘natural’ domain like a business or business process and an ‘artificial’ 
domain like a network router and protocol.

Carnegie-Mellon had a contract a while back from DoD to study Ultra-Large Scale 
systems – which coincidently are also Complex Adaptive systems. That study 
quite firmly said that the precepts, principles, tools, and models of Software 
Engineering would not be applicable to this type of system.

The premise of my workshop is to provide an alternative approach, and set of 
concepts and techniques, for designing and deploying software/information 
artifacts that enhance naturally occurring systems like businesses, cities, 
ecologies, etc.

What Nick wrote and referred me to could provide a lot of interesting and 
important ideas about “design-in-nature” that I can use in a biomimetic fashion 
to enhance my work on “design-with-nature.”

Which brings us back into the thread and a comment I made previously about the 
‘alchemical’ or ‘alchemical wanna be’ status of most of what we know about 
biological and cultural ‘living systems’. And, why I, and it seems others on 
the list, are tantalized but disappointed by folk like Rosen.


davew



On Thu, Oct 25, 2018, at 12:03 AM, glen wrote:
> On the contrary, the question can ONLY be answered by pointing at 
> something. Your abstracted, essentialist, linguistic tendencies will 
> fail us every time. I think I've mentioned Luc Steels' language games 
> before. And you seem to be fond of semiotics. So why isn't the question 
> best answered by pointing?
> 
> Playing along though, if the experience evoked by a model is good enough 
> to trigger a similar enough physiological response to that evoked by 
> reality, then the model passes for reality. I.e. if the effect is the 
> same, then the cause is equivalent.
> 
> 
> On October 24, 2018 8:08:01 PM PDT, Nick Thompson 
>  wrote:
> >Glen, 
> >
> >Interesting website ... .  But the question can't be answered by
> >pointing at something.  I meant to ask the question, "What are the
> >properties of something you would call real?"   
> >
> >Nick 
> -- 
> glen
> 
> 
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove


FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

Re: [FRIAM] On old question

[glen]

On the contrary, the question can ONLY be answered by pointing at something. 
Your abstracted, essentialist, linguistic tendencies will fail us every time. I 
think I've mentioned Luc Steels' language games before. And you seem to be fond 
of semiotics. So why isn't the question best answered by pointing?

Playing along though, if the experience evoked by a model is good enough to 
trigger a similar enough physiological response to that evoked by reality, then 
the model passes for reality. I.e. if the effect is the same, then the cause is 
equivalent.


On October 24, 2018 8:08:01 PM PDT, Nick Thompson  
wrote:
>Glen, 
>
>Interesting website ... .  But the question can't be answered by
>pointing at something.  I meant to ask the question, "What are the
>properties of something you would call real?"   
>
>Nick 
-- 
glen


FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

Re: [FRIAM] On old question

[Nick Thompson]

Glen, 

Interesting website ... .  But the question can't be answered by pointing at 
something.  I meant to ask the question, "What are the properties of something 
you would call real?"   

Nick 

Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
Clark University
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/


-Original Message-
From: Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of u?l? ?
Sent: Wednesday, October 24, 2018 4:24 PM
To: FriAM 
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] On old question

This might qualify:

  Bravemind: Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy
  http://ict.usc.edu/prototypes/pts/

Of course, you'll probably go all sophist on my and claim that the 2 
experiences (of the original traumatic experience and the simulation) are 
separate and unique.  But ... well... sophistry and all. 8^)

On 10/24/18 3:21 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:
> So:  What is it exactly for an experience to "pass as reality". 

--
☣ uǝlƃ


FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe 
http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove



FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

Re: [FRIAM] On old question

[uǝlƃ ☣]

This might qualify:

  Bravemind: Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy
  http://ict.usc.edu/prototypes/pts/

Of course, you'll probably go all sophist on my and claim that the 2 
experiences (of the original traumatic experience and the simulation) are 
separate and unique.  But ... well... sophistry and all. 8^)

On 10/24/18 3:21 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:
> So:  What is it exactly for an experience to "pass as reality". 

-- 
☣ uǝlƃ


FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

Re: [FRIAM] On old question

[Nick Thompson]

Hi, Glen, 

 

Rushing now, so no time to answer properly.  Only time to taunt you. 

 

So:  What is it exactly for an experience to "pass as reality". 

 

 

Nick 

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

 

-Original Message-
From: Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of u?l? ?
Sent: Wednesday, October 24, 2018 4:06 PM
To: FriAM 
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] On old question

 

 

On 10/24/18 2:58 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:

> First of all, the a priori distinction between the real and the modeling 
> world is indefensible.

 

As a person who *simulates* the real world for money, that's just plain 
offensive! 8^)  Were I to go into, say, NASA or somewhere and claim that my 
simulations are *indistinguishable* from the real world, I'd be unable to make 
a living.  So, the distinction is not only defensible, but necessary.  In fact, 
I'd argue the opposite.  It's parsimonious to *assume* the distinction and the 
burden of proof is on the simulant to show that a simulacrum is similar enough 
to pass as reality.

 

--

☣ uǝlƃ

 



FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv

Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe  
<http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com> 
http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

FRIAM-COMIC  <http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/> 
http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove


FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

Re: [FRIAM] On old question

[uǝlƃ ☣]

On 10/24/18 2:58 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:
> First of all, the a priori distinction between the real and the modeling 
> world is indefensible.

As a person who *simulates* the real world for money, that's just plain 
offensive! 8^)  Were I to go into, say, NASA or somewhere and claim that my 
simulations are *indistinguishable* from the real world, I'd be unable to make 
a living.  So, the distinction is not only defensible, but necessary.  In fact, 
I'd argue the opposite.  It's parsimonious to *assume* the distinction and the 
burden of proof is on the simulant to show that a simulacrum is similar enough 
to pass as reality.

-- 
☣ uǝlƃ


FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

Re: [FRIAM] On old question

[Nick Thompson]

Yeah, Steve.  Right.  I just got stuck on that very diagram.  Wrong, but in 
fascinating ways.  First of all, the a priori distinction between the real and 
the modeling world is indefensible.  If we are honest without selves, we are 
experience monists.  All we have is our experience, and every experience is a 
model.  So every experience is a model of another model.  Furthermore, since 
experience is variable – there’s your experience, and my experience, and 
yesterday’s experience and tomorrow’s experience, etc., blah, blah – universal 
experience is something that we as scientists aspire to but can never quite 
achieve, any more than the rabbit can catch the tortoise.  Yet, it is the only 
reality we have!  

 

So, I prefer to think of models as metaphors.  Gone is the distinction between 
models and reality (what do we know reality, for crissake!) to be replaced by 
experiences and other, more familiar experiences that serve as models.  We can 
talk about formal and informal metaphors and mathematics is an EXTREMELY 
formalized metaphor, I grant you.  But it is still a metaphor, a distillation 
of experience.  

 

But I am getting ahead of myself here.  Let’s see where the A. goes with this. 

 

Nick 

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

 <http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/> 
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of Steven A Smith
Sent: Wednesday, October 24, 2018 2:39 PM
To: friam@redfish.com
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] On old question

 

And BTW, the section in the paper linked on the topic of "the Modeling Relation"

1.1.3 The modeling relation: how we perceive 

The modeling relation is based on the universally accepted belief that the 
world has some sort of order associated with it; it is not a hodge-podge of 
seemingly random happenings. It depicts the elements of assigning 
interpretations to events in the world . The best treatment of the modeling 
relation appears in the book Anticipatory Systems (Rosen, 1985, pp 45-220). 
Rosen introduces the modeling relation to focus thinking on the process we 
carry out when we "do science". In its most detailed form, it is a mathematical 
object, but it will be presented in a less formal way here. It should be noted 
that the mathematics involved is among the most sophisticated available to us. 
In its purest form, it is called "category theory" [Rosen, 1978, 1985, 1991]. 
Category theory is a stratified or hierarchical structure without limit, which 
makes it suitable for modeling the process of modeling itself. 

