Getting You Libertarians' Goats

[jon zingale]

Nick,

I could probably express my thoughts in *steam governor* talk, but since
this week KenP has me thinking about RNA, I will try this other tack.
Extensionally, ribosomes can be identified as functions taking RNA and
returning useful proteins for an organism. Due to the constrained nature
of the *mechanism*, only certain sequences of RNA bases correspond to
proteins. Let us think of this correspondence as giving a semantics of
sequences to proteins. Now, a virus can come along and hijack the protein
production by sending RNA messages of its own, i.e., by operating within
the constraints of the semantics and producing viable RNA sequences.

As another example, consider giving an order at a restaurant. When you
perform this task, the waiter must decode the utterance into experiences
they can reason about before they can carry out the order. More than
just a transformation of pressure waves into the action of bringing you
food, designations of meaning are non-arbitrarily selected from the
context.



--
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[Prof David West]

Nick,

" I am always troubled by the notion of "self-assembly" since the self that is

assembling is never, by definition, the self that is assembled."

By what definition? Your monist view that the self lacks ontological status in the first place?

davew

On Wed, Oct 28, 2020, at 5:48 PM, [hidden email] wrote:

> Jon,

> 

> Is a steam governor a case of downward causation?

> 

> This question will reveal, no doubt, that I don't understand  your previous

> answer, but perhaps others will explain it to me. 

> 

> I am always troubled by the notion of "self-assembly" since the self that is

> assembling is never, by definition, the self that is assembled. 

> 

> Perhaps I am getting tangled up in words again. 

> 

> n

> 

> Nicholas Thompson

> Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

> Clark University

> [hidden email]

> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

>  

> 

> 

> -----Original Message-----

> From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of jon zingale

> Sent: Wednesday, October 28, 2020 2:01 PM

> To: [hidden email]

> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Getting You Libertarians' Goats

> 

> Nick,

> 

> Let's say I have a language designed to work with sticks, where for

> instance, it makes sense to name certain relations *Triangle*. Additionally,

> let's assume that the language is detailed enough to include less obvious

> relations such as those which relate sticks to trees to soil and water.

> Would it be cheap to narrowly define *downward causation* as the

> manipulation of the world in accordance with this language to produce new

> sticks?

> 

> Consider as another example when one manipulates charge in bulk using analog

> filters. Here, a circuit designer may not need to know about spin or

> superposition or a lot of other details about the universe. In fact, the

> designer may not know how to write a "mid-frequency ranged filter" if they

> were only given a quantum mechanical view of the world. They may, however,

> know how to build such a filter if they are given appropriately shaped

> conductive surfaces and coils.

> 

> My apologies in advance if this characterization (that of reducing *downward

> causation* to manipulation of a domain-specific language) is horribly

> flawed, but I spent this much time writing a response. So, there.

> 

> 

> 

> --

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[David Eric Smith]

Very nice, Nick.

Co-larding below, but I will try to keep it short.

On Oct 28, 2020, at 11:12 PM, <[hidden email]> <[hidden email]> wrote:

Thanks Eric.

 

Some unsophisticated “larding” below.

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of David Eric Smith
Sent: Wednesday, October 28, 2020 7:35 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Getting You Libertarians' Goats

 

Hi Nick,

 

I think something causes dreams to have the narrative order they have.  Whatever it is probably is put in place by all the other functions that the brain is asked to perform, along with the many constraints on how it is possible to make a brain.  So dreams receive all that structure to take the form they do.

[NST===>I am sure that everything I am about to say is wrong, but let’s see where it goes.  Let’s say, ex hypothesi, that sleeping is for tidying up the brain and the brain cannot tidy up without generating experiences, in the say that I cannot tidy up the mess of books, bills, and papers without reading them briefly to identify them and put them in some frame of reference.  Let it be the case that this goes on all night at a tremendous speed, and even though you are experiencing, you do nothing because you are asleep.  Now, upon awakening, you catch some of this processing in progress and you remember them along with phony narrative time stamps that attach them to earlier in the night.  Dreams are an epiphenomena of the waking brain catching the sleeping brain at its work.  I think I have just created a dualist monster here.  Oh, well. <===nst]

I actually think this is fine.  What I have seen about the memory-reinforcement role believed to be served by dreams works with it well.

The point being, dreams are not creating narrative for their own sake and within their own scope.  They are inheriting structures of narrative that are there in the brain, and are part of a template as other work is being done.

I prefer that kind of example, where there are many inputs and a real thing (all the organization of the brain) that they create, which is then available to act “downwardly” on any one thing, particularly one that the structure probably wasn’t selected for.  Like, dreaming may be functional, but I’m not sure that whether dreams are entertaining would matter that much to evolutionary criteria.

 

What I prefer those examples to are the old trope of “magnetization downwardly causes spins to align”, since there is no additional thing that is “magnetization” than the aggregate effect of all the other spins.  So one hasn’t added anything by claiming “downward causation” to just saying “each spin affects all the others, and the net effect excludes entropy to the environment”.

[NST===>So am I right that the magnetization is not an emergent; it is just the aggregate effect of the spins?<===nst]

It is emergent, and it is exactly nothing more than an aggregate effect.  Both.  Because in this use of the term “emergent” there is no dependence on a notion of downward causation.

This was my life.  I use emergence daily.  I never find myself needing to use downward causation.

Best,

Eric

 

Best,

 

Eric

 

On Oct 28, 2020, at 3:48 PM, <[hidden email]> <[hidden email]> wrote:

 

The bite causes the irritation causes the itch causes the slap causes the removal of the mosquito.   And the slap causes the mosquito to be gone and relieves the irritation.  So that is definitely downward causation.  But this is all in the context of a complex organization that has already been assembled and “designed” for self maintenance.  To it begs the question I was [ineptly] trying to ask.  How do such control systems get assembled in the first place if NOT through the mediation of group selection?

 

N

 

 

I suppose that the local irritation causes the itch is upward causation, that “itch” is a state of the whole.  

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Frank Wimberly
Sent: Wednesday, October 28, 2020 1:37 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Getting You Libertarians' Goats

 

Scratching oneself?  I'm not trying to be a pain.

---
Frank C. Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz, 
Santa Fe, NM 87505

505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM

 

On Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 1:32 PM <[hidden email]> wrote:

If one allows stygmergy as a form of downward causation, I can understand it.  So I guess I am looking for the simplest kind of example of self assembly: i.e., where something of a higher order improves itself by improving the arrangement of its parts.  Or places constraints on its parts to be good for itself. There may be a thousand examples.  I just can’t think of one that doesn’t involve group selection.  

 

N

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Frank Wimberly
Sent: Wednesday, October 28, 2020 1:16 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Getting You Libertarians' Goats

 

I'm not Marcus but a classical example is mental events causing physical events.  Note the use of mental language.

---
Frank C. Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz, 
Santa Fe, NM 87505

505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM

 

On Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 1:12 PM <[hidden email]> wrote:

Marcus, 

 can't claim to understand you fully, here, but your use of the word, sovereignty, made me think you might have something to contribute to a quandary I found myself in recently.  I was on a zoom with a bunch of people.  First they talked about emergence, and I figured I understand that.  Wimsatt: a property is emergent if it is a property of a whole that depends on the order or arrangement of the parts.  So, the ability of sticks to bear weight depends  on their arrangement as triangles.   So far, so good.  But then the began to talk about "downward" causation, and I realized that I did not know, nor have I ever known, what people mean by "downward" causation.  Do you have some simple models of it in mind that even I could understand? 

