Any non-biological complex systems?

[Steve Smith]

Glen -

It is not my nature to take exception to your oft curmudgeonly (or is it contrarian?) style but in this case I want to question the implications of what you say here when you suggest that we are conflating vague concepts merely because they are vague.

But we have to be careful not to arbitrarily swap one vague concept for another.  Just because "interesting", "life", and "complexity" are all vague doesn't mean they're analogs

MY point (at least, not trying to speak for others) was/is that "interesting", "life", and "complexity" might very well be highly superposed or even "conjugated" (to introduce an extremely overloaded technical term). 

I suppose to disambiguate, I believe that "Life" is a subset of "Complex Systems" and life in the larger sense of ALife is a larger subset of complex systems, though probably still a *proper* subset?  The outer bounds of he vagueness of "Life" convolved with the inner bounds of vagueness of Complex Systems might allow them to become identical?  The question of "Interesting" seems to be sharpened (or is it dulled?) by the subjectivity of the term...  I suppose "interesting" is usually defined by being simultaneously "familiar enough to be relevant" and "unfamiliar enough to be novel".  Since we are LIfe ourselves, it seems likely that we find *life itself* at least relevant and as we expand the definition of Life it becomes more novel and interesting, up to embracing all of "complexity"...  to the extent that the Alife movement expanded the consideration from biological life to proto-life and quasi-life, I'm tempted to claim that *they* would include *all* of complex systems... admitting that the specific boundaries of all the above *are* vague.

To re-iterate, I think there IS good evidence to consider "complex systems" and "life" as highly related and it seems obvious that they would be "interesting", though I suppose there should be things outside of that domain which are also obviously "interesting".   Agency is another hairball to sort through and I won't attempt much except that in MY definition of Life, "Agency" is one of the qualities of proto-life.   To that extent, it would seem that complex systems composed *of* entities with agency are as likely as any "biological system" to exhibit complexity, etc.

As for "Russ clarifying his question", I think this can be a rhetorical device?   It has always seemed to me that Science really degenerates to "asking the right question" where when properly formulated, the "answer becomes obvious"... in some sense, I think THIS is what passes for elegance, the holy grail of scientific theory?

I do wish I could be as concise as you generally are, but I definitely lack the discipline if not the skills for that.

Mumble,
 - Steve

On 5/25/17 11:36 AM, glen ☣ wrote:

Maturana and Varela, Robert Rosen, Mark Bedeau, Stuart Kauffman [†] (as well as a huge ecology of others) have written about this to no avail, apparently.  We _insist_ on having our ambiguity and eating it, too.  In the end, it's rhetorical trickery (of which I'm no less culpable than anyone else) to use words like "complexity", "emergence", "interestingness", "agent", etc. in a technical context without making _some_ (any!) attempt to disambiguate.

There are bottom-up rhetorical tactics (Newman, Moore, et al), where they reserve their vague-speak for the vague contexts, and simply tolerate their own and others higher order pattern-matching homunculi to imagine categories like complexity and agency.  And there are top-down tactics (M&V, Rosen, et al), where the rhetoriticians try to speak directly about the "can't define it but I know it when I see it" categories.  If you view these two rhetorical tactics as inductive vs generative (e.g. back-tracking), respectively, you can appreciate both.

But we have to be careful not to arbitrarily swap one vague concept for another.  Just because "interesting", "life", and "complexity" are all vague doesn't mean they're analogs.  We need Russ to clarify his question before we'll have anything useful to say about it.

[†] Including this "gem" by Kauffman: https://arxiv.org/abs/1303.5684, wherein he proceeds to treat subjects Rosen had treated way earlier, way better, and with no citation of Rosen, to boot. [sigh]  But, hey, defection can be profitable.


On 05/25/2017 05:23 AM, Steven A Smith wrote:

maybe an interesting (but relevant) question is also "what is interesting?"

It seems that we, as examples of complex, organized, far-from-equilibrium, systems of dissipative systems entities find other examples with similar (subsets) of those properties "interesting"...  I'm not sure what a system without those properties would call interesting (or if it could/would call anything anything).

I think what you are calling "interesting" are systems exhibiting nonlinear phenomena, self-organization, and aghast! emergence.   I think therefore that such systems exhibit proto-life-like properties by definition.   Your exclusion of systems arising from biological (explicitely alive) systems seems to be trying to niggle at the root of "what is life"?



On 5/25/17 5:59 AM, Steven A Smith wrote:

Russ -

I *think* I know what you are getting at, but I don't think we are there yet in this discussion.

I think we've come full circle to the challenges we encountered in the early days of Artificial Life.  The first year or two of ALife conferences had a lot of focus on "what IS life?"  It is a bit too early in the morning for me to give this proper consideration but as I remember it, there were many examples of systems with life-like or more to the point proto-life-like properties.  I doubt I can put my hands on my proceedings from ALife I and ALife II easily and couldn't pull them up online beyond this:

    http://alife.org/conferences-isal-past?page=2

I think your intuition that "unless all of physics would be" is correct, especially when caveated by your own reference to dissipative systems which go on to imply far-from-equilibrium and irreversible systems.

A precursor to the ALife work was that of Tibor Ganti:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemoton

which invoked "metabolism" and "self-replication" as qualities of proto-life.

It seems like Autocatalytics Sets are useful and near-minimal abstractions?

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autocatalytic_set

I feel like my maunderings here are vaguely circular when concatenated with your own but I hope someone more incisive than I takes an interest in this discussion and tightens these ideas up a little.

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[gepr]

I agree completely.  But if we look carefully at Russ' question:

On 05/24/2017 11:00 PM, Russ Abbott wrote:
> Can we think of anything that is non-biological, non-human, and not a biological or human artifact that would qualify as an agent based system?

And we consider the previous comments about biology creeping into (even!) weather patterns and climate, and whether complexity is invariant through the reduction to physics ... and we can even extend that to something like Smolin's fecund universe, etc ad forever, it becomes clear that we're hunting the snark.  And I suppose the wisdom of traditions like Buddhism and such, as well as the falsification/selection approach of critical rationalism, _strongly_ suggest to us what Harley Davidson tells us on a regular basis: The journey is the destination.

So, rather than talk about the elusive snark, why not talk explicitly about the journey ... the workflow, the tools, the thing(s) right in front of our face/hands?  E.g. topological insulators don't look at all plectic to me.  So, I'd be very interested to hear why y'all think they are.  (By using "plectic", I'm admitting that I don't understand quantum physics; so sure, they're mysterious... but how are they complex in the way we're using the term, here?)

But I'm more interested in well-defined concepts of agents than I im in well-defined concepts of complex systems.  So, what type of agents are we talking about?  Kauffman's "thermodynamic agents"?  Zero intelligence agents?  BDI-capable agents?  Etc.  These concrete details would put us squarely inside the journey and outside the destination.


On 05/25/2017 12:21 PM, Steven A Smith wrote:
> MY point (at least, not trying to speak for others) was/is that "interesting", "life", and "complexity" might very well be highly superposed or even "conjugated" (to introduce an extremely overloaded technical term).
>
> I suppose to disambiguate, I believe that "Life" is a subset of "Complex Systems" and life in the larger sense of ALife is a larger subset of complex systems, though probably still a *proper* subset? The outer bounds of he vagueness of "Life" convolved with the inner bounds of vagueness of Complex Systems might allow them to become identical?  The question of "Interesting" seems to be sharpened (or is it dulled?) by the subjectivity of the term...  I suppose "interesting" is usually defined by being simultaneously "familiar enough to be relevant" and "unfamiliar enough to be novel".  Since we are LIfe ourselves, it seems likely that we find *life itself* at least relevant and as we expand the definition of Life it becomes more novel and interesting, up to embracing all of "complexity"... to the extent that the Alife movement expanded the consideration from biological life to proto-life and quasi-life, I'm tempted to claim that *they* would include *all* of complex systems...
> admitting that the specific boundaries of all the above *are* vague.
>
> To re-iterate, I think there IS good evidence to consider "complex systems" and "life" as highly related and it seems obvious that they would be "interesting", though I suppose there should be things outside of that domain which are also obviously "interesting". Agency is another hairball to sort through and I won't attempt much except that in MY definition of Life, "Agency" is one of the qualities of proto-life.   To that extent, it would seem that complex systems composed *of* entities with agency are as likely as any "biological system" to exhibit complexity, etc.
>
> As for "Russ clarifying his question", I think this can be a rhetorical device?   It has always seemed to me that Science really degenerates to "asking the right question" where when properly formulated, the "answer becomes obvious"... in some sense, I think THIS is what passes for elegance, the holy grail of scientific theory?


