Marco,
>Just one thing. Can't almost everything be reduced to the egocentrical
>(dynamical) point of view of an agent? ...
The answer to your question is yes.
>I was astounded when I have read of how computer graphics render the warping
>of clothes over tables or rigid sufaces. The computer tries to minimise the
>potential energy of the system.
All of physics can be framed as action minimization. (Action is a
time integral of energy, so the potential energy minimization you
describe is a special case of action minimization when kinetic energy
can be neglected)
In quantum phenomena, it is a probability distribution that minimizes
the action integral. Different energy levels correspond to different
local minima.
Physicists tend to avoid teleological language in order to avoid the
appearance of anthropomorphizing non-living, non-conscious systems.
But teleological language need not be "dangerously anthropomorphic"
as long as we remember that we are making analogies, in the same way
that programmers frequently say things like "the reason my program
crashed was that it was trying to take the reciprocal of a number
that it set to zero," without thinking the computer was "really"
trying to compute a quotient and able to understand what it was doing
in the same way a schoolchild would.
The set of system equations for any collection of loosely coupled
physical systems is mathematically isomorphic to a game of
interacting "agents," were the "objective function" for each
subsystem is the action integral it is "trying" to minimize (where we
interpret "trying" for a non-living physical system in the same way
as my example of the computer "trying" to compute 1/0).
So everything "is" distributed interacting agents, including superstrings.
What you make of that isomorphism depends on what you think the
meaning of "is" is.
Kathy Laskey