Nick 
Nicholas Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
Clark University
[hidden email]
https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/



-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Marcus Daniels
Sent: Monday, September 14, 2020 9:17 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Getting You Libertarians' Goats

Using statistical mechanics to inspire a stable and universal functional form that evolves in time is one way to make a model of social systems.   But even with that for model of the physical world, there are many possible models for control systems that could layer on top of it.   If there are no shared concept types in these different models, there's nothing to do but go back to simulating the physics to determine what could happen next.   Simulating these physics takes energy that is of no discernable value to users of any one model so at some point there will be conflict over that energy.    The Libertarian claims that there is something in common between the users of these models, but it is nothing more than story that serves her purposes.   There is no reason not to violate her sovereignty if the reward/risk is acceptable.  

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of ? glen
Sent: Monday, September 14, 2020 7:18 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Getting You Libertarians' Goats

Well, sure. But the assumptions and simplifications are piling up fast. With anarcho-capitalism, I was trying to suggest a governing system that relies on as few assumptions as possible. And my sense is that social democracy relies on more assumptions (like the existence of stable functional forms).

On September 14, 2020 6:13:33 PM PDT, Marcus Daniels <[hidden email]> wrote:
>It depends whether you think of "static" as some circumscribed state or 
>"static" as a fixed functional form.  (The latter still allowing for a
>dynamical system.)   The appropriation/application of the notion of a
>"phase transition" would probably argue for the fixed functional form 
>on the basis of physics.

--
glen ⛧

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[David Eric Smith]

I want to somehow say sigh and sigh on this thread.

It comes somehow straight out of Monty Python (Blessed are the cheesemakers….)

1. Some physicists figure out how to do a calculation, showing that some parts can go dynamically into an organized state, appealing to a combination of their own shapes and laws of large numbers for events that happen, and they don’t need to have the organized form imposed by any outside boundary conditions beyond the very low-level rules for how the events are sampled.  They already knew this happens in equilibrium, because that is how anything freezes.  But here they are seeing it in a dynamical context, where the ordered form happens to be more ordered than the states they could produce from somehow-similar components in equilibrium.

2. Physicsts, like everyone, are usually impatient and don’t want to have to recite the whole operational meaning of something every time they want to refer to it in the course of saying something else.

3. So the physicists come up with a tag.  It should be sort of evocative, sort of catchy, and easy to remember.  Aha!  “Self-organization”, to keep in mind that the organization is resulting from low-level local features, and not from the boundary conditions imposed on the system beyond that local stuff.

4. Nick encounters the term.  It happens to contain two words about which he cares very very much, so to him they are not mere hackage generated by some physicists, but freighted with meaning.

5. Nick starts a thread: Which self?  Is it the same self before and after?  Is “organized” here a transitive or an intransitive verb?  If transitive, what is the object?  Can the same referent be both object and subject of a transitive verb?  Does that make the verb reflexive?  What are the implications for monists?  For dualists?

6. Friam is willing to engage.

7.  I write a long tedious email, trying to remind the humanists that the most important character trait of physicists is impatience.  

Eric

On Oct 29, 2020, at 10:03 AM, Prof David West <[hidden email]> wrote:

Nick,

" I am always troubled by the notion of "self-assembly" since the self that is

assembling is never, by definition, the self that is assembled."

By what definition? Your monist view that the self lacks ontological status in the first place?

davew

On Wed, Oct 28, 2020, at 5:48 PM, [hidden email] wrote:

> Jon,

> 

> Is a steam governor a case of downward causation?

> 

> This question will reveal, no doubt, that I don't understand  your previous

> answer, but perhaps others will explain it to me. 

> 

> I am always troubled by the notion of "self-assembly" since the self that is

> assembling is never, by definition, the self that is assembled. 

> 

> Perhaps I am getting tangled up in words again. 

> 

> n

> 

> Nicholas Thompson

> Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

> Clark University

> [hidden email]

> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

>  

> 

> 

> -----Original Message-----

> From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of jon zingale

> Sent: Wednesday, October 28, 2020 2:01 PM

> To: [hidden email]

> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Getting You Libertarians' Goats

> 

> Nick,

> 

> Let's say I have a language designed to work with sticks, where for

> instance, it makes sense to name certain relations *Triangle*. Additionally,

> let's assume that the language is detailed enough to include less obvious

> relations such as those which relate sticks to trees to soil and water.

> Would it be cheap to narrowly define *downward causation* as the

> manipulation of the world in accordance with this language to produce new

> sticks?

> 

> Consider as another example when one manipulates charge in bulk using analog

> filters. Here, a circuit designer may not need to know about spin or

> superposition or a lot of other details about the universe. In fact, the

> designer may not know how to write a "mid-frequency ranged filter" if they

> were only given a quantum mechanical view of the world. They may, however,

> know how to build such a filter if they are given appropriately shaped

> conductive surfaces and coils.

> 

> My apologies in advance if this characterization (that of reducing *downward

> causation* to manipulation of a domain-specific language) is horribly

> flawed, but I spent this much time writing a response. So, there.

> 

> 

> 

> --

> Sent from: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/

> 

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> 

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[Steve Smith]

Eric Smith wrote:

  Dreams are an epiphenomena of the waking brain catching the sleeping brain at its work.  I think I have just created a dualist monster here.  Oh, well. <===nst]

I actually think this is fine.  What I have seen about the memory-reinforcement role believed to be served by dreams works with it well.

I have always liked the "just so" story that dreams serve as a forum for "untangling" the tangles left from the day's weaving of webs that humans seem to do.  Like braiding a set of cords and having to pause every few dozen braidings to untangle the ends of the cords (the counter-braid).    In a more modern idiom, I think of it as a refactoring process.  Or following Piaget's structural theory of learning convolved with CS201 topics, it is a rebalancing of "trees" as we hang more and more stuff on them in our daily experiences.

The point being, dreams are not creating narrative for their own sake and within their own scope.  They are inheriting structures of narrative that are there in the brain, and are part of a template as other work is being done.

Yes, like that.

I prefer that kind of example, where there are many inputs and a real thing (all the organization of the brain) that they create, which is then available to act “downwardly” on any one thing, particularly one that the structure probably wasn’t selected for.  Like, dreaming may be functional, but I’m not sure that whether dreams are entertaining would matter that much to evolutionary criteria.

 

What I prefer those examples to are the old trope of “magnetization downwardly causes spins to align”, since there is no additional thing that is “magnetization” than the aggregate effect of all the other spins.  So one hasn’t added anything by claiming “downward causation” to just saying “each spin affects all the others, and the net effect excludes entropy to the environment”.

[NST===>So am I right that the magnetization is not an emergent; it is just the aggregate effect of the spins?<===nst]

It is emergent, and it is exactly nothing more than an aggregate effect.  Both.  Because in this use of the term “emergent” there is no dependence on a notion of downward causation.

This was my life.  I use emergence daily.  I never find myself needing to use downward causation.

Following DaveW's commentary, I suppose I think of "Emergence" as being about ontological status.   When a jizillion air molecules (with suspended dust and water droplets) begin to (self?) organize into a vortex, there is some point at which we want to call it a whirlwind/funnel-cloud/tornado/tropical storm/hurricane.   And in fact, the collective action of those molecules/particles/droplets is dominated by the vortex's properties with the components' properties less important?   But when/how does this transition happen?  Is it always a recognizable phase transition of some sort?  

I admit to finding "self-organization" "emergence" "ontological status" "downward causation" and "auopoesis" to be very (but wonderfully) mysterious...   I think it was recently that someone (SteveG) made the point that the central theme of any study is the term which is most in contention (Consciousness, Art, Governance, etc.).  Perhaps by definition, the central object of study (or constellation thereof) is the one thing left to be under-specified... otherwise why would we be studying it?

- Steve

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[thompnickson2]

Sorry everybody.  I seem to be out of my depth in  many pools at once.

 

I really like Eric’s analysis. 