--
☣ glen
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[Russ Abbott]

Thank you all for your interest and replies. I regret that I asked this question just before leaving for vacation. I'll be away for a week. 

Here are my thoughts, which I didn't want to impose before hearing other answers.

A complex system involves agents with the following properties.

• They can accumulate (and store) free energy.
  
• They have means to release that energy.
  
• They respond to (symbolic) information, i.e., symbols. By that I mean that they respond to things on the basis of their internal rules rather than as a consequence of physics or chemistry. (In other words they are autonomous in the sense that they are governed by internal rules and not just pushed around by external forces.) I'm not saying that the internal rules are not themselves run by physics and chemistry, only that the response of an agent to some information/symbol is minimally if at all connected to the physical nature of the symbol.  (A bit is a symbol. Bit representations don't matter when software looks at bit values. Similarly when you see a red traffic light you respond to the symbol red-traffic-light, not to the physical effects of the photons -- other than to translate those photons into the symbol. Software is a set of rules no matter what mechanism executes it.) Of course one of the things agents can do is to employ some of its stored energy as part of its response to a symbol.
  

The result of all this is that agents operate in two worlds: physics/chemistry and information. A system cannot be considered complex unless it includes such agents. 

-- Russ

On Thu, May 25, 2017 at 12:40 PM glen ☣ <[hidden email]> wrote:

I agree completely.  But if we look carefully at Russ' question:

On 05/24/2017 11:00 PM, Russ Abbott wrote:
> Can we think of anything that is non-biological, non-human, and not a biological or human artifact that would qualify as an agent based system?

And we consider the previous comments about biology creeping into (even!) weather patterns and climate, and whether complexity is invariant through the reduction to physics ... and we can even extend that to something like Smolin's fecund universe, etc ad forever, it becomes clear that we're hunting the snark.  And I suppose the wisdom of traditions like Buddhism and such, as well as the falsification/selection approach of critical rationalism, _strongly_ suggest to us what Harley Davidson tells us on a regular basis: The journey is the destination.

So, rather than talk about the elusive snark, why not talk explicitly about the journey ... the workflow, the tools, the thing(s) right in front of our face/hands?  E.g. topological insulators don't look at all plectic to me.  So, I'd be very interested to hear why y'all think they are.  (By using "plectic", I'm admitting that I don't understand quantum physics; so sure, they're mysterious... but how are they complex in the way we're using the term, here?)

But I'm more interested in well-defined concepts of agents than I im in well-defined concepts of complex systems.  So, what type of agents are we talking about?  Kauffman's "thermodynamic agents"?  Zero intelligence agents?  BDI-capable agents?  Etc.  These concrete details would put us squarely inside the journey and outside the destination.


On 05/25/2017 12:21 PM, Steven A Smith wrote:
> MY point (at least, not trying to speak for others) was/is that "interesting", "life", and "complexity" might very well be highly superposed or even "conjugated" (to introduce an extremely overloaded technical term).
>
> I suppose to disambiguate, I believe that "Life" is a subset of "Complex Systems" and life in the larger sense of ALife is a larger subset of complex systems, though probably still a *proper* subset? The outer bounds of he vagueness of "Life" convolved with the inner bounds of vagueness of Complex Systems might allow them to become identical?  The question of "Interesting" seems to be sharpened (or is it dulled?) by the subjectivity of the term...  I suppose "interesting" is usually defined by being simultaneously "familiar enough to be relevant" and "unfamiliar enough to be novel".  Since we are LIfe ourselves, it seems likely that we find *life itself* at least relevant and as we expand the definition of Life it becomes more novel and interesting, up to embracing all of "complexity"... to the extent that the Alife movement expanded the consideration from biological life to proto-life and quasi-life, I'm tempted to claim that *they* would include *all* of complex systems...
> admitting that the specific boundaries of all the above *are* vague.
>
> To re-iterate, I think there IS good evidence to consider "complex systems" and "life" as highly related and it seems obvious that they would be "interesting", though I suppose there should be things outside of that domain which are also obviously "interesting". Agency is another hairball to sort through and I won't attempt much except that in MY definition of Life, "Agency" is one of the qualities of proto-life.   To that extent, it would seem that complex systems composed *of* entities with agency are as likely as any "biological system" to exhibit complexity, etc.
>
> As for "Russ clarifying his question", I think this can be a rhetorical device?   It has always seemed to me that Science really degenerates to "asking the right question" where when properly formulated, the "answer becomes obvious"... in some sense, I think THIS is what passes for elegance, the holy grail of scientific theory?


--
☣ glen
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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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[Steve Smith]

And I agree completely with the idea of zooming in (enough) to be at least hunting subSnarks on a domain composed almost entirely of Snarks... ((Or Snarkbait?)

Beating the dead snark, I was mildly perturbed by the implication that the complexity of weather systems was more than incidentally dependent on the biological systems that might infiorm them (transpiration from forest or savannah, light absorption by algae, methane from cattle and termites, etc)

Sent from my iPhone

> On May 25, 2017, at 1:39 PM, glen ☣ <[hidden email]> wrote:
>
>
> I agree completely.  But if we look carefully at Russ' question:
>
>> On 05/24/2017 11:00 PM, Russ Abbott wrote:
>> Can we think of anything that is non-biological, non-human, and not a biological or human artifact that would qualify as an agent based system?
>
> And we consider the previous comments about biology creeping into (even!) weather patterns and climate, and whether complexity is invariant through the reduction to physics ... and we can even extend that to something like Smolin's fecund universe, etc ad forever, it becomes clear that we're hunting the snark.  And I suppose the wisdom of traditions like Buddhism and such, as well as the falsification/selection approach of critical rationalism, _strongly_ suggest to us what Harley Davidson tells us on a regular basis: The journey is the destination.
>
> So, rather than talk about the elusive snark, why not talk explicitly about the journey ... the workflow, the tools, the thing(s) right in front of our face/hands?  E.g. topological insulators don't look at all plectic to me.  So, I'd be very interested to hear why y'all think they are.  (By using "plectic", I'm admitting that I don't understand quantum physics; so sure, they're mysterious... but how are they complex in the way we're using the term, here?)
>
> But I'm more interested in well-defined concepts of agents than I im in well-defined concepts of complex systems.  So, what type of agents are we talking about?  Kauffman's "thermodynamic agents"?  Zero intelligence agents?  BDI-capable agents?  Etc.  These concrete details would put us squarely inside the journey and outside the destination.
>
>
>> On 05/25/2017 12:21 PM, Steven A Smith wrote:
>> MY point (at least, not trying to speak for others) was/is that "interesting", "life", and "complexity" might very well be highly superposed or even "conjugated" (to introduce an extremely overloaded technical term).
>>
>> I suppose to disambiguate, I believe that "Life" is a subset of "Complex Systems" and life in the larger sense of ALife is a larger subset of complex systems, though probably still a *proper* subset? The outer bounds of he vagueness of "Life" convolved with the inner bounds of vagueness of Complex Systems might allow them to become identical?  The question of "Interesting" seems to be sharpened (or is it dulled?) by the subjectivity of the term...  I suppose "interesting" is usually defined by being simultaneously "familiar enough to be relevant" and "unfamiliar enough to be novel".  Since we are LIfe ourselves, it seems likely that we find *life itself* at least relevant and as we expand the definition of Life it becomes more novel and interesting, up to embracing all of "complexity"... to the extent that the Alife movement expanded the consideration from biological life to proto-life and quasi-life, I'm tempted to claim that *they* would include *all* of complex systems...
>> admitting that the specific boundaries of all the above *are* vague.
>>
>> To re-iterate, I think there IS good evidence to consider "complex systems" and "life" as highly related and it seems obvious that they would be "interesting", though I suppose there should be things outside of that domain which are also obviously "interesting". Agency is another hairball to sort through and I won't attempt much except that in MY definition of Life, "Agency" is one of the qualities of proto-life.   To that extent, it would seem that complex systems composed *of* entities with agency are as likely as any "biological system" to exhibit complexity, etc.
>>
>> As for "Russ clarifying his question", I think this can be a rhetorical device?   It has always seemed to me that Science really degenerates to "asking the right question" where when properly formulated, the "answer becomes obvious"... in some sense, I think THIS is what passes for elegance, the holy grail of scientific theory?
>
>
> --
> ☣ 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
>

============================================================
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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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[Russ Abbott]

I think the weather example rests on the likelihood that we could have complex weather without biology.