  <http://www.people.vcu.edu/%7Emikuleck/mr.gif> 

reminded me of the work by our own (for a while at least) Vadas Gintautas vi 
LANL on what he (and Hubler) referred to as "interreality":

 <https://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0611293> 
Mixed Reality States in a Bidirectionally Coupled Interreality System


?




On 10/24/18 2:29 PM, Steven A Smith wrote:

Glen/Nick/Marcus/Dave/et alia -

For reasons I can't begin to enumerate here, I have been unable to keep up with 
this list beyond reading/skimming every day or three and each time I formulate 
a response or contribution to a thread, it sits for another cycle (1-3 days) 
and feels stale or misbegotten before I get it sent.   This one may fall to the 
same fate... if you are reading this, then I suppose it did not.

I have always struggled to understand the multiple/myriad understandings of 
Rosen's work and it's importance among this group...   and this time I feel 
like I'm doing a *little* better.   I've always been fascinated by all variants 
on the question "what is life?" (or replace "life" with: "consciousness", 
"complex systems", "nature", "reality", etc.) and the structure/function (or 
entropy/anentropy if you prefer) duality.   

This paper:  

Robert Rosen: The Well Posed Question and it's Answer - Why are Organisms 
Different from Machines <http://www.people.vcu.edu/%7Emikuleck/PPRISS3.html> 

http://www.people.vcu.edu/~mikuleck/PPRISS3.html 
<http://www.people.vcu.edu/%7Emikuleck/PPRISS3.html> 

seems to have helped me track some of the things youse guys rattle on about 
when referencing Rosen...  I'd be at least interested in a few opinions about 
how well this guy (or just this paper) reflects your own understanding of 
Rosen's work and it's relevance to "Life Itself" ?

 

- Steve

 

On 10/24/18 8:49 AM, ∄ uǝʃƃ wrote:

My comment may be addressed a bit by the 2nd paper Roger posted (DGI).  But my 
1st reaction to your comment was an attempt to reconstruct what Rosen *might* 
have intended re: function and organization.  I'm running with my gestalt 
memory, but I'll challenge it against his text later.  A relational conception 
of function and organization would necessarily be temporal and si

Re: [FRIAM] On old question

[uǝlƃ ☣]

Oh!  And I forgot to mention my other favorite *vein* of possible counter 
examples: Hewitt's "Inconsistency Robustness".  I particularly like John Woods' 
contribution to attempts to formalize abduction.

On 10/24/18 2:49 PM, uǝlƃ ☣ wrote:
> My opinion is probably the least credible.  But here it is anyway.  Rosen's 
> achievement was just like every other theoretician's achievement.  He 
> formulated hypotheses that *may* be testable.  The Mikulecky paper Steve 
> posted states one of them fairly well:
> 
> Mikulecky wrote:
>> The functional component itself is totally dependent on the context of the 
>> whole system and has no meaning outside that context. This is why reducing 
>> the system to its material parts loses information irreversibly. This is a 
>> cornerstone to the overall discovery Rosen made. It captures a real 
>> difference between complexity and reductionism which no other approach seems 
>> to have been able to formulate. This distinction makes it impossible to 
>> confuse computer models with complex systems.
> 
> Rosen's formulation of the hypothesis has led to a number of attempts to find 
> a counter example.  And those attempts have been much criticized.  Whatever 
> one's conclusion about those attempts, the hypothesis is clear *enough* to 
> allow those attempts to be in good faith. (E.g. Chu and Ho "A Category 
> Theoretical Argument against the Possibility of Artificial Life".)
> 
> Rosen's is yet another way to formulate (and perhaps formalize, if you 
> believe Louie's work) the strong AI question.  E.g. can human mathematicians 
> do math in ways computers cannot?  Personally, my favorite attempt at a 
> counter example is Feferman's "schematic axiomatic formal systems".  But the 
> same basic hypothesis has resulted in some fun things like Penrose's 
> objective reduction and Homotopy Type Theory's unification theorem.  Does 
> Rosen's formulation do any more work than the others?  Probably not.  But if 
> it's true that science doesn't produce answers, only more questions, then 
> Rosen's work qualifies because it's produced some interesting questions (or 
> ways to ask the same question).  Whether that body of questions is 
> interesting to any particular person is a matter of their taste and history.
> 
> 
> On 10/24/18 2:01 PM, John Kennison wrote:
>> I guess I have missed much of the conversation on this issue. Maybe my 
>> comments are way too late, but I would appreciate it if someone with a more 
>> positive view of Rosen would try to explain what it is that Rosen achieved.
> 
> 

-- 
☣ uǝlƃ


FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

Re: [FRIAM] On old question

[uǝlƃ ☣]

My opinion is probably the least credible.  But here it is anyway.  Rosen's 
achievement was just like every other theoretician's achievement.  He 
formulated hypotheses that *may* be testable.  The Mikulecky paper Steve posted 
states one of them fairly well:

Mikulecky wrote:
> The functional component itself is totally dependent on the context of the 
> whole system and has no meaning outside that context. This is why reducing 
> the system to its material parts loses information irreversibly. This is a 
> cornerstone to the overall discovery Rosen made. It captures a real 
> difference between complexity and reductionism which no other approach seems 
> to have been able to formulate. This distinction makes it impossible to 
> confuse computer models with complex systems.

Rosen's formulation of the hypothesis has led to a number of attempts to find a 
counter example.  And those attempts have been much criticized.  Whatever one's 
conclusion about those attempts, the hypothesis is clear *enough* to allow 
those attempts to be in good faith. (E.g. Chu and Ho "A Category Theoretical 
Argument against the Possibility of Artificial Life".)

Rosen's is yet another way to formulate (and perhaps formalize, if you believe 
Louie's work) the strong AI question.  E.g. can human mathematicians do math in 
ways computers cannot?  Personally, my favorite attempt at a counter example is 
Feferman's "schematic axiomatic formal systems".  But the same basic hypothesis 
has resulted in some fun things like Penrose's objective reduction and Homotopy 
Type Theory's unification theorem.  Does Rosen's formulation do any more work 
than the others?  Probably not.  But if it's true that science doesn't produce 
answers, only more questions, then Rosen's work qualifies because it's produced 
some interesting questions (or ways to ask the same question).  Whether that 
body of questions is interesting to any particular person is a matter of their 
taste and history.


On 10/24/18 2:01 PM, John Kennison wrote:
> I guess I have missed much of the conversation on this issue. Maybe my 
> comments are way too late, but I would appreciate it if someone with a more 
> positive view of Rosen would try to explain what it is that Rosen achieved.


-- 
☣ uǝlƃ


FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

Re: [FRIAM] On old question

[Nick Thompson]

NO, NO, John.  You are not too late.  You were in at the beginning on this one. 
You remember all that palaver about modeling emergence in the 90’s?  You were 
there. 

 

On your second point, that I have made no progress, I am afraid I have to 
agree.  But that does not keep me from trying.  

 

I recommend the article that Steve Smith sent us.  

 

http://www.people.vcu.edu/~mikuleck/PPRISS3.html

 

Here is a sample paragraph to whet the collective appetite. 

The machine which becomes a prototype of this general description is the 
Universal Turing Machine. Thus all of computer simulation, Artificial Life and 
Artificial Intelligence are part of this world. The fact that these are not 
part of the world of complex systems is directly contradictory to the claims 
being made by most that have espoused the "new science" of complexity. Church's 
Thesis says that all effective systems are computable. Rosen's work says that 
church's thesis is false. There is no middle ground here. The difference is one 
of profound epistemological significance. There is still another distinction 
that must wait until the subject of causality and entailment is discussed. For 
it is in that discussion that the most profound epistemological change will be 
realized. Before delving into that matter we will compare complex systems to 
machines.