 

I still want to protest abit.  I think the dynamic relation between the physical concept  and the physicist’s humanistic metaphor is much more interesting than this analysis would suggest.  Physicists use those metaphors for a reasons, cognitive and communicatory.  And humanists are right to explore their implications.  Otherwise, it would be fair for the humanist to turn to the physicist and say, “Shut up and calculate.”

 

The paradox of development (AKA epigenisis) is that there are all sorts of futures that can be known pretty precisely about a developing individual yet they are totally unknown to the individual that is developing.  It has to do with our discussion of intenSion, a few months back.

 

It may also be time for one of you to be delegated to “elder” me, in the quaker tradition.  “Now, Nick, ….”

 

N .

 

N

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of David Eric Smith
Sent: Thursday, October 29, 2020 10:00 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Getting You Libertarians' Goats

 

I want to somehow say sigh and sigh on this thread.

 

It comes somehow straight out of Monty Python (Blessed are the cheesemakers….)

 

1. Some physicists figure out how to do a calculation, showing that some parts can go dynamically into an organized state, appealing to a combination of their own shapes and laws of large numbers for events that happen, and they don’t need to have the organized form imposed by any outside boundary conditions beyond the very low-level rules for how the events are sampled.  They already knew this happens in equilibrium, because that is how anything freezes.  But here they are seeing it in a dynamical context, where the ordered form happens to be more ordered than the states they could produce from somehow-similar components in equilibrium.

 

2. Physicsts, like everyone, are usually impatient and don’t want to have to recite the whole operational meaning of something every time they want to refer to it in the course of saying something else.

 

3. So the physicists come up with a tag.  It should be sort of evocative, sort of catchy, and easy to remember.  Aha!  “Self-organization”, to keep in mind that the organization is resulting from low-level local features, and not from the boundary conditions imposed on the system beyond that local stuff.

 

4. Nick encounters the term.  It happens to contain two words about which he cares very very much, so to him they are not mere hackage generated by some physicists, but freighted with meaning.

 

5. Nick starts a thread: Which self?  Is it the same self before and after?  Is “organized” here a transitive or an intransitive verb?  If transitive, what is the object?  Can the same referent be both object and subject of a transitive verb?  Does that make the verb reflexive?  What are the implications for monists?  For dualists?

 

6. Friam is willing to engage.

 

7.  I write a long tedious email, trying to remind the humanists that the most important character trait of physicists is impatience.  

 

Eric

 

 

On Oct 29, 2020, at 10:03 AM, Prof David West <[hidden email]> wrote:

 

Nick,

 

" I am always troubled by the notion of "self-assembly" since the self that is

assembling is never, by definition, the self that is assembled."

 

By what definition? Your monist view that the self lacks ontological status in the first place?

 

davew

 

 

On Wed, Oct 28, 2020, at 5:48 PM, [hidden email] wrote:

> Jon,

> 

> Is a steam governor a case of downward causation?

> 

> This question will reveal, no doubt, that I don't understand  your previous

> answer, but perhaps others will explain it to me. 

> 

> I am always troubled by the notion of "self-assembly" since the self that is

> assembling is never, by definition, the self that is assembled. 

> 

> Perhaps I am getting tangled up in words again. 

> 

> n

> 

> Nicholas Thompson

> Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

> Clark University

> [hidden email]

> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

>  

> 

> 

> -----Original Message-----

> From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of jon zingale

> Sent: Wednesday, October 28, 2020 2:01 PM

> To: [hidden email]

> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Getting You Libertarians' Goats

> 

> Nick,

> 

> Let's say I have a language designed to work with sticks, where for

> instance, it makes sense to name certain relations *Triangle*. Additionally,

> let's assume that the language is detailed enough to include less obvious

> relations such as those which relate sticks to trees to soil and water.

> Would it be cheap to narrowly define *downward causation* as the

> manipulation of the world in accordance with this language to produce new

> sticks?

> 

> Consider as another example when one manipulates charge in bulk using analog

> filters. Here, a circuit designer may not need to know about spin or

> superposition or a lot of other details about the universe. In fact, the

> designer may not know how to write a "mid-frequency ranged filter" if they

> were only given a quantum mechanical view of the world. They may, however,

> know how to build such a filter if they are given appropriately shaped

> conductive surfaces and coils.

> 

> My apologies in advance if this characterization (that of reducing *downward

> causation* to manipulation of a domain-specific language) is horribly

> flawed, but I spent this much time writing a response. So, there.

> 

> 

> 

> --

> Sent from: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/

> 

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[gepr]

What can you possibly mean by "totally unknown"? EricS' reference to freezing doesn't imply that the thing frozen "knows" anything about being frozen. It's simply a state, in a space, where some other states in that space are unreachable. Anthropomorphizing to dreaming humans adds that higher order reflective layer, executive, or enteroceptive process that isn't necessary for *most* conversations about emergence.


On 10/29/20 10:20 AM, [hidden email] wrote:
> The paradox of development (AKA epigenisis) is that there are all sorts of futures that can be known pretty precisely about a developing individual yet they are totally unknown to the individual that is developing.  It has to do with our discussion of inten*/S/*ion, a few months back.

--
↙↙↙ uǝlƃ

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[David Eric Smith]

I’m actually quite on board with your wish to make these questions more interesting than they may have started out, Nick.

And I also think you are right that the namers meant the names to carry weight.  (Though I also think most thought is a bit hurried and careless, and gives itself more credit than is earned.)

The interesting struggle will be that the original calculation was in a way rather small, compared to the metaphor that many hope can be spun from it.

Or perhaps said another way, maybe many of these things that have weight to compel as we experience them in life, are pointers to little mechanics below the surface that, in its own terms, is a small thing.

I know that in each paper I write, I imagine getting at a big idea, and realize that the most I have done is a small calculation.  So there is a foot in each boat….

Best,

Eric

On Oct 29, 2020, at 1:20 PM, <[hidden email]> <[hidden email]> wrote:

Sorry everybody.  I seem to be out of my depth in  many pools at once.

 

I really like Eric’s analysis. 

 

I still want to protest abit.  I think the dynamic relation between the physical concept  and the physicist’s humanistic metaphor is much more interesting than this analysis would suggest.  Physicists use those metaphors for a reasons, cognitive and communicatory.  And humanists are right to explore their implications.  Otherwise, it would be fair for the humanist to turn to the physicist and say, “Shut up and calculate.”

 

The paradox of development (AKA epigenisis) is that there are all sorts of futures that can be known pretty precisely about a developing individual yet they are totally unknown to the individual that is developing.  It has to do with our discussion of intenSion, a few months back.

 

It may also be time for one of you to be delegated to “elder” me, in the quaker tradition.  “Now, Nick, ….”

 

N .

 

N

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of David Eric Smith
Sent: Thursday, October 29, 2020 10:00 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Getting You Libertarians' Goats

 

I want to somehow say sigh and sigh on this thread.

 

It comes somehow straight out of Monty Python (Blessed are the cheesemakers….)

 

1. Some physicists figure out how to do a calculation, showing that some parts can go dynamically into an organized state, appealing to a combination of their own shapes and laws of large numbers for events that happen, and they don’t need to have the organized form imposed by any outside boundary conditions beyond the very low-level rules for how the events are sampled.  They already knew this happens in equilibrium, because that is how anything freezes.  But here they are seeing it in a dynamical context, where the ordered form happens to be more ordered than the states they could produce from somehow-similar components in equilibrium.

 

2. Physicsts, like everyone, are usually impatient and don’t want to have to recite the whole operational meaning of something every time they want to refer to it in the course of saying something else.

 

3. So the physicists come up with a tag.  It should be sort of evocative, sort of catchy, and easy to remember.  Aha!  “Self-organization”, to keep in mind that the organization is resulting from low-level local features, and not from the boundary conditions imposed on the system beyond that local stuff.