On Thu, May 25, 2017 at 1:26 PM Steve <[hidden email]> wrote:

And I agree completely with the idea of zooming in (enough) to be at least hunting subSnarks on a domain composed almost entirely of Snarks... ((Or Snarkbait?)

Beating the dead snark, I was mildly perturbed by the implication that the complexity of weather systems was more than incidentally dependent on the biological systems that might infiorm them (transpiration from forest or savannah, light absorption by algae, methane from cattle and termites, etc)

Sent from my iPhone

> On May 25, 2017, at 1:39 PM, glen ☣ <[hidden email]> wrote:
>
>
> I agree completely.  But if we look carefully at Russ' question:
>
>> On 05/24/2017 11:00 PM, Russ Abbott wrote:
>> Can we think of anything that is non-biological, non-human, and not a biological or human artifact that would qualify as an agent based system?
>
> And we consider the previous comments about biology creeping into (even!) weather patterns and climate, and whether complexity is invariant through the reduction to physics ... and we can even extend that to something like Smolin's fecund universe, etc ad forever, it becomes clear that we're hunting the snark.  And I suppose the wisdom of traditions like Buddhism and such, as well as the falsification/selection approach of critical rationalism, _strongly_ suggest to us what Harley Davidson tells us on a regular basis: The journey is the destination.
>
> So, rather than talk about the elusive snark, why not talk explicitly about the journey ... the workflow, the tools, the thing(s) right in front of our face/hands?  E.g. topological insulators don't look at all plectic to me.  So, I'd be very interested to hear why y'all think they are.  (By using "plectic", I'm admitting that I don't understand quantum physics; so sure, they're mysterious... but how are they complex in the way we're using the term, here?)
>
> But I'm more interested in well-defined concepts of agents than I im in well-defined concepts of complex systems.  So, what type of agents are we talking about?  Kauffman's "thermodynamic agents"?  Zero intelligence agents?  BDI-capable agents?  Etc.  These concrete details would put us squarely inside the journey and outside the destination.
>
>
>> On 05/25/2017 12:21 PM, Steven A Smith wrote:
>> MY point (at least, not trying to speak for others) was/is that "interesting", "life", and "complexity" might very well be highly superposed or even "conjugated" (to introduce an extremely overloaded technical term).
>>
>> I suppose to disambiguate, I believe that "Life" is a subset of "Complex Systems" and life in the larger sense of ALife is a larger subset of complex systems, though probably still a *proper* subset? The outer bounds of he vagueness of "Life" convolved with the inner bounds of vagueness of Complex Systems might allow them to become identical?  The question of "Interesting" seems to be sharpened (or is it dulled?) by the subjectivity of the term...  I suppose "interesting" is usually defined by being simultaneously "familiar enough to be relevant" and "unfamiliar enough to be novel".  Since we are LIfe ourselves, it seems likely that we find *life itself* at least relevant and as we expand the definition of Life it becomes more novel and interesting, up to embracing all of "complexity"... to the extent that the Alife movement expanded the consideration from biological life to proto-life and quasi-life, I'm tempted to claim that *they* would include *all* of complex systems...
>> admitting that the specific boundaries of all the above *are* vague.
>>
>> To re-iterate, I think there IS good evidence to consider "complex systems" and "life" as highly related and it seems obvious that they would be "interesting", though I suppose there should be things outside of that domain which are also obviously "interesting". Agency is another hairball to sort through and I won't attempt much except that in MY definition of Life, "Agency" is one of the qualities of proto-life.   To that extent, it would seem that complex systems composed *of* entities with agency are as likely as any "biological system" to exhibit complexity, etc.
>>
>> As for "Russ clarifying his question", I think this can be a rhetorical device?   It has always seemed to me that Science really degenerates to "asking the right question" where when properly formulated, the "answer becomes obvious"... in some sense, I think THIS is what passes for elegance, the holy grail of scientific theory?
>
>
> --
> ☣ 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
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============================================================
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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove

[Gillian Densmore]

Much joy and merriment to you and yours on your vacation.

On Thu, May 25, 2017 at 3:14 PM, Russ Abbott <[hidden email]> wrote:

I think the weather example rests on the likelihood that we could have complex weather without biology.

On Thu, May 25, 2017 at 1:26 PM Steve <[hidden email]> wrote:

And I agree completely with the idea of zooming in (enough) to be at least hunting subSnarks on a domain composed almost entirely of Snarks... ((Or Snarkbait?)

Beating the dead snark, I was mildly perturbed by the implication that the complexity of weather systems was more than incidentally dependent on the biological systems that might infiorm them (transpiration from forest or savannah, light absorption by algae, methane from cattle and termites, etc)

Sent from my iPhone

> On May 25, 2017, at 1:39 PM, glen ☣ <[hidden email]> wrote:
>
>
> I agree completely.  But if we look carefully at Russ' question:
>
>> On 05/24/2017 11:00 PM, Russ Abbott wrote:
>> Can we think of anything that is non-biological, non-human, and not a biological or human artifact that would qualify as an agent based system?
>
> And we consider the previous comments about biology creeping into (even!) weather patterns and climate, and whether complexity is invariant through the reduction to physics ... and we can even extend that to something like Smolin's fecund universe, etc ad forever, it becomes clear that we're hunting the snark.  And I suppose the wisdom of traditions like Buddhism and such, as well as the falsification/selection approach of critical rationalism, _strongly_ suggest to us what Harley Davidson tells us on a regular basis: The journey is the destination.
>
> So, rather than talk about the elusive snark, why not talk explicitly about the journey ... the workflow, the tools, the thing(s) right in front of our face/hands?  E.g. topological insulators don't look at all plectic to me.  So, I'd be very interested to hear why y'all think they are.  (By using "plectic", I'm admitting that I don't understand quantum physics; so sure, they're mysterious... but how are they complex in the way we're using the term, here?)
>
> But I'm more interested in well-defined concepts of agents than I im in well-defined concepts of complex systems.  So, what type of agents are we talking about?  Kauffman's "thermodynamic agents"?  Zero intelligence agents?  BDI-capable agents?  Etc.  These concrete details would put us squarely inside the journey and outside the destination.
>
>
>> On 05/25/2017 12:21 PM, Steven A Smith wrote:
>> MY point (at least, not trying to speak for others) was/is that "interesting", "life", and "complexity" might very well be highly superposed or even "conjugated" (to introduce an extremely overloaded technical term).
>>
>> I suppose to disambiguate, I believe that "Life" is a subset of "Complex Systems" and life in the larger sense of ALife is a larger subset of complex systems, though probably still a *proper* subset? The outer bounds of he vagueness of "Life" convolved with the inner bounds of vagueness of Complex Systems might allow them to become identical?  The question of "Interesting" seems to be sharpened (or is it dulled?) by the subjectivity of the term...  I suppose "interesting" is usually defined by being simultaneously "familiar enough to be relevant" and "unfamiliar enough to be novel".  Since we are LIfe ourselves, it seems likely that we find *life itself* at least relevant and as we expand the definition of Life it becomes more novel and interesting, up to embracing all of "complexity"... to the extent that the Alife movement expanded the consideration from biological life to proto-life and quasi-life, I'm tempted to claim that *they* would include *all* of complex systems...
>> admitting that the specific boundaries of all the above *are* vague.
>>
>> To re-iterate, I think there IS good evidence to consider "complex systems" and "life" as highly related and it seems obvious that they would be "interesting", though I suppose there should be things outside of that domain which are also obviously "interesting". Agency is another hairball to sort through and I won't attempt much except that in MY definition of Life, "Agency" is one of the qualities of proto-life.   To that extent, it would seem that complex systems composed *of* entities with agency are as likely as any "biological system" to exhibit complexity, etc.
>>
>> As for "Russ clarifying his question", I think this can be a rhetorical device?   It has always seemed to me that Science really degenerates to "asking the right question" where when properly formulated, the "answer becomes obvious"... in some sense, I think THIS is what passes for elegance, the holy grail of scientific theory?
>
>
> --
> ☣ 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
>