Consider your appetite whetted. 

 

Nick 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

 <http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/> 
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of John Kennison
Sent: Wednesday, October 24, 2018 3:02 PM
To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group' 
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] On old question

 

I remember reading, or trying to read, Rosen's "Life Itself". For a long time 
it seemed like Rosen was onto something very important and exciting but, to my 
mind, he never even came close to delivering. The conclusion of "Life Itself" 
was, for me, a complete disappointment.  

 

The material presented here seems similar. I can feel the same kind of 
excitement, but I wonder if any real progress will be made on the issues that 
are raised. 

 

I guess I have missed much of the conversation on this issue. Maybe my comments 
are way too late, but I would appreciate it if someone with a more positive 
view of Rosen would try to explain what it is that Rosen achieved.  

 

--John

 

 

  _  

From: Friam  on behalf of Nick Thompson 
mailto:nickthomp...@earthlink.net> >
Sent: Wednesday, October 24, 2018 4:42:18 PM
To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group'
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] On old question 

 

Thanks, everybody, for your responses.  

 

Most of them are way above my pay-grade, but watching you all work together is 
inspiring, and I always, ALWAYS, get a rich harvest of crumbs off your table.  
Back in old days, I did a brief visitorship at the Philadelphia Child Guidance 
Clinic, toying with the idea of giving up ethology to be a family therapist.  
They quickly sent me back home to academia, insisting that I would more good 
for group therapy theory by pushing on as an ethologist.  I took that as a 
compliment, at the time.  (}8-0]

 

A few years later, a clinical graduate student came to me and asked me to help 
her think about the problem of “function” in the family therapy literature.  At 
the time, Salvador Munichin, Jay Haley, and others were toying with the idea of 
the Indicated Patient.  The notion was that every troubled family designates 
one of its individuals to be the patient, and unites in support of that 
person’s illness.  Because the family has a stake in the illness, the illness 
cannot be cured without the whole family present.  

 

This entailed the notion that the patient’s illness FUNCTIONED to hold the 
family together.  The patient, and his/her illness were like an organ of the 
body, or like a soldier ant in a colony, etc.  The patients served their 
families and their families directed or regulated their service.  I thought it 
was a fascinating theoretical problem, but the Department stopped hiring family 
systems people, and that was the end of that.   Another lesson noted. 

 

So here it is.  The problem of defining the system and what

it means for a system as a whole to cause changes in one of its components.  I 
sent the graduate student off to find a simple, straightforward biological 
model, and she never came back and was rumored to have had a nervous breakdown 
and left graduate school.  

 

Let that be a lesson to you.  

 

Here is another example to chew on.  It is often said that young male baboons 
serve as the patrols of a baboon troop, a kind of trip wire over which 
attacking predators have to pass in order to attack the troop.  The mechanistic 
explanation is that a young maturing male baboon is seen as a thre

Re: [FRIAM] On old question

[John Kennison]

I remember reading, or trying to read, Rosen's "Life Itself". For a long time 
it seemed like Rosen was onto something very important and exciting but, to my 
mind, he never even came close to delivering. The conclusion of "Life Itself" 
was, for me, a complete disappointment.


The material presented here seems similar. I can feel the same kind of 
excitement, but I wonder if any real progress will be made on the issues that 
are raised.


I guess I have missed much of the conversation on this issue. Maybe my comments 
are way too late, but I would appreciate it if someone with a more positive 
view of Rosen would try to explain what it is that Rosen achieved.


--John




From: Friam  on behalf of Nick Thompson 

Sent: Wednesday, October 24, 2018 4:42:18 PM
To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group'
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] On old question


Thanks, everybody, for your responses.



Most of them are way above my pay-grade, but watching you all work together is 
inspiring, and I always, ALWAYS, get a rich harvest of crumbs off your table.  
Back in old days, I did a brief visitorship at the Philadelphia Child Guidance 
Clinic, toying with the idea of giving up ethology to be a family therapist.  
They quickly sent me back home to academia, insisting that I would more good 
for group therapy theory by pushing on as an ethologist.  I took that as a 
compliment, at the time.  (}8-0]



A few years later, a clinical graduate student came to me and asked me to help 
her think about the problem of “function” in the family therapy literature.  At 
the time, Salvador Munichin, Jay Haley, and others were toying with the idea of 
the Indicated Patient.  The notion was that every troubled family designates 
one of its individuals to be the patient, and unites in support of that 
person’s illness.  Because the family has a stake in the illness, the illness 
cannot be cured without the whole family present.



This entailed the notion that the patient’s illness FUNCTIONED to hold the 
family together.  The patient, and his/her illness were like an organ of the 
body, or like a soldier ant in a colony, etc.  The patients served their 
families and their families directed or regulated their service.  I thought it 
was a fascinating theoretical problem, but the Department stopped hiring family 
systems people, and that was the end of that.   Another lesson noted.



So here it is.  The problem of defining the system and what

it means for a system as a whole to cause changes in one of its components.  I 
sent the graduate student off to find a simple, straightforward biological 
model, and she never came back and was rumored to have had a nervous breakdown 
and left graduate school.



Let that be a lesson to you.



Here is another example to chew on.  It is often said that young male baboons 
serve as the patrols of a baboon troop, a kind of trip wire over which 
attacking predators have to pass in order to attack the troop.  The mechanistic 
explanation is that a young maturing male baboon is seen as a threat to the 
dominant males and is kept away from the females (at the center of the troop) 
by his betters.  He is certainly not a trip wire by choice; but is he so by 
design?   Presumably his “trip-wire-ness” is a spandrel.  So, in what sense is 
he functioning for anything?



Nick





Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/





-Original Message-
From: Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of Prof David West
Sent: Wednesday, October 24, 2018 12:16 PM
To: friam@redfish.com
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] On old question



Glen, I was trying very hard to be metaphorical and general and avoid 
addressing details, like the one you raise, that would require pages to discuss 
properly. But,  I would definitely and immediately concede that Rosen, in 
particular, recognizes and deals with, sometimes more cleverly than others, 
with the kind of qualitative differences I mention. But, even there, I would 
suggest that the foundations of his work are still primarily derived from 
"Entropic Sciences" and their concepts and formulations.



davew





On Wed, Oct 24, 2018, at 11:07 AM, uǝlƃ ☣ wrote:

> So ... Rosen's openness to material flow, closure to operational flow,

> allows *both* endo- and exothermic sub-systems.  But his (M,R)-systems

> focus on maintaining organization using energy-material harvested from

> the gradient, ignoring sub-systems that produce energy-material?

>

> On 10/24/18 9:20 AM, Prof David West wrote:

> > I am pretty sure that the questions you pose, and the ideas of

> > people like Rosen, arise from a failure to recognize the qualitative

> > difference among structures and therefore miss the essence of 
> > "organization."

> > This, in turn is lar

Re: [FRIAM] On old question

[Nick Thompson]

Thanks, everybody, for your responses.  

 

Most of them are way above my pay-grade, but watching you all work together is 
inspiring, and I always, ALWAYS, get a rich harvest of crumbs off your table.  
Back in old days, I did a brief visitorship at the Philadelphia Child Guidance 
Clinic, toying with the idea of giving up ethology to be a family therapist.  
They quickly sent me back home to academia, insisting that I would more good 
for group therapy theory by pushing on as an ethologist.  I took that as a 
compliment, at the time.  (}8-0]

 

A few years later, a clinical graduate student came to me and asked me to help 
her think about the problem of “function” in the family therapy literature.  At 
the time, Salvador Munichin, Jay Haley, and others were toying with the idea of 
the Indicated Patient.  The notion was that every troubled family designates 
one of its individuals to be the patient, and unites in support of that 
person’s illness.  Because the family has a stake in the illness, the illness 
cannot be cured without the whole family present.  