 

4. Nick encounters the term.  It happens to contain two words about which he cares very very much, so to him they are not mere hackage generated by some physicists, but freighted with meaning.

 

5. Nick starts a thread: Which self?  Is it the same self before and after?  Is “organized” here a transitive or an intransitive verb?  If transitive, what is the object?  Can the same referent be both object and subject of a transitive verb?  Does that make the verb reflexive?  What are the implications for monists?  For dualists?

 

6. Friam is willing to engage.

 

7.  I write a long tedious email, trying to remind the humanists that the most important character trait of physicists is impatience.  

 

Eric

 

 

On Oct 29, 2020, at 10:03 AM, Prof David West <[hidden email]> wrote:

 

Nick,

 

" I am always troubled by the notion of "self-assembly" since the self that is

assembling is never, by definition, the self that is assembled."

 

By what definition? Your monist view that the self lacks ontological status in the first place?

 

davew

 

 

On Wed, Oct 28, 2020, at 5:48 PM, [hidden email] wrote:

> Jon,

> 

> Is a steam governor a case of downward causation?

> 

> This question will reveal, no doubt, that I don't understand  your previous

> answer, but perhaps others will explain it to me. 

> 

> I am always troubled by the notion of "self-assembly" since the self that is

> assembling is never, by definition, the self that is assembled. 

> 

> Perhaps I am getting tangled up in words again. 

> 

> n

> 

> Nicholas Thompson

> Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

> Clark University

> [hidden email]

> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

>  

> 

> 

> -----Original Message-----

> From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of jon zingale

> Sent: Wednesday, October 28, 2020 2:01 PM

> To: [hidden email]

> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Getting You Libertarians' Goats

> 

> Nick,

> 

> Let's say I have a language designed to work with sticks, where for

> instance, it makes sense to name certain relations *Triangle*. Additionally,

> let's assume that the language is detailed enough to include less obvious

> relations such as those which relate sticks to trees to soil and water.

> Would it be cheap to narrowly define *downward causation* as the

> manipulation of the world in accordance with this language to produce new

> sticks?

> 

> Consider as another example when one manipulates charge in bulk using analog

> filters. Here, a circuit designer may not need to know about spin or

> superposition or a lot of other details about the universe. In fact, the

> designer may not know how to write a "mid-frequency ranged filter" if they

> were only given a quantum mechanical view of the world. They may, however,

> know how to build such a filter if they are given appropriately shaped

> conductive surfaces and coils.

> 

> My apologies in advance if this characterization (that of reducing *downward

> causation* to manipulation of a domain-specific language) is horribly

> flawed, but I spent this much time writing a response. So, there.

> 

> 

> 

> --

> Sent from: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/

> 

> - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. .

> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv

> Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6  bit.ly/virtualfriam un/subscribe

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

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

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> 

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[thompnickson2]

Thanks, Eric,

 

I like that.

 

So long as the humanist does not get to say “Shut up and Calculate” and the physicist to say, “Of Course they aren’t strings, you idiot!”.  So long as it’s left dynamic. 

 

Hywel and I used to repeat this dialogue about once or twice a year.  He would be explaining some bit of particle physics to me in pen and ink on elegant pad he always carried around with him, and he would say “This particle wants to do this, and that particle wants to do that!” and I would soon be drowning.  At some point, I would thank him, and say, “So you confirm what I have always believed: that Psychology is the mother of all sciences.”

Nick

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of David Eric Smith
Sent: Thursday, October 29, 2020 11:32 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Getting You Libertarians' Goats

 

I’m actually quite on board with your wish to make these questions more interesting than they may have started out, Nick.

 

And I also think you are right that the namers meant the names to carry weight.  (Though I also think most thought is a bit hurried and careless, and gives itself more credit than is earned.)

 

The interesting struggle will be that the original calculation was in a way rather small, compared to the metaphor that many hope can be spun from it.

 

Or perhaps said another way, maybe many of these things that have weight to compel as we experience them in life, are pointers to little mechanics below the surface that, in its own terms, is a small thing.

 

I know that in each paper I write, I imagine getting at a big idea, and realize that the most I have done is a small calculation.  So there is a foot in each boat….

 

Best,

 

Eric

 

On Oct 29, 2020, at 1:20 PM, <[hidden email]> <[hidden email]> wrote:

 

Sorry everybody.  I seem to be out of my depth in  many pools at once.

 

I really like Eric’s analysis. 

 

I still want to protest abit.  I think the dynamic relation between the physical concept  and the physicist’s humanistic metaphor is much more interesting than this analysis would suggest.  Physicists use those metaphors for a reasons, cognitive and communicatory.  And humanists are right to explore their implications.  Otherwise, it would be fair for the humanist to turn to the physicist and say, “Shut up and calculate.”

 

The paradox of development (AKA epigenisis) is that there are all sorts of futures that can be known pretty precisely about a developing individual yet they are totally unknown to the individual that is developing.  It has to do with our discussion of intenSion, a few months back.

 

It may also be time for one of you to be delegated to “elder” me, in the quaker tradition.  “Now, Nick, ….”

 

N .

 

N

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of David Eric Smith
Sent: Thursday, October 29, 2020 10:00 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Getting You Libertarians' Goats

 

I want to somehow say sigh and sigh on this thread.

 

It comes somehow straight out of Monty Python (Blessed are the cheesemakers….)

 

1. Some physicists figure out how to do a calculation, showing that some parts can go dynamically into an organized state, appealing to a combination of their own shapes and laws of large numbers for events that happen, and they don’t need to have the organized form imposed by any outside boundary conditions beyond the very low-level rules for how the events are sampled.  They already knew this happens in equilibrium, because that is how anything freezes.  But here they are seeing it in a dynamical context, where the ordered form happens to be more ordered than the states they could produce from somehow-similar components in equilibrium.

 

2. Physicsts, like everyone, are usually impatient and don’t want to have to recite the whole operational meaning of something every time they want to refer to it in the course of saying something else.

 

3. So the physicists come up with a tag.  It should be sort of evocative, sort of catchy, and easy to remember.  Aha!  “Self-organization”, to keep in mind that the organization is resulting from low-level local features, and not from the boundary conditions imposed on the system beyond that local stuff.

 

4. Nick encounters the term.  It happens to contain two words about which he cares very very much, so to him they are not mere hackage generated by some physicists, but freighted with meaning.

 

5. Nick starts a thread: Which self?  Is it the same self before and after?  Is “organized” here a transitive or an intransitive verb?  If transitive, what is the object?  Can the same referent be both object and subject of a transitive verb?  Does that make the verb reflexive?  What are the implications for monists?  For dualists?

 

6. Friam is willing to engage.

 

7.  I write a long tedious email, trying to remind the humanists that the most important character trait of physicists is impatience.  

 

Eric

 

 

On Oct 29, 2020, at 10:03 AM, Prof David West <[hidden email]> wrote:

 

Nick,

 

" I am always troubled by the notion of "self-assembly" since the self that is

assembling is never, by definition, the self that is assembled."

 

By what definition? Your monist view that the self lacks ontological status in the first place?

 

davew

 

 

On Wed, Oct 28, 2020, at 5:48 PM, [hidden email] wrote:

> Jon,

> 

> Is a steam governor a case of downward causation?

> 

> This question will reveal, no doubt, that I don't understand  your previous

> answer, but perhaps others will explain it to me. 

> 

> I am always troubled by the notion of "self-assembly" since the self that is

> assembling is never, by definition, the self that is assembled. 

> 

> Perhaps I am getting tangled up in words again. 