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[gepr]

Excellent!  Thanks for the clarification.  This seems (to me) to follow along with Kauffman's "agents", at least up to the working paper version of Investigations I have.  There, he suggests that a galaxy might be a collection of agents.  I prefer what (I think) Smolin suggests in The Life of the Cosmos, where the galaxies are the basic structural unit.  So, it makes more sense to me to think of galaxies as the agents.  But it's reasonable to think that the galaxies (what we think of when we use the term) are epiphenomenal and the underlying agency is more minimally defined by something else (black holes? or whatever constitutes dark matter/energy? gravitation itself?).  To satisfy your symbolic requirement, we'd have to identify the boundary.  To me, gravitation is inadequate (perhaps necessary but not sufficient).  But perhaps if we included inflation and the idea that inflation occurs all the time in various parts of the (unobservable) universe, then that light-cone type boundary would work?  Could inflationary bubbles ever interact in any way so that we could say they communicate with symbols?  I have no idea what I'm talking about, obviously. 8^)

Also, if you disambiguate "biology", it might help.  Would silicon analogs of organic compounds still be biology?  Would proto-biological processes count (perhaps we can build agents in RNAWorld)?


Ultimately, though, I think I'd answer your question with: No, I can't think of any agents that satisfy all your criteria, the most important of which is "non-biological".  Despite my persnickety objections to his works, I land with Rosen in his tight coupling of biology (life) with closure to efficient cause (aka "agency").


On 05/25/2017 01:25 PM, Russ Abbott wrote:

> Thank you all for your interest and replies. I regret that I asked this
> question just before leaving for vacation. I'll be away for a week.
>
> Here are my thoughts, which I didn't want to impose before hearing other
> answers.
>
> A complex system involves agents with the following properties.
>
>    - They can accumulate (and store) free energy.
>    - They have means to release that energy.
>    - They respond to (symbolic) information, i.e., symbols. By that I mean
>    that they respond to things on the basis of their internal rules rather
>    than as a consequence of physics or chemistry. (In other words they are
>    autonomous in the sense that they are governed by internal rules and not
>    just pushed around by external forces.) I'm not saying that the internal
>    rules are not themselves run by physics and chemistry, only that the
>    response of an agent to some information/symbol is minimally if at all
>    connected to the physical nature of the symbol.  (A bit is a symbol. Bit
>    representations don't matter when software looks at bit values. Similarly
>    when you see a red traffic light you respond to the symbol
>    red-traffic-light, not to the physical effects of the photons -- other than
>    to translate those photons into the symbol. Software is a set of rules no
>    matter what mechanism executes it.) Of course one of the things agents can
>    do is to employ some of its stored energy as part of its response to a
>    symbol.
>
> The result of all this is that agents operate in two worlds:
> physics/chemistry and information. A system cannot be considered complex
> unless it includes such agents.

--
☣ glen
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[Marcus G. Daniels]

I am surprised by the suggestion that a crude computational convenience (agents) would really have any one-to-one mapping with real things.   Since we are not talking about biological neural systems nor artifacts from them, what sort of physical system would need to decouple symbols from their physical implementation?  It seems like nonsense by construction and a violation of parsimony.

Sent from my iPhone

> On May 25, 2017, at 4:04 PM, glen ☣ <[hidden email]> wrote:
>
>
> Excellent!  Thanks for the clarification.  This seems (to me) to follow along with Kauffman's "agents", at least up to the working paper version of Investigations I have.  There, he suggests that a galaxy might be a collection of agents.  I prefer what (I think) Smolin suggests in The Life of the Cosmos, where the galaxies are the basic structural unit.  So, it makes more sense to me to think of galaxies as the agents.  But it's reasonable to think that the galaxies (what we think of when we use the term) are epiphenomenal and the underlying agency is more minimally defined by something else (black holes? or whatever constitutes dark matter/energy? gravitation itself?).  To satisfy your symbolic requirement, we'd have to identify the boundary.  To me, gravitation is inadequate (perhaps necessary but not sufficient).  But perhaps if we included inflation and the idea that inflation occurs all the time in various parts of the (unobservable) universe, then that light-cone type boundary would work?  Could inflationary bubbles ever interact in any way so that we could say they communicate with symbols?  I have no idea what I'm talking about, obviously. 8^)
>
> Also, if you disambiguate "biology", it might help.  Would silicon analogs of organic compounds still be biology?  Would proto-biological processes count (perhaps we can build agents in RNAWorld)?
>
>
> Ultimately, though, I think I'd answer your question with: No, I can't think of any agents that satisfy all your criteria, the most important of which is "non-biological".  Despite my persnickety objections to his works, I land with Rosen in his tight coupling of biology (life) with closure to efficient cause (aka "agency").
>
>
>> On 05/25/2017 01:25 PM, Russ Abbott wrote:
>> Thank you all for your interest and replies. I regret that I asked this
>> question just before leaving for vacation. I'll be away for a week.
>>
>> Here are my thoughts, which I didn't want to impose before hearing other
>> answers.
>>
>> A complex system involves agents with the following properties.
>>
>>   - They can accumulate (and store) free energy.
>>   - They have means to release that energy.
>>   - They respond to (symbolic) information, i.e., symbols. By that I mean
>>   that they respond to things on the basis of their internal rules rather
>>   than as a consequence of physics or chemistry. (In other words they are
>>   autonomous in the sense that they are governed by internal rules and not
>>   just pushed around by external forces.) I'm not saying that the internal
>>   rules are not themselves run by physics and chemistry, only that the
>>   response of an agent to some information/symbol is minimally if at all
>>   connected to the physical nature of the symbol.  (A bit is a symbol. Bit
>>   representations don't matter when software looks at bit values. Similarly
>>   when you see a red traffic light you respond to the symbol
>>   red-traffic-light, not to the physical effects of the photons -- other than
>>   to translate those photons into the symbol. Software is a set of rules no
>>   matter what mechanism executes it.) Of course one of the things agents can
>>   do is to employ some of its stored energy as part of its response to a
>>   symbol.
>>
>> The result of all this is that agents operate in two worlds:
>> physics/chemistry and information. A system cannot be considered complex
>> unless it includes such agents.
>
> --
> ☣ 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

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[gepr]

I agree for the most part.  But what M&V and Rosen (and to some extent Shrödinger, Turing, von Neumann, etc.) were trying to do is suss out the difference between living and inanimate systems.  And that's worthy.  You don't really need the "agent" concept for that work, though.  I tend to prefer the word "actor".  But that's polluted, too.

And you can't really write it off merely as a crude computational convenience, either.  The core idea (taken up by Penrose and the proofs-as-programs people, too!) is to settle the question of whether biology is doing something super-mechanical or non-mechanical ... at least non-algorithmic, if not non-computational.  It's not _all_ nonsense, though a lot of it is.


On 05/25/2017 04:40 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> I am surprised by the suggestion that a crude computational convenience (agents) would really have any one-to-one mapping with real things.   Since we are not talking about biological neural systems nor artifacts from them, what sort of physical system would need to decouple symbols from their physical implementation?  It seems like nonsense by construction and a violation of parsimony.