 

This entailed the notion that the patient’s illness FUNCTIONED to hold the 
family together.  The patient, and his/her illness were like an organ of the 
body, or like a soldier ant in a colony, etc.  The patients served their 
families and their families directed or regulated their service.  I thought it 
was a fascinating theoretical problem, but the Department stopped hiring family 
systems people, and that was the end of that.   Another lesson noted. 

 

So here it is.  The problem of defining the system and what

it means for a system as a whole to cause changes in one of its components.  I 
sent the graduate student off to find a simple, straightforward biological 
model, and she never came back and was rumored to have had a nervous breakdown 
and left graduate school.  

 

Let that be a lesson to you.  

 

Here is another example to chew on.  It is often said that young male baboons 
serve as the patrols of a baboon troop, a kind of trip wire over which 
attacking predators have to pass in order to attack the troop.  The mechanistic 
explanation is that a young maturing male baboon is seen as a threat to the 
dominant males and is kept away from the females (at the center of the troop) 
by his betters.  He is certainly not a trip wire by choice; but is he so by 
design?   Presumably his “trip-wire-ness” is a spandrel.  So, in what sense is 
he functioning for anything?

 

Nick 

 

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

 

-Original Message-
From: Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of Prof David West
Sent: Wednesday, October 24, 2018 12:16 PM
To: friam@redfish.com
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] On old question

 

Glen, I was trying very hard to be metaphorical and general and avoid 
addressing details, like the one you raise, that would require pages to discuss 
properly. But,  I would definitely and immediately concede that Rosen, in 
particular, recognizes and deals with, sometimes more cleverly than others, 
with the kind of qualitative differences I mention. But, even there, I would 
suggest that the foundations of his work are still primarily derived from 
"Entropic Sciences" and their concepts and formulations.

 

davew

 

 

On Wed, Oct 24, 2018, at 11:07 AM, uǝlƃ ☣ wrote:

> So ... Rosen's openness to material flow, closure to operational flow, 

> allows *both* endo- and exothermic sub-systems.  But his (M,R)-systems 

> focus on maintaining organization using energy-material harvested from 

> the gradient, ignoring sub-systems that produce energy-material?

> 

> On 10/24/18 9:20 AM, Prof David West wrote:

> > I am pretty sure that the questions you pose, and the ideas of 

> > people like Rosen, arise from a failure to recognize the qualitative 

> > difference among structures and therefore miss the essence of 
> > "organization."

> > This, in turn is largely attributable to the fact that we enjoy a 

> > highly developed "science" of Entropy and Entropic Structuralism 

> > (Physics, Chemistry, Astronomy, etc.) but almost no equivalent 

> > science of Anentropy. Recombinant DNA and CRISPR are at the level  

> > of alchemy in this regard. Sociology, Anthropology, Psychology, 

> > Ecology, etc. are, at best, aspiring to alchemy.

> > pretentiously yours,

> 

> 

> --

> ☣ uǝlƃ

> 

> 

> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe 

> at St. John's College to unsubscribe 

>  <http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com> 
> http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

> FRIAM-COMIC  <http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/> 
> ht

Re: [FRIAM] On old question

[Steven A Smith]

And BTW, the section in the paper linked on the topic of "the Modeling
Relation"

//

/1.1.3 The modeling relation: how we perceive /

//

The modeling relation is based on the universally accepted belief that
the world has some sort of order associated with it; it is not a
hodge-podge of seemingly random happenings. It depicts the elements of
assigning interpretations to events in the world . The best treatment of
the modeling relation appears in the book /Anticipatory Systems /(Rosen,
1985, pp 45-220). Rosen introduces the modeling relation to focus
thinking on the process we carry out when we "do science". In its most
detailed form, it is a mathematical object, but it will be presented in
a less formal way here. It should be noted that the mathematics involved
is among the most sophisticated available to us. In its purest form, it
is called "category theory" [Rosen, 1978, 1985, 1991]. Category theory
is a stratified or hierarchical structure without limit, which makes it
suitable for modeling the process of modeling itself.

mr.gif (4013 bytes)

reminded me of the work by our own (for a while at least) Vadas
Gintautas vi LANL on what he (and Hubler) referred to as "interreality":


Mixed Reality States in a Bidirectionally Coupled Interreality
System 


?



On 10/24/18 2:29 PM, Steven A Smith wrote:
>
> Glen/Nick/Marcus/Dave/et alia -
>
> For reasons I can't begin to enumerate here, I have been unable to
> keep up with this list beyond reading/skimming every day or three and
> each time I formulate a response or contribution to a thread, it sits
> for another cycle (1-3 days) and feels stale or misbegotten before I
> get it sent.   This one may fall to the same fate... if you are
> reading this, then I suppose it did not.
>
> I have always struggled to understand the multiple/myriad
> understandings of Rosen's work and it's importance among this
> group...   and this time I feel like I'm doing a *little* better.  
> I've always been fascinated by all variants on the question "what is
> life?" (or replace "life" with: "consciousness", "complex systems",
> "nature", "reality", etc.) and the structure/function (or
> entropy/anentropy if you prefer) duality.  
>
> This paper: 
>
> Robert Rosen: The Well Posed Question and it's Answer - Why are
> Organisms Different from Machines
> 
>
> http://www.people.vcu.edu/~mikuleck/PPRISS3.html
>
> seems to have helped me track some of the things youse guys rattle on
> about when referencing Rosen...  I'd be at least interested in a few
> opinions about how well this guy (or just this paper) reflects your
> own understanding of Rosen's work and it's relevance to "Life Itself" ?
>
>
> - Steve
>
>
> On 10/24/18 8:49 AM, ∄ uǝʃƃ wrote:
>> My comment may be addressed a bit by the 2nd paper Roger posted (DGI).  But 
>> my 1st reaction to your comment was an attempt to reconstruct what Rosen 
>> *might* have intended re: function and organization.  I'm running with my 
>> gestalt memory, but I'll challenge it against his text later.  A relational 
>> conception of function and organization would necessarily be temporal and 
>> situational.  So, the function of any one component would depend 
>> fundamentally on how the components were related in that *specific* context 
>> (either a good colloidal mix or segregated).  And such definitions would not 
>> be (arbitrarily) dependent on how the system is observed (as long as the 
>> system is robust to any manipulation involved in the observation).  E.g. the 
>> role/function of a vortex in a sink drain isn't "to drain fast", perhaps 
>> it's to equalize pressure. And it may not even be that.  These 
>> purposes/roles/functions are examples of preemptive registration ... imputed 
>> by the observer.
>>
>> The (M,R)-system model is (I think) an attempt to describe organization such 
>> that it is robust to changes in both material components (N different things 
>> playing the same function/role) and situational context (persistence over 
>> time and robust to "damage").  If I'm right, then Rosen's conception of 
>> organization wouldn't credit salad dressing to be more or less organized in 
>> either the settled or shaken state.
>>
>> To boot, his ideas around closure imply that components would be defined in 
>> a particular way.  For example, your idea of "draining the water out" treats 
>> the water layer as a component, rather than treating each H2O molecule as a 
>> component.  Obviously, the ontological status of the "water layer" is 
>> fragile, whereas that of the molecules is robust.  Your idea of hierarchy 
>> should play well, here.  Except that a *strict* hierarchy disallows 
>> heterogeneous operands. If a closure happens to rely on components that are 
>> also closures, then the you'd expect the functions/roles of those components 
>> to have inputs/outputs that are mixed, some of the functions 

Re: [FRIAM] On old question

[Steven A Smith]

Glen/Nick/Marcus/Dave/et alia -

For reasons I can't begin to enumerate here, I have been unable to keep
up with this list beyond reading/skimming every day or three and each
time I formulate a response or contribution to a thread, it sits for
another cycle (1-3 days) and feels stale or misbegotten before I get it
sent.   This one may fall to the same fate... if you are reading this,
then I suppose it did not.