> 

> n

> 

> Nicholas Thompson

> Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

> Clark University

> [hidden email]

> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

>  

> 

> 

> -----Original Message-----

> From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of jon zingale

> Sent: Wednesday, October 28, 2020 2:01 PM

> To: [hidden email]

> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Getting You Libertarians' Goats

> 

> Nick,

> 

> Let's say I have a language designed to work with sticks, where for

> instance, it makes sense to name certain relations *Triangle*. Additionally,

> let's assume that the language is detailed enough to include less obvious

> relations such as those which relate sticks to trees to soil and water.

> Would it be cheap to narrowly define *downward causation* as the

> manipulation of the world in accordance with this language to produce new

> sticks?

> 

> Consider as another example when one manipulates charge in bulk using analog

> filters. Here, a circuit designer may not need to know about spin or

> superposition or a lot of other details about the universe. In fact, the

> designer may not know how to write a "mid-frequency ranged filter" if they

> were only given a quantum mechanical view of the world. They may, however,

> know how to build such a filter if they are given appropriately shaped

> conductive surfaces and coils.

> 

> My apologies in advance if this characterization (that of reducing *downward

> causation* to manipulation of a domain-specific language) is horribly

> flawed, but I spent this much time writing a response. So, there.

> 

> 

> 

> --

> Sent from: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/

> 

> - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. .

> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv

> Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6  bit.ly/virtualfriam un/subscribe

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

> archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/

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

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[thompnickson2]

Dave,

 

Ontology, schmontology.  As others have pointed out, mine is just a trivial logical point.   Let the self (Sx) be any kind of thing (Tx) at all.  Let assembly be a process of putting things together to make a new thing.  S1 + T1 = S2 + T2 = etc.  At each point the self that is assembled is not the self that is assembling, no?  I think, on the whole, it would be better if we spoke not of self assembly, but of scaffolding where something external to the structure being formed, facilitates the formation of the structure.  So at each stage in the assembly, the previous stage “scaffolds” the next.  White smokers scaffolded the formation of life. Life scaffolded the further evolution of life.  The genome is a scaffold for natural selection. 

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Prof David West
Sent: Thursday, October 29, 2020 8:04 AM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Getting You Libertarians' Goats

 

Nick,

 

" I am always troubled by the notion of "self-assembly" since the self that is

assembling is never, by definition, the self that is assembled."

 

By what definition? Your monist view that the self lacks ontological status in the first place?

 

davew

 

 

On Wed, Oct 28, 2020, at 5:48 PM, [hidden email] wrote:

> Jon,

> 

> Is a steam governor a case of downward causation?

> 

> This question will reveal, no doubt, that I don't understand  your previous

> answer, but perhaps others will explain it to me. 

> 

> I am always troubled by the notion of "self-assembly" since the self that is

> assembling is never, by definition, the self that is assembled. 

> 

> Perhaps I am getting tangled up in words again. 

> 

> n

> 

> Nicholas Thompson

> Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

> Clark University

> [hidden email]

> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

>  

> 

> 

> -----Original Message-----

> From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of jon zingale

> Sent: Wednesday, October 28, 2020 2:01 PM

> To: [hidden email]

> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Getting You Libertarians' Goats

> 

> Nick,

> 

> Let's say I have a language designed to work with sticks, where for

> instance, it makes sense to name certain relations *Triangle*. Additionally,

> let's assume that the language is detailed enough to include less obvious

> relations such as those which relate sticks to trees to soil and water.

> Would it be cheap to narrowly define *downward causation* as the

> manipulation of the world in accordance with this language to produce new

> sticks?

> 

> Consider as another example when one manipulates charge in bulk using analog

> filters. Here, a circuit designer may not need to know about spin or

> superposition or a lot of other details about the universe. In fact, the

> designer may not know how to write a "mid-frequency ranged filter" if they

> were only given a quantum mechanical view of the world. They may, however,

> know how to build such a filter if they are given appropriately shaped

> conductive surfaces and coils.

> 

> My apologies in advance if this characterization (that of reducing *downward

> causation* to manipulation of a domain-specific language) is horribly

> flawed, but I spent this much time writing a response. So, there.

> 

> 

> 

> --

> Sent from: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/

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[David Eric Smith]

But that’s exactly not the set of relations they want to invoke with the word “self-organization”.  Not organization imposed by a scaffold.  Organization that reflects a loss of access to a large subset of arrangements, for reasons that appeal only to the “ordinary” local properties of the system that you already knew, but that have consequences for very non-local regularities that the small-scale features don’t seem to be “about”.

Things get interesting when we get to viral capsids.  They exploit properties of statistical mechanics that enable you, by controlling the shape and surface properties of some small, rigid proteins, to manage the assembly of quite large and structured ribonucleoprotein complexes.  On the other hand, the information-carrying library that ensures those coat proteins will have forms that do assemble with functional consequences, is an outcome of Bayesian filtering according to regularities in environments.

So there is a part that uses the mechanics of "self-organization”, but only for the rightly-configured participants.  Chance favors the prepared mind.  The gods help those who help themselves (or in this case, the gods set those up to help themselves).

Eric

On Oct 29, 2020, at 3:39 PM, <[hidden email]> <[hidden email]> wrote:

Dave, 

 

Ontology, schmontology.  As others have pointed out, mine is just a trivial logical point.   Let the self (Sx) be any kind of thing (Tx) at all.  Let assembly be a process of putting things together to make a new thing.  S1 + T1 = S2 + T2 = etc.  At each point the self that is assembled is not the self that is assembling, no?  I think, on the whole, it would be better if we spoke not of self assembly, but of scaffolding where something external to the structure being formed, facilitates the formation of the structure.  So at each stage in the assembly, the previous stage “scaffolds” the next.  White smokers scaffolded the formation of life. Life scaffolded the further evolution of life.  The genome is a scaffold for natural selection.  

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Prof David West
Sent: Thursday, October 29, 2020 8:04 AM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Getting You Libertarians' Goats

 

Nick,

 

" I am always troubled by the notion of "self-assembly" since the self that is

assembling is never, by definition, the self that is assembled."

 

By what definition? Your monist view that the self lacks ontological status in the first place?

 

davew

 

 

On Wed, Oct 28, 2020, at 5:48 PM, [hidden email] wrote:

> Jon,

> 

> Is a steam governor a case of downward causation?

> 

> This question will reveal, no doubt, that I don't understand  your previous

> answer, but perhaps others will explain it to me. 

> 

> I am always troubled by the notion of "self-assembly" since the self that is

> assembling is never, by definition, the self that is assembled. 

> 

> Perhaps I am getting tangled up in words again. 

> 

> n

> 

> Nicholas Thompson

> Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

> Clark University

> [hidden email]

> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

>  

> 

> 

> -----Original Message-----

> From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of jon zingale

> Sent: Wednesday, October 28, 2020 2:01 PM

> To: [hidden email]

> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Getting You Libertarians' Goats

> 

> Nick,

> 

> Let's say I have a language designed to work with sticks, where for

> instance, it makes sense to name certain relations *Triangle*. Additionally,

> let's assume that the language is detailed enough to include less obvious

> relations such as those which relate sticks to trees to soil and water.

> Would it be cheap to narrowly define *downward causation* as the

> manipulation of the world in accordance with this language to produce new

> sticks?

> 

> Consider as another example when one manipulates charge in bulk using analog

> filters. Here, a circuit designer may not need to know about spin or

> superposition or a lot of other details about the universe. In fact, the

> designer may not know how to write a "mid-frequency ranged filter" if they

> were only given a quantum mechanical view of the world. They may, however,

> know how to build such a filter if they are given appropriately shaped

> conductive surfaces and coils.

> 

> My apologies in advance if this characterization (that of reducing *downward

> causation* to manipulation of a domain-specific language) is horribly

> flawed, but I spent this much time writing a response. So, there.