--
☣ glen

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[Marcus G. Daniels]

ok, but we are confined to the inanimate here?  What natural inanimate objects do symbolic manipulation?

Sent from my iPhone

> On May 25, 2017, at 4:57 PM, glen ☣ <[hidden email]> wrote:
>
> I agree for the most part.  But what M&V and Rosen (and to some extent Shrödinger, Turing, von Neumann, etc.) were trying to do is suss out the difference between living and inanimate systems.  And that's worthy.  You don't really need the "agent" concept for that work, though.  I tend to prefer the word "actor".  But that's polluted, too.
>
> And you can't really write it off merely as a crude computational convenience, either.  The core idea (taken up by Penrose and the proofs-as-programs people, too!) is to settle the question of whether biology is doing something super-mechanical or non-mechanical ... at least non-algorithmic, if not non-computational.  It's not _all_ nonsense, though a lot of it is.
>
>
>> On 05/25/2017 04:40 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
>> I am surprised by the suggestion that a crude computational convenience (agents) would really have any one-to-one mapping with real things.   Since we are not talking about biological neural systems nor artifacts from them, what sort of physical system would need to decouple symbols from their physical implementation?  It seems like nonsense by construction and a violation of parsimony.
>
> --
> ☣ 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

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[gepr]

Well, that seems to be the question Russ is asking. It would be more difficult to answer 'no' if we left off the symbolic part. Then we could argue about the closures, if they exist, of things like vortices and such.

On May 25, 2017 5:09:38 PM PDT, Marcus Daniels <[hidden email]> wrote:
>ok, but we are confined to the inanimate here?  What natural inanimate
>objects do symbolic manipulation?
--
⛧glen⛧

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[Nick Thompson]

Steve,

 

I have just arrived in MA in the Mosquito Infested Swamp and opened your message.  Now I realize that this message is part of a high minded correspondence on profound matters, and that you have EVERY reason to have forgotten yourself.  But STILL I want to remind you that you promised me years ago NEVER AGAIN to use the word "inform" where the word "shape" would do as well or better.  Now, having said this, it is now my duty to crawl backwards through this high-minded correspondence and try to ACTUALLY have something USEFUL to say about it.  You would think that you high-minded folks at FRIAM would at least give an old guy a few days to TRAVEL. 

 

"Inform" indeed!  Soon you'll be informing putty.  With what information will you provide that putty, as you are “informing” it.  I informed the putty with my finger so that it lay smoothly against the window pane.  I informed my friend that it was time to leave for the Friam meeting; he was like putty in my hands. 

 

Grrr

 

Nick

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

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

 

 

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Steve
Sent: Thursday, May 25, 2017 2:27 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Any non-biological complex systems?

 

And I agree completely with the idea of zooming in (enough) to be at least hunting subSnarks on a domain composed almost entirely of Snarks... ((Or Snarkbait?)

 

Beating the dead snark, I was mildly perturbed by the implication that the complexity of weather systems was more than incidentally dependent on the biological systems that might inform them (transpiration from forest or savannah, light absorption by algae, methane from cattle and termites, etc)

 

Sent from my iPhone

 

> On May 25, 2017, at 1:39 PM, glen ☣ <[hidden email]> wrote:

>

>

> I agree completely.  But if we look carefully at Russ' question:

>

>> On 05/24/2017 11:00 PM, Russ Abbott wrote:

>> Can we think of anything that is non-biological, non-human, and not a biological or human artifact that would qualify as an agent based system?

>

> And we consider the previous comments about biology creeping into (even!) weather patterns and climate, and whether complexity is invariant through the reduction to physics ... and we can even extend that to something like Smolin's fecund universe, etc ad forever, it becomes clear that we're hunting the snark.  And I suppose the wisdom of traditions like Buddhism and such, as well as the falsification/selection approach of critical rationalism, _strongly_ suggest to us what Harley Davidson tells us on a regular basis: The journey is the destination.

>

> So, rather than talk about the elusive snark, why not talk explicitly

> about the journey ... the workflow, the tools, the thing(s) right in

> front of our face/hands?  E.g. topological insulators don't look at

> all plectic to me.  So, I'd be very interested to hear why y'all think

> they are.  (By using "plectic", I'm admitting that I don't understand

> quantum physics; so sure, they're mysterious... but how are they

> complex in the way we're using the term, here?)

>

> But I'm more interested in well-defined concepts of agents than I im in well-defined concepts of complex systems.  So, what type of agents are we talking about?  Kauffman's "thermodynamic agents"?  Zero intelligence agents?  BDI-capable agents?  Etc.  These concrete details would put us squarely inside the journey and outside the destination.

>

>

>> On 05/25/2017 12:21 PM, Steven A Smith wrote:

>> MY point (at least, not trying to speak for others) was/is that "interesting", "life", and "complexity" might very well be highly superposed or even "conjugated" (to introduce an extremely overloaded technical term).

>>

>> I suppose to disambiguate, I believe that "Life" is a subset of "Complex Systems" and life in the larger sense of ALife is a larger subset of complex systems, though probably still a *proper* subset? The outer bounds of he vagueness of "Life" convolved with the inner bounds of vagueness of Complex Systems might allow them to become identical?  The question of "Interesting" seems to be sharpened (or is it dulled?) by the subjectivity of the term...  I suppose "interesting" is usually defined by being simultaneously "familiar enough to be relevant" and "unfamiliar enough to be novel".  Since we are LIfe ourselves, it seems likely that we find *life itself* at least relevant and as we expand the definition of Life it becomes more novel and interesting, up to embracing all of "complexity"... to the extent that the Alife movement expanded the consideration from biological life to proto-life and quasi-life, I'm tempted to claim that *they* would include *all* of complex systems...

>> admitting that the specific boundaries of all the above *are* vague.

>>

>> To re-iterate, I think there IS good evidence to consider "complex systems" and "life" as highly related and it seems obvious that they would be "interesting", though I suppose there should be things outside of that domain which are also obviously "interesting". Agency is another hairball to sort through and I won't attempt much except that in MY definition of Life, "Agency" is one of the qualities of proto-life.   To that extent, it would seem that complex systems composed *of* entities with agency are as likely as any "biological system" to exhibit complexity, etc.

>>

>> As for "Russ clarifying his question", I think this can be a rhetorical device?   It has always seemed to me that Science really degenerates to "asking the right question" where when properly formulated, the "answer becomes obvious"... in some sense, I think THIS is what passes for elegance, the holy grail of scientific theory?

>

>

> --

> ☣ 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

>

 

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[Steve Smith]

Nick -

I'm sorry to break into your travel plans/recovery with my (ab)use of language.  

Unfortunately I do not remember any such admonishment in the past but am happy to take it in the moment.  I can tell that this is one of your hot-buttons...  maybe right up there with dangling participles or conflation of "it's" and "its" or "there", "they're" and "their"?

I agree that "inform" is a much too fancy word for the simple act of "shaping".  As a sometimes poet, I am quite happy to use the simplest or most apt word in a given situation.

That said, I suppose I will *try* to defend my use of the word "inform" in this context.  My working definition of "inform" in this context is "to provide qualitatively unspecified input to".

Going mildly against Glen's gripe with vagueness, I would claim that "inform" is more apt than "shape" in this case and chosen partly FOR it's vagueness.   I tend to reserve "shape" for geometric and topological structures.  While weather (in this case) has geometric structures, it is highly dynamic by nature...  I am not sure that you would say that the complex feedback control system in an internal combustion engine "shapes" the dynamical characteristics of said engine, though perhaps one could say they "shape" the torque and power curves (the curves, not the dynamics themselves)?  

I'm mostly happy with restricting the use of "inform" to systems which provide "information"... in this case, the biological entities implicated in "shaping" the weather system being information inputs to the weather system?

In a simple algorithmic formulation, I suppose what I intended by "inform" was "to provide inputs relevant to" without specifying the types of inputs.  In this case, mostly adjustments to opacity, heat absorption/radiation/dispersion, and humidity.