I have always struggled to understand the multiple/myriad understandings
of Rosen's work and it's importance among this group...   and this time
I feel like I'm doing a *little* better.   I've always been fascinated
by all variants on the question "what is life?" (or replace "life" with:
"consciousness", "complex systems", "nature", "reality", etc.) and the
structure/function (or entropy/anentropy if you prefer) duality.  

This paper: 

Robert Rosen: The Well Posed Question and it's Answer - Why are
Organisms Different from Machines


http://www.people.vcu.edu/~mikuleck/PPRISS3.html

seems to have helped me track some of the things youse guys rattle on
about when referencing Rosen...  I'd be at least interested in a few
opinions about how well this guy (or just this paper) reflects your own
understanding of Rosen's work and it's relevance to "Life Itself" ?


- Steve


On 10/24/18 8:49 AM, ∄ uǝʃƃ wrote:
> My comment may be addressed a bit by the 2nd paper Roger posted (DGI).  But 
> my 1st reaction to your comment was an attempt to reconstruct what Rosen 
> *might* have intended re: function and organization.  I'm running with my 
> gestalt memory, but I'll challenge it against his text later.  A relational 
> conception of function and organization would necessarily be temporal and 
> situational.  So, the function of any one component would depend 
> fundamentally on how the components were related in that *specific* context 
> (either a good colloidal mix or segregated).  And such definitions would not 
> be (arbitrarily) dependent on how the system is observed (as long as the 
> system is robust to any manipulation involved in the observation).  E.g. the 
> role/function of a vortex in a sink drain isn't "to drain fast", perhaps it's 
> to equalize pressure. And it may not even be that.  These 
> purposes/roles/functions are examples of preemptive registration ... imputed 
> by the observer.
>
> The (M,R)-system model is (I think) an attempt to describe organization such 
> that it is robust to changes in both material components (N different things 
> playing the same function/role) and situational context (persistence over 
> time and robust to "damage").  If I'm right, then Rosen's conception of 
> organization wouldn't credit salad dressing to be more or less organized in 
> either the settled or shaken state.
>
> To boot, his ideas around closure imply that components would be defined in a 
> particular way.  For example, your idea of "draining the water out" treats 
> the water layer as a component, rather than treating each H2O molecule as a 
> component.  Obviously, the ontological status of the "water layer" is 
> fragile, whereas that of the molecules is robust.  Your idea of hierarchy 
> should play well, here.  Except that a *strict* hierarchy disallows 
> heterogeneous operands. If a closure happens to rely on components that are 
> also closures, then the you'd expect the functions/roles of those components 
> to have inputs/outputs that are mixed, some of the functions operate over 
> simple materials (like molecules) and others operate over closures.  And some 
> functions would operate over a mix of simple components and whole closures.  
> A strict hierarchy would only allow, for example, a 2nd order function to 
> operate over 1st order components.  I've only skimmed the DGI paper.  But it 
> seems like the patches were defined homogeneously (e.g. 2 hop subgraphs), 
> rather than allowing any sub-graph to be of arbitrary topology.
>
>
>
> On 10/23/18 11:21 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:
>> Dear Roger, and anybody else who wants to play,
>>
>>  
>>
>> While waiting for my paper, /Signs and Designs/, to be rejected, I have gone 
>> back to thinking about an old project, whose working title has been “/A Sign 
>> Language/.”  And this has led me back to Robert Rosen, whose /Life Itself/ I 
>> bought almost 9 years ago and it has remained almost pristine, ever since.  
>> In the chapter I am now looking at, Rosen is talking about “organization.”  
>> Now, I have been thinking about organization ever since I read C. Ray 
>> Carpenter’s early work on primate groups back in the late 50’s.  It seemed 
>> to me at the time, and it seems to me reasonable now, to define the 
>> organization of a set of entities as related in some way to the degree to 
>> which one can predict the behavior of one entity from knowledge about 
>> another.  Now the relationship is not straightforward, because neither total 
>> unpredictability 

Re: [FRIAM] On old question

[Nick Thompson]

Thanks, Marcus, 

 

I ordered the book.  Time I revived old memory traces.  

 

Nick 

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

 <http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/> 
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of Marcus Daniels
Sent: Wednesday, October 24, 2018 12:56 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group ; 
Roger Critchlow 
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] On old question

 

Nick,

 

It sounds like you are describing mutual information.  This is ancient, but a 
nice overview of related topics:

 

https://www.amazon.com/Information-Theory-Qualitative-Quantitative-Applications/dp/0803921322

 

Marcus

 

From: Friam mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com> > on 
behalf of Nick Thompson mailto:nickthomp...@earthlink.net> >
Reply-To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group mailto:Friam@redfish.com> >
Date: Wednesday, October 24, 2018 at 12:22 AM
To: Roger Critchlow mailto:r...@elf.org> >, Friam 
mailto:Friam@redfish.com> >
Subject: [FRIAM] On old question

 

Dear Roger, and anybody else who wants to play, 

 

While waiting for my paper, Signs and Designs, to be rejected, I have gone back 
to thinking about an old project, whose working title has been “A Sign 
Language.”  And this has led me back to Robert Rosen, whose Life Itself I 
bought almost 9 years ago and it has remained almost pristine, ever since.  In 
the chapter I am now looking at, Rosen is talking about “organization.”  Now, I 
have been thinking about organization ever since I read C. Ray Carpenter’s 
early work on primate groups back in the late 50’s.  It seemed to me at the 
time, and it seems to me reasonable now, to define the organization of a set of 
entities as related in some way to the degree to which one can predict the 
behavior of one entity from knowledge about another.  Now the relationship is 
not straightforward, because neither total unpredictability (every monkey 
behaves exactly the same as every other monkey in every situation) nor total 
unpredictability (no monkey behaves like any other monkey in ANY situation) 
smacks of great organization.  The highest levels organization, speaking 
inexpertly and intuitively, seem to correspond to intermediate levels of 
predictability, where there were several classes of individuals within a group 
and within class predictability was strong but cross-class predictability was 
weak.  On my account, the highest levels of organization involve hierarchies of 
predictability.  Thus honey bees and ants are more organized than starling 
flocks, say.  

 

This is where the matter stood at the point that I came to Santa Fe and started 
interacting with you guys 14 years ago.  You-all introduced me to a totally 
different notion of organization based – shudder – on the second law.  But I 
have never been able to deploy your concept with any assurance.  So, for 
instance, when I shake the salad dressing, I feel like I am disorganizing it, 
and when it reasserts itself into layers, I feel like it ought to be called 
more organized.  But I have a feeling that you are going to tell me that the 
reverse is true.  That, given the molecules of fat and water/acid, that the 
layered state is the less organized state.  

 

Now this confusion of mine takes on importance when I try to read Rosen.  He 
defines a function as the difference that occurs when one removes a component 
of a system.  I can see no reason why the oil or the water in my salad dressing 
cannot be thought of components of a system and if, for instance, I were to 
siphon out the water from the bottom of my layered salad dressing, I could 
claim that the function of the water had been to hold the water up.  This seems 
a rather lame notion of function.  

 

Some of you who have been on this list forever will remember that I raised the 
same kind of worry almost a decade back when I noticed the drainage of water 
from a basin was actually slowed by the formation of a vortex.  This seemed to 
dispel any notion that vortices are structures whose function is to efficiently 
dispel a gradient.  It also violated my intuition from traffic flows, where I 
imagine that rigid rules of priority would facilitate the flow of people 
crossing bridges to escape Zozobra.  

 

It’s quite possible that my confusions in this matter are of no great general 
applicability, in which case, I look forward to being ignored.  