> 

> 

> 

> --

> Sent from: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/

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[Eric Charles-2]

I agree with everything said in there email focusing on:

And I also think you are right that the namers meant the names to carry weight.  (Though I also think most thought is a bit hurried and careless, and gives itself more credit than is earned.)

However, as I am fond of saying: It's worse than that.

They aren't just picking the names to carry weight, the are picking the names exactly to try to gain traction off of how sexy it sounds, even when they know they know that they would deny all the sexy implications if pressed. And it doesn't bother them that anyone hearing the term will think the phenomenon is sexier than it actually is, because that is a feature, not a bug. 

There is a reason Dawkins titled his book "The Selfish Gene" rather than "Things that stay around are things that stayed around."

There is a reason people called it "superstring theory" instead of "High-dimensional math you will never understand and which we might never be able to test." 

It wasn't JUST about verbal expedience or rushed thinking. If you wanted expedience you would just label it Theory Option 78, or TO78 if you wanted it even shorter. You could do that, sure, but it would never get you a mention on Freakonomics radio. 

On Thu, Oct 29, 2020, 1:32 PM David Eric Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

I’m actually quite on board with your wish to make these questions more interesting than they may have started out, Nick.

And I also think you are right that the namers meant the names to carry weight.  (Though I also think most thought is a bit hurried and careless, and gives itself more credit than is earned.)

The interesting struggle will be that the original calculation was in a way rather small, compared to the metaphor that many hope can be spun from it.

Or perhaps said another way, maybe many of these things that have weight to compel as we experience them in life, are pointers to little mechanics below the surface that, in its own terms, is a small thing.

I know that in each paper I write, I imagine getting at a big idea, and realize that the most I have done is a small calculation.  So there is a foot in each boat….

Best,

Eric

On Oct 29, 2020, at 1:20 PM, <[hidden email]> <[hidden email]> wrote:

Sorry everybody.  I seem to be out of my depth in  many pools at once.

 

I really like Eric’s analysis. 

 

I still want to protest abit.  I think the dynamic relation between the physical concept  and the physicist’s humanistic metaphor is much more interesting than this analysis would suggest.  Physicists use those metaphors for a reasons, cognitive and communicatory.  And humanists are right to explore their implications.  Otherwise, it would be fair for the humanist to turn to the physicist and say, “Shut up and calculate.”

 

The paradox of development (AKA epigenisis) is that there are all sorts of futures that can be known pretty precisely about a developing individual yet they are totally unknown to the individual that is developing.  It has to do with our discussion of intenSion, a few months back.

 

It may also be time for one of you to be delegated to “elder” me, in the quaker tradition.  “Now, Nick, ….”

 

N .

 

N

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of David Eric Smith
Sent: Thursday, October 29, 2020 10:00 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Getting You Libertarians' Goats

 

I want to somehow say sigh and sigh on this thread.

 

It comes somehow straight out of Monty Python (Blessed are the cheesemakers….)

 

1. Some physicists figure out how to do a calculation, showing that some parts can go dynamically into an organized state, appealing to a combination of their own shapes and laws of large numbers for events that happen, and they don’t need to have the organized form imposed by any outside boundary conditions beyond the very low-level rules for how the events are sampled.  They already knew this happens in equilibrium, because that is how anything freezes.  But here they are seeing it in a dynamical context, where the ordered form happens to be more ordered than the states they could produce from somehow-similar components in equilibrium.

 

2. Physicsts, like everyone, are usually impatient and don’t want to have to recite the whole operational meaning of something every time they want to refer to it in the course of saying something else.

 

3. So the physicists come up with a tag.  It should be sort of evocative, sort of catchy, and easy to remember.  Aha!  “Self-organization”, to keep in mind that the organization is resulting from low-level local features, and not from the boundary conditions imposed on the system beyond that local stuff.

 

4. Nick encounters the term.  It happens to contain two words about which he cares very very much, so to him they are not mere hackage generated by some physicists, but freighted with meaning.

 

5. Nick starts a thread: Which self?  Is it the same self before and after?  Is “organized” here a transitive or an intransitive verb?  If transitive, what is the object?  Can the same referent be both object and subject of a transitive verb?  Does that make the verb reflexive?  What are the implications for monists?  For dualists?

 

6. Friam is willing to engage.

 

7.  I write a long tedious email, trying to remind the humanists that the most important character trait of physicists is impatience.  

 

Eric

 

 

On Oct 29, 2020, at 10:03 AM, Prof David West <[hidden email]> wrote:

 

Nick,

 

" I am always troubled by the notion of "self-assembly" since the self that is

assembling is never, by definition, the self that is assembled."

 

By what definition? Your monist view that the self lacks ontological status in the first place?

 

davew

 

 

On Wed, Oct 28, 2020, at 5:48 PM, [hidden email] wrote:

> Jon,

> 

> Is a steam governor a case of downward causation?

> 

> This question will reveal, no doubt, that I don't understand  your previous

> answer, but perhaps others will explain it to me. 

> 

> I am always troubled by the notion of "self-assembly" since the self that is

> assembling is never, by definition, the self that is assembled. 

> 

> Perhaps I am getting tangled up in words again. 

> 

> n

> 

> Nicholas Thompson

> Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

> Clark University

> [hidden email]

> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

>  

> 

> 

> -----Original Message-----

> From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of jon zingale

> Sent: Wednesday, October 28, 2020 2:01 PM

> To: [hidden email]

> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Getting You Libertarians' Goats

> 

> Nick,

> 

> Let's say I have a language designed to work with sticks, where for

> instance, it makes sense to name certain relations *Triangle*. Additionally,

> let's assume that the language is detailed enough to include less obvious

> relations such as those which relate sticks to trees to soil and water.

> Would it be cheap to narrowly define *downward causation* as the

> manipulation of the world in accordance with this language to produce new

> sticks?

> 

> Consider as another example when one manipulates charge in bulk using analog

> filters. Here, a circuit designer may not need to know about spin or

> superposition or a lot of other details about the universe. In fact, the

> designer may not know how to write a "mid-frequency ranged filter" if they

> were only given a quantum mechanical view of the world. They may, however,

> know how to build such a filter if they are given appropriately shaped

> conductive surfaces and coils.

> 

> My apologies in advance if this characterization (that of reducing *downward

> causation* to manipulation of a domain-specific language) is horribly

> flawed, but I spent this much time writing a response. So, there.

> 

> 

> 

> --

> Sent from: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/

> 

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[David Eric Smith]

Yeah, on one hand (they are) guilty as charged.

On the other hand, nah, only mathematicians name things in gzip so that the names are maximally compressed.  (By which I mean, referring to every theorem by the name of whoever proved it, so you have not a clue what it is about.)  I wish I could bring to mind some lines in textbooks from my freshman or sophomore algebra classes, where at the end of a long and completely uninterpretable sentence, the author wrapped with “to which we apply a theorem of Darbou.”  My friends and I, all getting bombed out of existence by the course, hit that line and shook our heads in unison.  Laughing in the way that late at night ends up in crying.  While I can’t remember what the rest of the topic was, I can still summon the feeling of hopelessness as if it were yesterday.  (It may have been yesterday; what was I trying to read that day?….)

In that respect, I am fine with “flavor SU(3) and color SU(3)”, and do not have trouble remembering which is which.

Also, surely superstrings aren’t as cynical and  Machiavellian as you suggest, right?  There was a symmetry that was encompassing enough that it applied in parallel across all the other symmetries known at the time, and so they called it supersymmetry.  In a Germanic language that doesn’t seem evil.  When applied to gravity it wound up as super-gravity (not that it was better).  I guess, like teenagers say when explaining to their parents, one thing led to another, and now I really need to get to a clinic.