I will concede that "inform" is a bit vague and high-faluting but won't as easily concede that "to shape" would be any more appropriate.   Perhaps we could find a yet better term?

"the implication that the complexity of weather systems was more than incidentally dependent on the biological systems that might shape them" 

doesn't really do it for me either?  Do you not agree that "shape" has strong geometric (or possibly topological) connotations which are at best coincidental to the subject of weather?

Grrr,
 - Steve

On 5/25/17 9:08 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:

Steve,

 

I have just arrived in MA in the Mosquito Infested Swamp and opened your message.  Now I realize that this message is part of a high minded correspondence on profound matters, and that you have EVERY reason to have forgotten yourself.  But STILL I want to remind you that you promised me years ago NEVER AGAIN to use the word "inform" where the word "shape" would do as well or better.  Now, having said this, it is now my duty to crawl backwards through this high-minded correspondence and try to ACTUALLY have something USEFUL to say about it.  You would think that you high-minded folks at FRIAM would at least give an old guy a few days to TRAVEL. 

 

"Inform" indeed!  Soon you'll be informing putty.  With what information will you provide that putty, as you are “informing” it.  I informed the putty with my finger so that it lay smoothly against the window pane.  I informed my friend that it was time to leave for the Friam meeting; he was like putty in my hands. 

 

Grrr

 

Nick

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

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

 

 

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam [[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Steve
Sent: Thursday, May 25, 2017 2:27 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Any non-biological complex systems?

 

And I agree completely with the idea of zooming in (enough) to be at least hunting subSnarks on a domain composed almost entirely of Snarks... ((Or Snarkbait?)

 

Beating the dead snark, I was mildly perturbed by the implication that the complexity of weather systems was more than incidentally dependent on the biological systems that might inform them (transpiration from forest or savannah, light absorption by algae, methane from cattle and termites, etc)

 

Sent from my iPhone

 

> On May 25, 2017, at 1:39 PM, glen ☣ <[hidden email]> wrote:

>

>

> I agree completely.  But if we look carefully at Russ' question:

>

>> On 05/24/2017 11:00 PM, Russ Abbott wrote:

>> Can we think of anything that is non-biological, non-human, and not a biological or human artifact that would qualify as an agent based system?

>

> And we consider the previous comments about biology creeping into (even!) weather patterns and climate, and whether complexity is invariant through the reduction to physics ... and we can even extend that to something like Smolin's fecund universe, etc ad forever, it becomes clear that we're hunting the snark.  And I suppose the wisdom of traditions like Buddhism and such, as well as the falsification/selection approach of critical rationalism, _strongly_ suggest to us what Harley Davidson tells us on a regular basis: The journey is the destination.

>

> So, rather than talk about the elusive snark, why not talk explicitly

> about the journey ... the workflow, the tools, the thing(s) right in

> front of our face/hands?  E.g. topological insulators don't look at

> all plectic to me.  So, I'd be very interested to hear why y'all think

> they are.  (By using "plectic", I'm admitting that I don't understand

> quantum physics; so sure, they're mysterious... but how are they

> complex in the way we're using the term, here?)

>

> But I'm more interested in well-defined concepts of agents than I im in well-defined concepts of complex systems.  So, what type of agents are we talking about?  Kauffman's "thermodynamic agents"?  Zero intelligence agents?  BDI-capable agents?  Etc.  These concrete details would put us squarely inside the journey and outside the destination.

>

>

>> On 05/25/2017 12:21 PM, Steven A Smith wrote:

>> MY point (at least, not trying to speak for others) was/is that "interesting", "life", and "complexity" might very well be highly superposed or even "conjugated" (to introduce an extremely overloaded technical term).

>>

>> I suppose to disambiguate, I believe that "Life" is a subset of "Complex Systems" and life in the larger sense of ALife is a larger subset of complex systems, though probably still a *proper* subset? The outer bounds of he vagueness of "Life" convolved with the inner bounds of vagueness of Complex Systems might allow them to become identical?  The question of "Interesting" seems to be sharpened (or is it dulled?) by the subjectivity of the term...  I suppose "interesting" is usually defined by being simultaneously "familiar enough to be relevant" and "unfamiliar enough to be novel".  Since we are LIfe ourselves, it seems likely that we find *life itself* at least relevant and as we expand the definition of Life it becomes more novel and interesting, up to embracing all of "complexity"... to the extent that the Alife movement expanded the consideration from biological life to proto-life and quasi-life, I'm tempted to claim that *they* would include *all* of complex systems...

>> admitting that the specific boundaries of all the above *are* vague.

>>

>> To re-iterate, I think there IS good evidence to consider "complex systems" and "life" as highly related and it seems obvious that they would be "interesting", though I suppose there should be things outside of that domain which are also obviously "interesting". Agency is another hairball to sort through and I won't attempt much except that in MY definition of Life, "Agency" is one of the qualities of proto-life.   To that extent, it would seem that complex systems composed *of* entities with agency are as likely as any "biological system" to exhibit complexity, etc.

>>

>> As for "Russ clarifying his question", I think this can be a rhetorical device?   It has always seemed to me that Science really degenerates to "asking the right question" where when properly formulated, the "answer becomes obvious"... in some sense, I think THIS is what passes for elegance, the holy grail of scientific theory?

>

>

> --

> ☣ 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

>

 

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[Steve Smith]

Nick-

Just to be contrarian, I have to ask how much the heat, humidity and mosquito-flux of MA "shaped" the mood of your response?  I would still be tempted to suggest that those factors "informed" your mood and therefore response more than to have "shaped" them...

Just sayin'

 - Steve

On 5/25/17 9:50 PM, Steven A Smith wrote:

Nick -

I'm sorry to break into your travel plans/recovery with my (ab)use of language.  

Unfortunately I do not remember any such admonishment in the past but am happy to take it in the moment.  I can tell that this is one of your hot-buttons...  maybe right up there with dangling participles or conflation of "it's" and "its" or "there", "they're" and "their"?

I agree that "inform" is a much too fancy word for the simple act of "shaping".  As a sometimes poet, I am quite happy to use the simplest or most apt word in a given situation.

That said, I suppose I will *try* to defend my use of the word "inform" in this context.  My working definition of "inform" in this context is "to provide qualitatively unspecified input to".

Going mildly against Glen's gripe with vagueness, I would claim that "inform" is more apt than "shape" in this case and chosen partly FOR it's vagueness.   I tend to reserve "shape" for geometric and topological structures.  While weather (in this case) has geometric structures, it is highly dynamic by nature...  I am not sure that you would say that the complex feedback control system in an internal combustion engine "shapes" the dynamical characteristics of said engine, though perhaps one could say they "shape" the torque and power curves (the curves, not the dynamics themselves)?  

I'm mostly happy with restricting the use of "inform" to systems which provide "information"... in this case, the biological entities implicated in "shaping" the weather system being information inputs to the weather system?

In a simple algorithmic formulation, I suppose what I intended by "inform" was "to provide inputs relevant to" without specifying the types of inputs.  In this case, mostly adjustments to opacity, heat absorption/radiation/dispersion, and humidity.

I will concede that "inform" is a bit vague and high-faluting but won't as easily concede that "to shape" would be any more appropriate.   Perhaps we could find a yet better term?

"the implication that the complexity of weather systems was more than incidentally dependent on the biological systems that might shape them" 

doesn't really do it for me either?  Do you not agree that "shape" has strong geometric (or possibly topological) connotations which are at best coincidental to the subject of weather?

Grrr,
 - Steve

On 5/25/17 9:08 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:

Steve,

 

I have just arrived in MA in the Mosquito Infested Swamp and opened your message.  Now I realize that this message is part of a high minded correspondence on profound matters, and that you have EVERY reason to have forgotten yourself.  But STILL I want to remind you that you promised me years ago NEVER AGAIN to use the word "inform" where the word "shape" would do as well or better.  Now, having said this, it is now my duty to crawl backwards through this high-minded correspondence and try to ACTUALLY have something USEFUL to say about it.  You would think that you high-minded folks at FRIAM would at least give an old guy a few days to TRAVEL. 