 

Nick 

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 


FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

Re: [FRIAM] On old question

[Prof David West]

Glen, I was trying very hard to be metaphorical and general and avoid 
addressing details, like the one you raise, that would require pages to discuss 
properly. But,  I would definitely and immediately concede that Rosen, in 
particular, recognizes and deals with, sometimes more cleverly than others, 
with the kind of qualitative differences I mention. But, even there, I would 
suggest that the foundations of his work are still primarily derived from 
"Entropic Sciences" and their concepts and formulations.

davew


On Wed, Oct 24, 2018, at 11:07 AM, uǝlƃ ☣ wrote:
> So ... Rosen's openness to material flow, closure to operational flow, 
> allows *both* endo- and exothermic sub-systems.  But his (M,R)-systems 
> focus on maintaining organization using energy-material harvested from 
> the gradient, ignoring sub-systems that produce energy-material?
> 
> On 10/24/18 9:20 AM, Prof David West wrote:
> > I am pretty sure that the questions you pose, and the ideas of people
> > like Rosen, arise from a failure to recognize the qualitative difference
> > among structures and therefore miss the essence of "organization."
> > This, in turn is largely attributable to the fact that we enjoy a highly
> > developed "science" of Entropy and Entropic Structuralism (Physics,
> > Chemistry, Astronomy, etc.) but almost no equivalent science of
> > Anentropy. Recombinant DNA and CRISPR are at the level  of alchemy in
> > this regard. Sociology, Anthropology, Psychology, Ecology, etc. are, at
> > best, aspiring to alchemy.
> > pretentiously yours,
> 
> 
> -- 
> ☣ uǝlƃ
> 
> 
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove


FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

Re: [FRIAM] On old question

[Nick Thompson]

Thanks, David.  Great to hear from you.  Where ARE you?  Are you every coming 
home?  

 

Nick

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

 <http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/> 
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

From: Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of Prof David West
Sent: Wednesday, October 24, 2018 10:20 AM
To: friam@redfish.com
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] On old question

 

Nick,

 

   If your 'psychological' monism extends to a metaphysical monism, please 
don't hyperventilate when I suggest a fundamental dualism — Entropy and 
Anentropy. I am suggesting a kind of Leibniz-ian model, "from zero (chaos) and 
one (God) comes everything. Substituting the non-personified 'Anentropy' for 
'God'.

 

   The phenomenological universe came into existence at the moment, impossibly, 
 some dimensionless point, the Singularity, contained both Entropy and 
Anentropy - the Original Distinction (with intentional allusion to 'original 
sin'). The Bib Bang diffused Entropy and Anentropy throughout the 
phenomenological Universe and the differentiation between the two is 
responsible for the observed "structure" (stars, dark matter, galaxies, etc, 
etc.) of that Universe.

 

   As "forces" both Entropy and Entropy operate to create, destroy, modify 
"structure:" stars from dust clouds, galaxies from starts, molecules from 
atoms, proteins, from molecules, etc. The actions (reactions?) 'utilized' by 
Entropy/Anentropy can be exothermic or endothermic — the latter requiring an 
energy gradient.

 

Up to a certain level, the 'dynamic structuralism' of Entropy/Anentropy are 
observably similar if not the same. When the energy gradient is sufficiently 
steep and endothermic reactions  come to dominate in the generation of new 
structures; a qualitative difference between/among structures 'emerges'. 
Pretend that the basis of this qualitative difference is a kind of dynamic 
meta-level structuralism. In software we would call this type of thing 
"reflection" and/or a "meta-object protocol.

 

"Organization" would be the consequence of structure plus meta-structure.

 

I am pretty sure that the questions you pose, and the ideas of people like 
Rosen, arise from a failure to recognize the qualitative difference among 
structures and therefore miss the essence of "organization."

 

This, in turn is largely attributable to the fact that we enjoy a highly 
developed "science" of Entropy and Entropic Structuralism (Physics, Chemistry, 
Astronomy, etc.) but almost no equivalent science of Anentropy. Recombinant DNA 
and CRISPR are at the level  of alchemy in this regard. Sociology, 
Anthropology, Psychology, Ecology, etc. are, at best, aspiring to alchemy.

 

pretentiously yours,

 dave west

 

 

On Wed, Oct 24, 2018, at 12:21 AM, Nick Thompson wrote:

Dear Roger, and anybody else who wants to play,

 

While waiting for my paper, Signs and Designs, to be rejected, I have gone back 
to thinking about an old project, whose working title has been “A Sign 
Language.”  And this has led me back to Robert Rosen, whose Life Itself I 
bought almost 9 years ago and it has remained almost pristine, ever since.  In 
the chapter I am now looking at, Rosen is talking about “organization.”  Now, I 
have been thinking about organization ever since I read C. Ray Carpenter’s 
early work on primate groups back in the late 50’s.  It seemed to me at the 
time, and it seems to me reasonable now, to define the organization of a set of 
entities as related in some way to the degree to which one can predict the 
behavior of one entity from knowledge about another.  Now the relationship is 
not straightforward, because neither total unpredictability (every monkey 
behaves exactly the same as every other monkey in every situation) nor total 
unpredictability (no monkey behaves like any other monkey in ANY situation) 
smacks of great organization.  The highest levels organization, speaking 
inexpertly and intuitively, seem to correspond to intermediate levels of 
predictability, where there were several classes of individuals within a group 
and within class predictability was strong but cross-class predictability was 
weak.  On my account, the highest levels of organization involve hierarchies of 
predictability.  Thus honey bees and ants are more organized than starling 
flocks, say. 

 

This is where the matter stood at the point that I came to Santa Fe and started 
interacting with you guys 14 years ago.  You-all introduced me to a totally 
different notion of organization based – shudder – on the second law.  But I 
have never been able to deploy your concept with any assurance.  So, for 
instance, when I shake the salad dressing, I feel like I am disorganizing it, 
and when it reasserts itself into layers, I feel like it ought to be called 
more or

Re: [FRIAM] On old question

[uǝlƃ ☣]

So ... Rosen's openness to material flow, closure to operational flow, allows 
*both* endo- and exothermic sub-systems.  But his (M,R)-systems focus on 
maintaining organization using energy-material harvested from the gradient, 
ignoring sub-systems that produce energy-material?

On 10/24/18 9:20 AM, Prof David West wrote:
> I am pretty sure that the questions you pose, and the ideas of people
> like Rosen, arise from a failure to recognize the qualitative difference
> among structures and therefore miss the essence of "organization."
> This, in turn is largely attributable to the fact that we enjoy a highly
> developed "science" of Entropy and Entropic Structuralism (Physics,
> Chemistry, Astronomy, etc.) but almost no equivalent science of
> Anentropy. Recombinant DNA and CRISPR are at the level  of alchemy in
> this regard. Sociology, Anthropology, Psychology, Ecology, etc. are, at
> best, aspiring to alchemy.
> pretentiously yours,


-- 
☣ uǝlƃ


FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

Re: [FRIAM] On old question

[Prof David West]