I do wish you had been Dawkins’s publisher, though.  _That_ would have been a title.

EricS

On Oct 29, 2020, at 5:07 PM, Eric Charles <[hidden email]> wrote:

I agree with everything said in there email focusing on:

And I also think you are right that the namers meant the names to carry weight.  (Though I also think most thought is a bit hurried and careless, and gives itself more credit than is earned.)

However, as I am fond of saying: It's worse than that.

They aren't just picking the names to carry weight, the are picking the names exactly to try to gain traction off of how sexy it sounds, even when they know they know that they would deny all the sexy implications if pressed. And it doesn't bother them that anyone hearing the term will think the phenomenon is sexier than it actually is, because that is a feature, not a bug. 

There is a reason Dawkins titled his book "The Selfish Gene" rather than "Things that stay around are things that stayed around."

There is a reason people called it "superstring theory" instead of "High-dimensional math you will never understand and which we might never be able to test." 

It wasn't JUST about verbal expedience or rushed thinking. If you wanted expedience you would just label it Theory Option 78, or TO78 if you wanted it even shorter. You could do that, sure, but it would never get you a mention on Freakonomics radio. 

On Thu, Oct 29, 2020, 1:32 PM David Eric Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

I’m actually quite on board with your wish to make these questions more interesting than they may have started out, Nick.

And I also think you are right that the namers meant the names to carry weight.  (Though I also think most thought is a bit hurried and careless, and gives itself more credit than is earned.)

The interesting struggle will be that the original calculation was in a way rather small, compared to the metaphor that many hope can be spun from it.

Or perhaps said another way, maybe many of these things that have weight to compel as we experience them in life, are pointers to little mechanics below the surface that, in its own terms, is a small thing.

I know that in each paper I write, I imagine getting at a big idea, and realize that the most I have done is a small calculation.  So there is a foot in each boat….

Best,

Eric

On Oct 29, 2020, at 1:20 PM, <[hidden email]> <[hidden email]> wrote:

Sorry everybody.  I seem to be out of my depth in  many pools at once.

 

I really like Eric’s analysis. 

 

I still want to protest abit.  I think the dynamic relation between the physical concept  and the physicist’s humanistic metaphor is much more interesting than this analysis would suggest.  Physicists use those metaphors for a reasons, cognitive and communicatory.  And humanists are right to explore their implications.  Otherwise, it would be fair for the humanist to turn to the physicist and say, “Shut up and calculate.”

 

The paradox of development (AKA epigenisis) is that there are all sorts of futures that can be known pretty precisely about a developing individual yet they are totally unknown to the individual that is developing.  It has to do with our discussion of intenSion, a few months back.

 

It may also be time for one of you to be delegated to “elder” me, in the quaker tradition.  “Now, Nick, ….”

 

N .

 

N

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of David Eric Smith
Sent: Thursday, October 29, 2020 10:00 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Getting You Libertarians' Goats

 

I want to somehow say sigh and sigh on this thread.

 

It comes somehow straight out of Monty Python (Blessed are the cheesemakers….)

 

1. Some physicists figure out how to do a calculation, showing that some parts can go dynamically into an organized state, appealing to a combination of their own shapes and laws of large numbers for events that happen, and they don’t need to have the organized form imposed by any outside boundary conditions beyond the very low-level rules for how the events are sampled.  They already knew this happens in equilibrium, because that is how anything freezes.  But here they are seeing it in a dynamical context, where the ordered form happens to be more ordered than the states they could produce from somehow-similar components in equilibrium.

 

2. Physicsts, like everyone, are usually impatient and don’t want to have to recite the whole operational meaning of something every time they want to refer to it in the course of saying something else.

 

3. So the physicists come up with a tag.  It should be sort of evocative, sort of catchy, and easy to remember.  Aha!  “Self-organization”, to keep in mind that the organization is resulting from low-level local features, and not from the boundary conditions imposed on the system beyond that local stuff.

 

4. Nick encounters the term.  It happens to contain two words about which he cares very very much, so to him they are not mere hackage generated by some physicists, but freighted with meaning.

 

5. Nick starts a thread: Which self?  Is it the same self before and after?  Is “organized” here a transitive or an intransitive verb?  If transitive, what is the object?  Can the same referent be both object and subject of a transitive verb?  Does that make the verb reflexive?  What are the implications for monists?  For dualists?

 

6. Friam is willing to engage.

 

7.  I write a long tedious email, trying to remind the humanists that the most important character trait of physicists is impatience.  

 

Eric

 

 

On Oct 29, 2020, at 10:03 AM, Prof David West <[hidden email]> wrote:

 

Nick,

 

" I am always troubled by the notion of "self-assembly" since the self that is

assembling is never, by definition, the self that is assembled."

 

By what definition? Your monist view that the self lacks ontological status in the first place?

 

davew

 

 

On Wed, Oct 28, 2020, at 5:48 PM, [hidden email] wrote:

> Jon,

> 

> Is a steam governor a case of downward causation?

> 

> This question will reveal, no doubt, that I don't understand  your previous

> answer, but perhaps others will explain it to me. 

> 

> I am always troubled by the notion of "self-assembly" since the self that is

> assembling is never, by definition, the self that is assembled. 

> 

> Perhaps I am getting tangled up in words again. 

> 

> n

> 

> Nicholas Thompson

> Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

> Clark University

> [hidden email]

> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

>  

> 

> 

> -----Original Message-----

> From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of jon zingale

> Sent: Wednesday, October 28, 2020 2:01 PM

> To: [hidden email]

> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Getting You Libertarians' Goats

> 

> Nick,

> 

> Let's say I have a language designed to work with sticks, where for

> instance, it makes sense to name certain relations *Triangle*. Additionally,

> let's assume that the language is detailed enough to include less obvious

> relations such as those which relate sticks to trees to soil and water.

> Would it be cheap to narrowly define *downward causation* as the

> manipulation of the world in accordance with this language to produce new

> sticks?

> 

> Consider as another example when one manipulates charge in bulk using analog

> filters. Here, a circuit designer may not need to know about spin or

> superposition or a lot of other details about the universe. In fact, the

> designer may not know how to write a "mid-frequency ranged filter" if they

> were only given a quantum mechanical view of the world. They may, however,

> know how to build such a filter if they are given appropriately shaped

> conductive surfaces and coils.

> 

> My apologies in advance if this characterization (that of reducing *downward

> causation* to manipulation of a domain-specific language) is horribly

> flawed, but I spent this much time writing a response. So, there.

> 

> 

> 

> --

> Sent from: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/

> 

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[Frank Wimberly-2]

I learned about all those symmetry groups a couple of years ago (When was it Jon?) and I remember almost nothing.  But I can state the Heine-Borel theorem, Stokes' theorem and others in complex analysis and algebra that I learned about 55 years ago.

On Thu, Oct 29, 2020, 4:16 PM David Eric Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

Yeah, on one hand (they are) guilty as charged.

On the other hand, nah, only mathematicians name things in gzip so that the names are maximally compressed.  (By which I mean, referring to every theorem by the name of whoever proved it, so you have not a clue what it is about.)  I wish I could bring to mind some lines in textbooks from my freshman or sophomore algebra classes, where at the end of a long and completely uninterpretable sentence, the author wrapped with “to which we apply a theorem of Darbou.”  My friends and I, all getting bombed out of existence by the course, hit that line and shook our heads in unison.  Laughing in the way that late at night ends up in crying.  While I can’t remember what the rest of the topic was, I can still summon the feeling of hopelessness as if it were yesterday.  (It may have been yesterday; what was I trying to read that day?….)

In that respect, I am fine with “flavor SU(3) and color SU(3)”, and do not have trouble remembering which is which.

Also, surely superstrings aren’t as cynical and  Machiavellian as you suggest, right?  There was a symmetry that was encompassing enough that it applied in parallel across all the other symmetries known at the time, and so they called it supersymmetry.  In a Germanic language that doesn’t seem evil.  When applied to gravity it wound up as super-gravity (not that it was better).  I guess, like teenagers say when explaining to their parents, one thing led to another, and now I really need to get to a clinic.

I do wish you had been Dawkins’s publisher, though.  _That_ would have been a title.

EricS

On Oct 29, 2020, at 5:07 PM, Eric Charles <[hidden email]> wrote:

I agree with everything said in there email focusing on:

And I also think you are right that the namers meant the names to carry weight.  (Though I also think most thought is a bit hurried and careless, and gives itself more credit than is earned.)

However, as I am fond of saying: It's worse than that.

They aren't just picking the names to carry weight, the are picking the names exactly to try to gain traction off of how sexy it sounds, even when they know they know that they would deny all the sexy implications if pressed. And it doesn't bother them that anyone hearing the term will think the phenomenon is sexier than it actually is, because that is a feature, not a bug. 

There is a reason Dawkins titled his book "The Selfish Gene" rather than "Things that stay around are things that stayed around."

There is a reason people called it "superstring theory" instead of "High-dimensional math you will never understand and which we might never be able to test." 

It wasn't JUST about verbal expedience or rushed thinking. If you wanted expedience you would just label it Theory Option 78, or TO78 if you wanted it even shorter. You could do that, sure, but it would never get you a mention on Freakonomics radio. 

On Thu, Oct 29, 2020, 1:32 PM David Eric Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

I’m actually quite on board with your wish to make these questions more interesting than they may have started out, Nick.

And I also think you are right that the namers meant the names to carry weight.  (Though I also think most thought is a bit hurried and careless, and gives itself more credit than is earned.)

The interesting struggle will be that the original calculation was in a way rather small, compared to the metaphor that many hope can be spun from it.

Or perhaps said another way, maybe many of these things that have weight to compel as we experience them in life, are pointers to little mechanics below the surface that, in its own terms, is a small thing.

I know that in each paper I write, I imagine getting at a big idea, and realize that the most I have done is a small calculation.  So there is a foot in each boat….

Best,

Eric

On Oct 29, 2020, at 1:20 PM, <[hidden email]> <[hidden email]> wrote:

Sorry everybody.  I seem to be out of my depth in  many pools at once.

 

I really like Eric’s analysis. 

 

I still want to protest abit.  I think the dynamic relation between the physical concept  and the physicist’s humanistic metaphor is much more interesting than this analysis would suggest.  Physicists use those metaphors for a reasons, cognitive and communicatory.  And humanists are right to explore their implications.  Otherwise, it would be fair for the humanist to turn to the physicist and say, “Shut up and calculate.”

 

The paradox of development (AKA epigenisis) is that there are all sorts of futures that can be known pretty precisely about a developing individual yet they are totally unknown to the individual that is developing.  It has to do with our discussion of intenSion, a few months back.

 

It may also be time for one of you to be delegated to “elder” me, in the quaker tradition.  “Now, Nick, ….”

 

N .

 

N

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of David Eric Smith
Sent: Thursday, October 29, 2020 10:00 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Getting You Libertarians' Goats

 

I want to somehow say sigh and sigh on this thread.

 

It comes somehow straight out of Monty Python (Blessed are the cheesemakers….)

 

1. Some physicists figure out how to do a calculation, showing that some parts can go dynamically into an organized state, appealing to a combination of their own shapes and laws of large numbers for events that happen, and they don’t need to have the organized form imposed by any outside boundary conditions beyond the very low-level rules for how the events are sampled.  They already knew this happens in equilibrium, because that is how anything freezes.  But here they are seeing it in a dynamical context, where the ordered form happens to be more ordered than the states they could produce from somehow-similar components in equilibrium.

 

2. Physicsts, like everyone, are usually impatient and don’t want to have to recite the whole operational meaning of something every time they want to refer to it in the course of saying something else.

 

3. So the physicists come up with a tag.  It should be sort of evocative, sort of catchy, and easy to remember.  Aha!  “Self-organization”, to keep in mind that the organization is resulting from low-level local features, and not from the boundary conditions imposed on the system beyond that local stuff.

 

4. Nick encounters the term.  It happens to contain two words about which he cares very very much, so to him they are not mere hackage generated by some physicists, but freighted with meaning.

 

5. Nick starts a thread: Which self?  Is it the same self before and after?  Is “organized” here a transitive or an intransitive verb?  If transitive, what is the object?  Can the same referent be both object and subject of a transitive verb?  Does that make the verb reflexive?  What are the implications for monists?  For dualists?

 

6. Friam is willing to engage.

 

7.  I write a long tedious email, trying to remind the humanists that the most important character trait of physicists is impatience.  

 

Eric

 

 

On Oct 29, 2020, at 10:03 AM, Prof David West <[hidden email]> wrote:

 

Nick,

 

" I am always troubled by the notion of "self-assembly" since the self that is

assembling is never, by definition, the self that is assembled."

 

By what definition? Your monist view that the self lacks ontological status in the first place?

 

davew

 

 

On Wed, Oct 28, 2020, at 5:48 PM, [hidden email] wrote:

> Jon,

> 

> Is a steam governor a case of downward causation?

> 

> This question will reveal, no doubt, that I don't understand  your previous

> answer, but perhaps others will explain it to me. 

> 

> I am always troubled by the notion of "self-assembly" since the self that is

> assembling is never, by definition, the self that is assembled. 

> 

> Perhaps I am getting tangled up in words again. 

> 

> n

> 

> Nicholas Thompson

> Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

> Clark University

> [hidden email]

> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

>  

> 

> 

> -----Original Message-----

> From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of jon zingale

> Sent: Wednesday, October 28, 2020 2:01 PM

> To: [hidden email]

> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Getting You Libertarians' Goats

> 

> Nick,

> 

> Let's say I have a language designed to work with sticks, where for

> instance, it makes sense to name certain relations *Triangle*. Additionally,

> let's assume that the language is detailed enough to include less obvious

> relations such as those which relate sticks to trees to soil and water.

> Would it be cheap to narrowly define *downward causation* as the

> manipulation of the world in accordance with this language to produce new

> sticks?

> 

> Consider as another example when one manipulates charge in bulk using analog

> filters. Here, a circuit designer may not need to know about spin or

> superposition or a lot of other details about the universe. In fact, the

> designer may not know how to write a "mid-frequency ranged filter" if they

> were only given a quantum mechanical view of the world. They may, however,

> know how to build such a filter if they are given appropriately shaped

> conductive surfaces and coils.

> 

> My apologies in advance if this characterization (that of reducing *downward

> causation* to manipulation of a domain-specific language) is horribly

> flawed, but I spent this much time writing a response. So, there.

> 

> 

> 

> --

> Sent from: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/

> 

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[jon zingale]

Is it really as bad as all of that? I like your choice of Darboux, rather
than Euler or Gauss, because his name quickly points me in a particular
direction. My experience is that familiarity with the tastes of individual
mathematicians contributes to navigating that vast sea, mercifully
suggesting hope that some charted course will not lead me astray. Darboux
fashioned such-and-such tool and if I think about the problem for a while, I
too may need such a tool. I suppose I can agree that like the Dewey decimal
or LLC system, it is an awkward and archaic attempt at library science.
OTOH, it seems to work well with my sensibility for building my personal
memory castle. Certainly, however, if I read an uninterpretable sentence
concluded with, "to which we apply a theorem of St. Anthony...", well then I
would surely cry.



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[jon zingale]

Wow. I just checked my records and it was already 3 years ago that we started
that Baez book.



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