 

"Inform" indeed!  Soon you'll be informing putty.  With what information will you provide that putty, as you are “informing” it.  I informed the putty with my finger so that it lay smoothly against the window pane.  I informed my friend that it was time to leave for the Friam meeting; he was like putty in my hands. 

 

Grrr

 

Nick

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

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

 

 

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam [[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Steve
Sent: Thursday, May 25, 2017 2:27 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Any non-biological complex systems?

 

And I agree completely with the idea of zooming in (enough) to be at least hunting subSnarks on a domain composed almost entirely of Snarks... ((Or Snarkbait?)

 

Beating the dead snark, I was mildly perturbed by the implication that the complexity of weather systems was more than incidentally dependent on the biological systems that might inform them (transpiration from forest or savannah, light absorption by algae, methane from cattle and termites, etc)

 

Sent from my iPhone

 

> On May 25, 2017, at 1:39 PM, glen ☣ <[hidden email]> wrote:

>

>

> I agree completely.  But if we look carefully at Russ' question:

>

>> On 05/24/2017 11:00 PM, Russ Abbott wrote:

>> Can we think of anything that is non-biological, non-human, and not a biological or human artifact that would qualify as an agent based system?

>

> And we consider the previous comments about biology creeping into (even!) weather patterns and climate, and whether complexity is invariant through the reduction to physics ... and we can even extend that to something like Smolin's fecund universe, etc ad forever, it becomes clear that we're hunting the snark.  And I suppose the wisdom of traditions like Buddhism and such, as well as the falsification/selection approach of critical rationalism, _strongly_ suggest to us what Harley Davidson tells us on a regular basis: The journey is the destination.

>

> So, rather than talk about the elusive snark, why not talk explicitly

> about the journey ... the workflow, the tools, the thing(s) right in

> front of our face/hands?  E.g. topological insulators don't look at

> all plectic to me.  So, I'd be very interested to hear why y'all think

> they are.  (By using "plectic", I'm admitting that I don't understand

> quantum physics; so sure, they're mysterious... but how are they

> complex in the way we're using the term, here?)

>

> But I'm more interested in well-defined concepts of agents than I im in well-defined concepts of complex systems.  So, what type of agents are we talking about?  Kauffman's "thermodynamic agents"?  Zero intelligence agents?  BDI-capable agents?  Etc.  These concrete details would put us squarely inside the journey and outside the destination.

>

>

>> On 05/25/2017 12:21 PM, Steven A Smith wrote:

>> MY point (at least, not trying to speak for others) was/is that "interesting", "life", and "complexity" might very well be highly superposed or even "conjugated" (to introduce an extremely overloaded technical term).

>>

>> I suppose to disambiguate, I believe that "Life" is a subset of "Complex Systems" and life in the larger sense of ALife is a larger subset of complex systems, though probably still a *proper* subset? The outer bounds of he vagueness of "Life" convolved with the inner bounds of vagueness of Complex Systems might allow them to become identical?  The question of "Interesting" seems to be sharpened (or is it dulled?) by the subjectivity of the term...  I suppose "interesting" is usually defined by being simultaneously "familiar enough to be relevant" and "unfamiliar enough to be novel".  Since we are LIfe ourselves, it seems likely that we find *life itself* at least relevant and as we expand the definition of Life it becomes more novel and interesting, up to embracing all of "complexity"... to the extent that the Alife movement expanded the consideration from biological life to proto-life and quasi-life, I'm tempted to claim that *they* would include *all* of complex systems...

>> admitting that the specific boundaries of all the above *are* vague.

>>

>> To re-iterate, I think there IS good evidence to consider "complex systems" and "life" as highly related and it seems obvious that they would be "interesting", though I suppose there should be things outside of that domain which are also obviously "interesting". Agency is another hairball to sort through and I won't attempt much except that in MY definition of Life, "Agency" is one of the qualities of proto-life.   To that extent, it would seem that complex systems composed *of* entities with agency are as likely as any "biological system" to exhibit complexity, etc.

>>

>> As for "Russ clarifying his question", I think this can be a rhetorical device?   It has always seemed to me that Science really degenerates to "asking the right question" where when properly formulated, the "answer becomes obvious"... in some sense, I think THIS is what passes for elegance, the holy grail of scientific theory?

>

>

> --

> ☣ glen

> ============================================================

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> at St. John's College to unsubscribe

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>

 

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[Steve Smith]

..

And in the spirit of beating a dead horse about the head and shoulders with a wet noodle made of well mixed metaphors, I offer the following scholarly support (I hope) for my preferred use of the term "to inform" in this case.

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/717d/bc6f72b99e7bc13a971ccf8bce4d5b4db35e.pdf

- Sieve

On 5/25/17 9:54 PM, Steven A Smith wrote:

Nick-

Just to be contrarian, I have to ask how much the heat, humidity and mosquito-flux of MA "shaped" the mood of your response?  I would still be tempted to suggest that those factors "informed" your mood and therefore response more than to have "shaped" them...

Just sayin'

 - Steve

On 5/25/17 9:50 PM, Steven A Smith wrote:

Nick -

I'm sorry to break into your travel plans/recovery with my (ab)use of language.  

Unfortunately I do not remember any such admonishment in the past but am happy to take it in the moment.  I can tell that this is one of your hot-buttons...  maybe right up there with dangling participles or conflation of "it's" and "its" or "there", "they're" and "their"?

I agree that "inform" is a much too fancy word for the simple act of "shaping".  As a sometimes poet, I am quite happy to use the simplest or most apt word in a given situation.

That said, I suppose I will *try* to defend my use of the word "inform" in this context.  My working definition of "inform" in this context is "to provide qualitatively unspecified input to".

Going mildly against Glen's gripe with vagueness, I would claim that "inform" is more apt than "shape" in this case and chosen partly FOR it's vagueness.   I tend to reserve "shape" for geometric and topological structures.  While weather (in this case) has geometric structures, it is highly dynamic by nature...  I am not sure that you would say that the complex feedback control system in an internal combustion engine "shapes" the dynamical characteristics of said engine, though perhaps one could say they "shape" the torque and power curves (the curves, not the dynamics themselves)?  

I'm mostly happy with restricting the use of "inform" to systems which provide "information"... in this case, the biological entities implicated in "shaping" the weather system being information inputs to the weather system?

In a simple algorithmic formulation, I suppose what I intended by "inform" was "to provide inputs relevant to" without specifying the types of inputs.  In this case, mostly adjustments to opacity, heat absorption/radiation/dispersion, and humidity.

I will concede that "inform" is a bit vague and high-faluting but won't as easily concede that "to shape" would be any more appropriate.   Perhaps we could find a yet better term?

"the implication that the complexity of weather systems was more than incidentally dependent on the biological systems that might shape them" 

doesn't really do it for me either?  Do you not agree that "shape" has strong geometric (or possibly topological) connotations which are at best coincidental to the subject of weather?

Grrr,
 - Steve

On 5/25/17 9:08 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:

Steve,

 

I have just arrived in MA in the Mosquito Infested Swamp and opened your message.  Now I realize that this message is part of a high minded correspondence on profound matters, and that you have EVERY reason to have forgotten yourself.  But STILL I want to remind you that you promised me years ago NEVER AGAIN to use the word "inform" where the word "shape" would do as well or better.  Now, having said this, it is now my duty to crawl backwards through this high-minded correspondence and try to ACTUALLY have something USEFUL to say about it.  You would think that you high-minded folks at FRIAM would at least give an old guy a few days to TRAVEL. 

 

"Inform" indeed!  Soon you'll be informing putty.  With what information will you provide that putty, as you are “informing” it.  I informed the putty with my finger so that it lay smoothly against the window pane.  I informed my friend that it was time to leave for the Friam meeting; he was like putty in my hands. 

 

Grrr

 

Nick

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

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

 

 

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam [[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Steve
Sent: Thursday, May 25, 2017 2:27 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Any non-biological complex systems?

 

And I agree completely with the idea of zooming in (enough) to be at least hunting subSnarks on a domain composed almost entirely of Snarks... ((Or Snarkbait?)

 

Beating the dead snark, I was mildly perturbed by the implication that the complexity of weather systems was more than incidentally dependent on the biological systems that might inform them (transpiration from forest or savannah, light absorption by algae, methane from cattle and termites, etc)

 

Sent from my iPhone

 

> On May 25, 2017, at 1:39 PM, glen ☣ <[hidden email]> wrote:

>

>

> I agree completely.  But if we look carefully at Russ' question:

>

>> On 05/24/2017 11:00 PM, Russ Abbott wrote:

>> Can we think of anything that is non-biological, non-human, and not a biological or human artifact that would qualify as an agent based system?

>

> And we consider the previous comments about biology creeping into (even!) weather patterns and climate, and whether complexity is invariant through the reduction to physics ... and we can even extend that to something like Smolin's fecund universe, etc ad forever, it becomes clear that we're hunting the snark.  And I suppose the wisdom of traditions like Buddhism and such, as well as the falsification/selection approach of critical rationalism, _strongly_ suggest to us what Harley Davidson tells us on a regular basis: The journey is the destination.

>

> So, rather than talk about the elusive snark, why not talk explicitly

> about the journey ... the workflow, the tools, the thing(s) right in

> front of our face/hands?  E.g. topological insulators don't look at

> all plectic to me.  So, I'd be very interested to hear why y'all think

> they are.  (By using "plectic", I'm admitting that I don't understand

> quantum physics; so sure, they're mysterious... but how are they

> complex in the way we're using the term, here?)

>

> But I'm more interested in well-defined concepts of agents than I im in well-defined concepts of complex systems.  So, what type of agents are we talking about?  Kauffman's "thermodynamic agents"?  Zero intelligence agents?  BDI-capable agents?  Etc.  These concrete details would put us squarely inside the journey and outside the destination.

>

>

>> On 05/25/2017 12:21 PM, Steven A Smith wrote:

>> MY point (at least, not trying to speak for others) was/is that "interesting", "life", and "complexity" might very well be highly superposed or even "conjugated" (to introduce an extremely overloaded technical term).

>>

>> I suppose to disambiguate, I believe that "Life" is a subset of "Complex Systems" and life in the larger sense of ALife is a larger subset of complex systems, though probably still a *proper* subset? The outer bounds of he vagueness of "Life" convolved with the inner bounds of vagueness of Complex Systems might allow them to become identical?  The question of "Interesting" seems to be sharpened (or is it dulled?) by the subjectivity of the term...  I suppose "interesting" is usually defined by being simultaneously "familiar enough to be relevant" and "unfamiliar enough to be novel".  Since we are LIfe ourselves, it seems likely that we find *life itself* at least relevant and as we expand the definition of Life it becomes more novel and interesting, up to embracing all of "complexity"... to the extent that the Alife movement expanded the consideration from biological life to proto-life and quasi-life, I'm tempted to claim that *they* would include *all* of complex systems...

>> admitting that the specific boundaries of all the above *are* vague.

>>

>> To re-iterate, I think there IS good evidence to consider "complex systems" and "life" as highly related and it seems obvious that they would be "interesting", though I suppose there should be things outside of that domain which are also obviously "interesting". Agency is another hairball to sort through and I won't attempt much except that in MY definition of Life, "Agency" is one of the qualities of proto-life.   To that extent, it would seem that complex systems composed *of* entities with agency are as likely as any "biological system" to exhibit complexity, etc.

>>

>> As for "Russ clarifying his question", I think this can be a rhetorical device?   It has always seemed to me that Science really degenerates to "asking the right question" where when properly formulated, the "answer becomes obvious"... in some sense, I think THIS is what passes for elegance, the holy grail of scientific theory?

>

>

> --

> ☣ glen

> ============================================================

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> at St. John's College to unsubscribe

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

>

 

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[Stephen Guerin-5]

Are there any good examples of a complex system that doesn't involve biological organisms (including human beings)?

Three most used non-biological examples I've seen are:

• ferromagnetism (described with ising model)
  
• Bénard cells (convection)
• Belousov–Zhabotinsky reaction

Practically any physical system that transacts forms of energy can have critical regimes of phase transitions and would all qualify as complex systems.

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[Marcus G. Daniels]

Stephen writes:

 

“Three most used non-biological examples I've seen are:

• ferromagnetism (described with ising model)

[..]

The Ising model is just a model, however.  Even though an Ising system can encode functions, I don’t think that arbitrary functions are found in nature.  As a ridiculous example, show me a division function that occurs as a metastable crystal in the wild.  There are some Ising model instances that would be irregular arrangements of atoms and maybe even impossible to form without an apparatus.

Marcus

 

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[Stephen Guerin-5]

Marcos writes
The Ising model is just a model, however.  

My example was the physical phenomena of ferromagnetism not the Ising model that describes it. Eg heat up a physical magnet past its critical point (Curie temperature) and the metal loses its alignment/magnetic polarity as a collective property. from wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curie_temperature:

That said, I am also interested in studying computational agent-based systems as complex systems without the need to tie them to systems in the "real-world".

On Fri, May 26, 2017 at 8:54 AM, Marcus Daniels <[hidden email]> wrote:

Stephen writes:

 

“Three most used non-biological examples I've seen are:

• ferromagnetism (described with ising model)

[..]

The Ising model is just a model, however.  Even though an Ising system can encode functions, I don’t think that arbitrary functions are found in nature.  As a ridiculous example, show me a division function that occurs as a metastable crystal in the wild.  There are some Ising model instances that would be irregular arrangements of atoms and maybe even impossible to form without an apparatus.

Marcus

 

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[Marcus G. Daniels]

Stephen writes:

 

“My example was the physical phenomena of ferromagnetism not the Ising model that describes it. Eg heat up a physical magnet past its critical point (Curie temperature) and the metal loses its alignment/magnetic polarity as a collective property.”

 

The complex things an Ising model can compute require very particular J and h values.

These values won’t occur in either regime, or if they do with infinitesimal probability and only for a moment.   Particular Ising models that perform computation can be created in classical or quantum circuits, or in photonic systems, but those are engineered by humans.   So yes metamagnetic material is complex system in a technical definition (e.g. has phase transitions) but I think not what Russ was looking for in light of his later e-mails.

 

Marcus

 

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[Stephen Guerin-5]

On Thu, May 25, 2017 at 2:25 PM, Russ Abbott <[hidden email]> wrote:

A complex system involves agents with the following properties.

• They can accumulate (and store) free energy.
  
• They have means to release that energy.
  
• They respond to (symbolic) information, i.e., symbols. By that I mean that they respond to things on the basis of their internal rules rather than as a consequence of physics or chemistry. (In other words they are autonomous in the sense that they are governed by internal rules and not just pushed around by external forces.) I'm not saying that the internal rules are not themselves run by physics and chemistry, only that the response of an agent to some information/symbol is minimally if at all connected to the physical nature of the symbol.  (A bit is a symbol. Bit representations don't matter when software looks at bit values. Similarly when you see a red traffic light you respond to the symbol red-traffic-light, not to the physical effects of the photons -- other than to translate those photons into the symbol. Software is a set of rules no matter what mechanism executes it.) Of course one of the things agents can do is to employ some of its stored energy as part of its response to a symbol.
  

The result of all this is that agents operate in two worlds: physics/chemistry and information. A system cannot be considered complex unless it includes such agents. 

I disagree with the your last statement - it is too restricting for the general field of complex systems. 

The criteria you list above are similar to what others have described as distinguishing properties for the transition from physically self-organizing systems to living systems. So if you include these conditions as necessary to be a complex system, of course, you won't be able to find physical systems that qualify as complex systems.

Example criteria others have used similar to yours:

• onboard free energy stores
• responding to information gradients instead of just force gradients
• responding to kinematic flow fields (1987 Kugler and Turvey) instead of only kinetic. Eg forces defined on information gradients not just mass-based.
• Stu's definition of an "Autonomous Agent" 
• detect gradients from which it can extract work
• construct system of constraints to extract work
• do work to maintain those constraints

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