Nick,

   If your 'psychological' monism extends to a metaphysical monism,
   please don't hyperventilate when I suggest a fundamental dualism —
   Entropy and Anentropy. I am suggesting a kind of Leibniz-ian model,
   "from zero (chaos) and one (God) comes everything. Substituting the
   non-personified 'Anentropy' for 'God'.
   The phenomenological universe came into existence at the moment,
   impossibly,  some dimensionless point, the Singularity, contained
   both Entropy and Anentropy - the Original Distinction (with
   intentional allusion to 'original sin'). The Bib Bang diffused
   Entropy and Anentropy throughout the phenomenological Universe and
   the differentiation between the two is responsible for the
   observed "structure" (stars, dark matter, galaxies, etc, etc.) of
   that Universe.
   As "forces" both Entropy and Entropy operate to create, destroy,
   modify "structure:" stars from dust clouds, galaxies from starts,
   molecules from atoms, proteins, from molecules, etc. The actions
   (reactions?) 'utilized' by Entropy/Anentropy can be exothermic or
   endothermic — the latter requiring an energy gradient.
Up to a certain level, the 'dynamic structuralism' of
Entropy/Anentropy are observably similar if not the same. When the
energy gradient is sufficiently steep and endothermic reactions  come
to dominate in the generation of new structures; a qualitative
difference between/among structures 'emerges'. Pretend that the basis
of this qualitative difference is a kind of dynamic meta-level
structuralism. In software we would call this type of thing
"reflection" and/or a "meta-object protocol.
"Organization" would be the consequence of structure plus meta-
structure.
I am pretty sure that the questions you pose, and the ideas of people
like Rosen, arise from a failure to recognize the qualitative difference
among structures and therefore miss the essence of "organization."
This, in turn is largely attributable to the fact that we enjoy a highly
developed "science" of Entropy and Entropic Structuralism (Physics,
Chemistry, Astronomy, etc.) but almost no equivalent science of
Anentropy. Recombinant DNA and CRISPR are at the level  of alchemy in
this regard. Sociology, Anthropology, Psychology, Ecology, etc. are, at
best, aspiring to alchemy.
pretentiously yours,
 dave west


On Wed, Oct 24, 2018, at 12:21 AM, Nick Thompson wrote:
> Dear Roger, and anybody else who wants to play,


>  


> While waiting for my paper, *Signs and Designs*, to be rejected, I
> have gone back to thinking about an old project, whose working title
> has been “*A Sign Language*.”  And this has led me back to Robert
> Rosen, whose *Life Itself* I bought almost 9 years ago and it has
> remained almost pristine, ever since.  In the chapter I am now looking
> at, Rosen is talking about “organization.”  Now, I have been thinking
> about organization ever since I read C. Ray Carpenter’s early work on
> primate groups back in the late 50’s.  It seemed to me at the time,
> and it seems to me reasonable now, to define the organization of a set
> of entities as related in some way to the degree to which one can
> predict the behavior of one entity from knowledge about another.  Now
> the relationship is not straightforward, because neither total
> unpredictability (every monkey behaves exactly the same as every other
> monkey in every situation) nor total unpredictability (no monkey
> behaves like any other monkey in ANY situation) smacks of great
> organization.  The highest levels organization, speaking inexpertly
> and intuitively, seem to correspond to intermediate levels of
> predictability, where there were several classes of individuals within
> a group and within class predictability was strong but cross-class
> predictability was weak.  On my account, the highest levels of
> organization involve hierarchies of predictability.  Thus honey bees
> and ants are more organized than starling flocks, say.>  


> This is where the matter stood at the point that I came to Santa Fe
> and started interacting with you guys 14 years ago.  You-all
> introduced me to a totally different notion of organization based –
> shudder – on the second law.  But I have never been able to deploy
> your concept with any assurance.  So, for instance, when I shake the
> salad dressing, I feel like I am disorganizing it, and when it
> reasserts itself into layers, I feel like it ought to be called more
> organized.  But I have a feeling that you are going to tell me that
> the reverse is true.  That, given the molecules of fat and water/acid,
> that the layered state is the less organized state.>  


> Now this confusion of mine takes on importance when I try to read
> Rosen.  He defines a function as the difference that occurs when one
> removes a component of a system.  I can see no reason why the oil or
> the water in my salad dressing cannot be thought of components of a
> system and if, for instance, I were to siphon out the water from the

Re: [FRIAM] On old question

[∄ uǝʃƃ]

My comment may be addressed a bit by the 2nd paper Roger posted (DGI).  But my 
1st reaction to your comment was an attempt to reconstruct what Rosen *might* 
have intended re: function and organization.  I'm running with my gestalt 
memory, but I'll challenge it against his text later.  A relational conception 
of function and organization would necessarily be temporal and situational.  
So, the function of any one component would depend fundamentally on how the 
components were related in that *specific* context (either a good colloidal mix 
or segregated).  And such definitions would not be (arbitrarily) dependent on 
how the system is observed (as long as the system is robust to any manipulation 
involved in the observation).  E.g. the role/function of a vortex in a sink 
drain isn't "to drain fast", perhaps it's to equalize pressure. And it may not 
even be that.  These purposes/roles/functions are examples of preemptive 
registration ... imputed by the observer.

The (M,R)-system model is (I think) an attempt to describe organization such 
that it is robust to changes in both material components (N different things 
playing the same function/role) and situational context (persistence over time 
and robust to "damage").  If I'm right, then Rosen's conception of organization 
wouldn't credit salad dressing to be more or less organized in either the 
settled or shaken state.

To boot, his ideas around closure imply that components would be defined in a 
particular way.  For example, your idea of "draining the water out" treats the 
water layer as a component, rather than treating each H2O molecule as a 
component.  Obviously, the ontological status of the "water layer" is fragile, 
whereas that of the molecules is robust.  Your idea of hierarchy should play 
well, here.  Except that a *strict* hierarchy disallows heterogeneous operands. 
If a closure happens to rely on components that are also closures, then the 
you'd expect the functions/roles of those components to have inputs/outputs 
that are mixed, some of the functions operate over simple materials (like 
molecules) and others operate over closures.  And some functions would operate 
over a mix of simple components and whole closures.  A strict hierarchy would 
only allow, for example, a 2nd order function to operate over 1st order 
components.  I've only skimmed the DGI paper.  But it seems like the patches 
were defined homogeneously (e.g. 2 hop subgraphs), rather than allowing any 
sub-graph to be of arbitrary topology.



On 10/23/18 11:21 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:
> Dear Roger, and anybody else who wants to play,
> 
>  
> 
> While waiting for my paper, /Signs and Designs/, to be rejected, I have gone 
> back to thinking about an old project, whose working title has been “/A Sign 
> Language/.”  And this has led me back to Robert Rosen, whose /Life Itself/ I 
> bought almost 9 years ago and it has remained almost pristine, ever since.  
> In the chapter I am now looking at, Rosen is talking about “organization.”  
> Now, I have been thinking about organization ever since I read C. Ray 
> Carpenter’s early work on primate groups back in the late 50’s.  It seemed to 
> me at the time, and it seems to me reasonable now, to define the organization 
> of a set of entities as related in some way to the degree to which one can 
> predict the behavior of one entity from knowledge about another.  Now the 
> relationship is not straightforward, because neither total unpredictability 
> (every monkey behaves exactly the same as every other monkey in every 
> situation) nor total unpredictability (no monkey behaves like any other 
> monkey in ANY
> situation) smacks of great organization.  The highest levels organization, 
> speaking inexpertly and intuitively, seem to correspond to intermediate 
> levels of predictability, where there were several classes of individuals 
> within a group and within class predictability was strong but cross-class 
> predictability was weak.  On my account, the highest levels of organization 
> involve hierarchies of predictability.  Thus honey bees and ants are more 
> organized than starling flocks, say. 
> 
>  
> 
> This is where the matter stood at the point that I came to Santa Fe and 
> started interacting with you guys 14 years ago.  You-all introduced me to a 
> totally different notion of organization based – shudder – on the second law. 
>  But I have never been able to deploy your concept with any assurance.  So, 
> for instance, when I shake the salad dressing, I feel like I am disorganizing 
> it, and when it reasserts itself into layers, I feel like it ought to be 
> called more organized.  But I have a feeling that you are going to tell me 
> that the reverse is true.  That, given the molecules of fat and water/acid, 
> that the layered state is the less organized state. 
> 
>  
> 
> Now this confusion of mine takes on importance when I try to read Rosen.  He 
> defines a function as the difference that 

Re: [FRIAM] On old question

[Marcus Daniels]

Roger writes:

“So mutual information between the whole and the part, the shared purpose as it 
were, where the residual information of the part -- modulo the mutual 
information with the whole -- would presumably be the 'function' of the part.”

It sees incomplete.  In the case of higher-order functions, one would observe 
the caller and callee interacting, but from a design perspective, the intent is 
to keep them separable.

Anyway, cool stuff.   Soros told me Skynet will need these features, and soon!

Marcus

FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

Re: [FRIAM] On old question

[Roger Critchlow]

Mutual information turned up earlier this week in some articles about what
Google AI does next, which could be read as an attempt on organization, too.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-ponders-the-shortcomings-of-machine-learning/
this is the article that Google news pushed on me.  The shortcoming of
machine learning, in the article, is that it isn't general intelligence.
And it linked to the following papers.

First https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.01261 Relational inductive biases, deep
learning, and graph networks

> Artificial intelligence (AI) has undergone a renaissance recently, making
> major progress in key domains such as vision, language, control, and
> decision-making. This has been due, in part, to cheap data and cheap
> compute resources, which have fit the natural strengths of deep learning.
> However, many defining characteristics of human intelligence, which
> developed under much different pressures, remain out of reach for current
> approaches. In particular, generalizing beyond one's experiences--a
> hallmark of human intelligence from infancy--remains a formidable challenge
> for modern AI.

The proposed solution is to develop deep learning architectures over graph
structured data.

Then https://arxiv.org/abs/1809.10341 Deep Graph Infomax

> We present Deep Graph Infomax (DGI), a general approach for learning node
> representations within graph-structured data in an unsupervised manner. DGI
> relies on maximizing mutual information between patch representations and
> corresponding high-level summaries of graphs---both derived using
> established graph convolutional network architectures.

So mutual information between the whole and the part, the shared purpose as
it were, where the residual information of the part -- modulo the mutual
information with the whole -- would presumably be the 'function' of the
part.

What struck me most forcefully about this is that deep learning models
themselves provide a huge dataset of graph structured data, with varying
degrees of generality and success over varying datasets of experience.

The oil and water never "really mix".  The shaking mechanically breaks them
into smaller and smaller pieces which intermingle, but they are immediately
reforming into their original layers.  If you add detergent, not
recommended for salad dressing, you can get the emulsified oil to dissolve
into the water and they won't separate again.

-- rec --


On Wed, Oct 24, 2018 at 2:56 AM Marcus Daniels  wrote:

> Nick,
>
>
>
> It sounds like you are describing mutual information.  This is ancient,
> but a nice overview of related topics:
>
>
>
>
> https://www.amazon.com/Information-Theory-Qualitative-Quantitative-Applications/dp/0803921322
>
>
>
> Marcus
>
>
>
> *From: *Friam  on behalf of Nick Thompson <
> nickthomp...@earthlink.net>
> *Reply-To: *The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <
> Friam@redfish.com>
> *Date: *Wednesday, October 24, 2018 at 12:22 AM
> *To: *Roger Critchlow , Friam 
> *Subject: *[FRIAM] On old question
>
>
>
> Dear Roger, and anybody else who wants to play,
>
>
>
> While waiting for my paper, *Signs and Designs*, to be rejected, I have
> gone back to thinking about an old project, whose working title has been “*A
> Sign Language*.”  And this has led me back to Robert Rosen, whose *Life
> Itself* I bought almost 9 years ago and it has remained almost pristine,
> ever since.  In the chapter I am now looking at, Rosen is talking about
> “organization.”  Now, I have been thinking about organization ever since I
> read C. Ray Carpenter’s early work on primate groups back in the late
> 50’s.  It seemed to me at the time, and it seems to me reasonable now, to
> define the organization of a set of entities as related in some way to the
> degree to which one can predict the behavior of one entity from knowledge
> about another.  Now the relationship is not straightforward, because
> neither total unpredictability (every monkey behaves exactly the same as
> every other monkey in every situation) nor total unpredictability (no
> monkey behaves like any other monkey in ANY situation) smacks of great
> organization.  The highest levels organization, speaking inexpertly and
> intuitively, seem to correspond to intermediate levels of predictability,
> where there were several classes of individuals within a group and within
> class predictability was strong but cross-class predictability was weak.
> On my account, the highest levels of organization involve hierarchies of
> predictability.  Thus honey bees and ants are more organized than starling
> flocks, say.
>
>
>
> This is where the matter stood at the point that I came to Santa Fe and
> started interacting with you guys 14 years ago.  You-all introduced me to a
> totally different notion of organization based – shudder – on the second
> law.  But I have never been able to deploy your concept with any
> assurance.  So, for instance, when I shake the salad dressing, I feel like
> I am disorganizing 

Re: [FRIAM] On old question

[Marcus Daniels]

Nick,

It sounds like you are describing mutual information.  This is ancient, but a 
nice overview of related topics:

https://www.amazon.com/Information-Theory-Qualitative-Quantitative-Applications/dp/0803921322

Marcus

From: Friam  on behalf of Nick Thompson 

Reply-To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group 
Date: Wednesday, October 24, 2018 at 12:22 AM
To: Roger Critchlow , Friam 
Subject: [FRIAM] On old question

Dear Roger, and anybody else who wants to play,

While waiting for my paper, Signs and Designs, to be rejected, I have gone back 
to thinking about an old project, whose working title has been “A Sign 
Language.”  And this has led me back to Robert Rosen, whose Life Itself I 
bought almost 9 years ago and it has remained almost pristine, ever since.  In 
the chapter I am now looking at, Rosen is talking about “organization.”  Now, I 
have been thinking about organization ever since I read C. Ray Carpenter’s 
early work on primate groups back in the late 50’s.  It seemed to me at the 
time, and it seems to me reasonable now, to define the organization of a set of 
entities as related in some way to the degree to which one can predict the 
behavior of one entity from knowledge about another.  Now the relationship is 
not straightforward, because neither total unpredictability (every monkey 
behaves exactly the same as every other monkey in every situation) nor total 
unpredictability (no monkey behaves like any other monkey in ANY situation) 
smacks of great organization.  The highest levels organization, speaking 
inexpertly and intuitively, seem to correspond to intermediate levels of 
predictability, where there were several classes of individuals within a group 
and within class predictability was strong but cross-class predictability was 
weak.  On my account, the highest levels of organization involve hierarchies of 
predictability.  Thus honey bees and ants are more organized than starling 
flocks, say.

This is where the matter stood at the point that I came to Santa Fe and started 
interacting with you guys 14 years ago.  You-all introduced me to a totally 
different notion of organization based – shudder – on the second law.  But I 
have never been able to deploy your concept with any assurance.  So, for 
instance, when I shake the salad dressing, I feel like I am disorganizing it, 
and when it reasserts itself into layers, I feel like it ought to be called 
more organized.  But I have a feeling that you are going to tell me that the 
reverse is true.  That, given the molecules of fat and water/acid, that the 
layered state is the less organized state.

Now this confusion of mine takes on importance when I try to read Rosen.  He 
defines a function as the difference that occurs when one removes a component 
of a system.  I can see no reason why the oil or the water in my salad dressing 
cannot be thought of components of a system and if, for instance, I were to 
siphon out the water from the bottom of my layered salad dressing, I could 
claim that the function of the water had been to hold the water up.  This seems 
a rather lame notion of function.

Some of you who have been on this list forever will remember that I raised the 
same kind of worry almost a decade back when I noticed the drainage of water 
from a basin was actually slowed by the formation of a vortex.  This seemed to 
dispel any notion that vortices are structures whose function is to efficiently 
dispel a gradient.  It also violated my intuition from traffic flows, where I 
imagine that rigid rules of priority would facilitate the flow of people 
crossing bridges to escape Zozobra.

It’s quite possible that my confusions in this matter are of no great general 
applicability, in which case, I look forward to being ignored.

Nick

Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
Clark University
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/


FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove