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Dear all,
There is real fruit in this discussion and I long to be in a position to harvest it .... well, and also to have the ability to harvest it. With the wiki in questionable shape, I will just have to content myself to commenting here. First, I agree with Glen that the dangers of spinning out of control in a discussion of Rosen increase exponentially as we depart from a particular text. I had a couple of hours to put Life Itself in front of a very sophisticated philosopher of science friend of mine... I started out be reading to her a short section on "entailment" as Rosen uses the term, and it took the first hour to calm her down after her hearing the term "causal entailment". To her it was at least a chimera, if not an oxymoron. So, if we are tomake progress, I think we to work out carefully from some text that we have all read, and perhaps all have before us as we write. Is Rosen's Life Itself interesting enough to warrant such attention? For me, at the moment, FOR the moment, the answer is YES. Whether it is for anybody else, remains to be seen. I still plan to organize our thoughts in the wiki when I get a chance and a faster connection. I would love help in such a project. Gutta Run, Nick Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology, Clark University ([hidden email]) > ------------------------------ > > Message: 3 > Date: Mon, 18 Aug 2008 11:58:35 -0700 > From: "glen e. p. ropella" <[hidden email]> > Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Rosen, Life Itself > To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group > <[hidden email]> > Message-ID: <[hidden email]> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 > > [hidden email] wrote: > > It's odd that you don't catch my intent to help others understand a > > very non ad hoc and efficient method, not yet in general use, for > > doing just that. To understand my technique you do need to > > distinguish between information and the physical prosesses from which > > we get it.. That can be a hangup. > > Sorry. I'm a bit of a literal person and, since we were talking in the > context of Rosen, I keep trying to tie the conversation to what I > understand of Rosen's work. > > And in that context, we're (or should be) assuming a very clear > delineation between causal and inferential entailment, a.k.a. "physical > processes" and "information", respectively. > > So, at least in the context of Rosen, that distinction is not the > problem. It's foundational. > > > Once you distinguish between > > those, what works to let your information signal you where to look in > > physical processes for better information about how they work is the > > transitions between continuities. That indicates transitions in how > > they are working, giving you focused questions and a subject to > > closely examine for more. > > I guess I'm lost. It's not clear to me how this relates to Rosen and > "Life Itself". Perhaps you'd be willing to clarify that for me? Thanks. > > -- > glen e. p. ropella, 971-219-3846, http://tempusdictum.com > > > >Send Friam mailing list submissions to To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to [hidden email] You can reach the person managing the list at [hidden email] When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific than "Re: Contents of Friam digest..." Today's Topics: 1. Re: Rosen, functional entailments (Roger Critchlow) 2. Frito Pie Friday @ 7:00 PM (Don Begley) 3. Re: Rosen, functional entailments (glen e. p. ropella) 4. Re: Rosen, Life Itself (Phil Henshaw) 5. Re: Rosen, Life Itself (glen e. p. ropella) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Message: 1 Date: Fri, 15 Aug 2008 11:58:11 -0600 From: "Roger Critchlow" <[hidden email]> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Rosen, functional entailments To: "The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group" <[hidden email]> Message-ID: <[hidden email]> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" On Fri, Aug 15, 2008 at 8:57 AM, Nicholas Thompson < [hidden email]> wrote: > Thanks, Russell. > > Is your comment differ with Ken's or is it Ken's in another language. > > For a former english major, the LANGUAGE is everything. > > The operation of functional composition, taking *f: A -> B* and *g: B -> C*and composing them to get *gf: A -> C*, is qualitatively different from the *inner* entailments which only involve sets and mappings. The *inner* entailments were summarized as *f => (a => f(a))* which reads that *f* is the efficient cause and *a* is the material cause of *f(a)*. This gives us an element, *f(a)*, as a consequence of a mapping and an element, *f* and *a*. The *outer* entailments speak to the causes of mappings and sets. So *F => (f, g => F(f,g)) *says that functional composition is the efficient cause and the functions *f *and *g* are the material cause of the function * gf.* And, the example left for the reader to work out, *C => (a, b => C(a,b))* says that the cartesian product is the efficient cause and the elements *a* and *b* are the material cause of the element *a x b.* In the first case we get a mapping as a consequence of composition and two mappings, in the second case we get an element as a consequence of cartesian product and two elements. No functors were deployed in the construction of these paragraphs. At the end of section 5H (p 130) Rosen notes: We can formally do a great deal with the modes of inner and outer entailment inherent in any category. In particular we can concatenate them to form, and characterize, arbitrarily complicated abstract block diagrams from the sets and mappings in any particular category. In fact, the totality of abstract block diagrams that can be formed in this way constitutes a new category [ ... ] as a (free) monoid A~s stands to its set of A of generators [...]. Baez and Stay in "Physics, Topology, Logic and Computation: A Rosetta Stone" are essentially applying the same "arbitrarily complicated abstract block diagrams" formalized as various subclasses of "symmetric monoidal categories". By now there is an extensive network of interlocking analogies between physics, topology, logic and computer science. They suggest that research in the area of common overlap is actually trying to build a new science: *a general science of systems and processes*. So they agree that physics, logic, and computation are pretty much the same thing, that arbitrarily complex block diagrams are the key, and that a general science of systems and processes is the goal. -- rec -- -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/attachments/20080815/f8d8fbbb /attachment-0001.html ------------------------------ ------------------------------ Message: 3 Date: Fri, 15 Aug 2008 12:22:48 -0700 From: "glen e. p. ropella" <[hidden email]> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Rosen, functional entailments To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]> Message-ID: <[hidden email]> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Roger Critchlow wrote: > No functors were deployed in the construction of these paragraphs. I agree that the "F" isn't a functor. But, it is at the same level of discourse as functors. It's part of the definition of a category, an axiom, which means it comes from _outside_ the formalism. I.e. it comes from somewhere other than the formalism itself. Functors, being morphisms between categories are also outside of the categories they relate. So "outer entailments" involve extra information not available within the context and "inner entailments" involve only information available within the context. I think this is why Rosen links it to a discussion of final (externally imposed) cause. The whole goal is to find a way to _close_, feed back, or turn these arrows back in on themselves. The claim is that an organism will not have any efficient outer entailments (though we expect material outer entailments). To go back to parsing the notation, how about this: f => ( a => f(a)) means "f dictates that ( a dictates that f(a) )" g => ( b => g(b)) means "g dictates that ( b dictates that g(b) )" g => ( f(a) => g(f(a)) ) means "g dictates that ( f(a) dictates that g(f(a)) )" i.e. "g is defined so that the things in its co-domain (e.g. f(a)) dictate the composition g(f(a))." F => ( (f,g) => gf) means "F is defined in order to clump two functions in its co-domain so that the clumping is identified as an operation, specifically, the composition operation". p.s. I use "dictates" as opposed to "entails" just for a linguistic parallax. One might also use "specifies", "requires", "imposes", etc. -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-219-3846, http://tempusdictum.com ------------------------------ Message: 4 Date: Fri, 15 Aug 2008 22:44:35 -0400 From: "Phil Henshaw" <[hidden email]> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Rosen, Life Itself To: "'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group'" <[hidden email]> Message-ID: <000d01c8ff4a$0597b3f0$10c71bd0$@com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Glen, ..clip > You can stay in the system. Then there's only symbols. Whoever said > that > it was allowed to go outside the symbols? > > And if you analyze one formal system on a higher level formal system, > then, there again, only symbols. > > Everything else is philosophy (this is barebones formalism I am > advocating here - but then again - why not? you have to give reasons > for > assuming more). [ph] Yes that's the key step, having a reason to assume more so that a process of looking for it is justified. You can't confirm things outside your syntax without looking for them and finding them. Otherwise you just have fiction. But having clues to where to look for things that are discoverable is a reliable procedure for going beyond your current model. Phil ------------------------------ Message: 5 Date: Fri, 15 Aug 2008 20:08:14 -0700 From: "glen e. p. ropella" <[hidden email]> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Rosen, Life Itself To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]> Message-ID: <[hidden email]> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Phil Henshaw wrote: > G?nther Greindl wrote: >> >> You can stay in the system. Then there's only symbols. Whoever said >> that it was allowed to go outside the symbols? >> >> And if you analyze one formal system on a higher level formal >> system, then, there again, only symbols. >> >> Everything else is philosophy (this is barebones formalism I am >> advocating here - but then again - why not? you have to give >> reasons for assuming more). Just to be clear, G?nther wrote that part. > [ph] Yes that's the key step, having a reason to assume more so that > a process of looking for it is justified. You can't confirm things > outside your syntax without looking for them and finding them. > Otherwise you just have fiction. But having clues to where to look > for things that are discoverable is a reliable procedure for going > beyond your current model. I agree that your syntax must be somehow inadequate to cause you to look outside of it. And, if we believe his argument, Rosen's work culminated _merely_ into a demonstration of how our modeling language is inadequate. (Not to belittle that achievement, of course.) He didn't really get very far in extending the language so that it could capture (Rosennean) complexity. But, I'm not sure that "having clues to where to look for discoverable things" is a reliable procedure. That sounds pretty ad hoc. If I were to attempt to create a reliable procedure, it would invariably involve some concerted (and distributed) hands-on effort to explore reality. In fact, I can't think of a better method than what we're already doing in science today. The only flaws I can see are a) not quite enough "big science" and b) not quite enough amateur science. And, of course, our society is in a fragile balance between objective truth-seeking versus self-interested rhetoric. We could easily fall back into a dark ages where, say, Monsanto, specified what we consider "biological truth". So, it would be nice, but perhaps logically impossible, to construct a really _reliable_ procedure. -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-219-3846, http://tempusdictum.com ------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Friam mailing list [hidden email] http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com End of Friam Digest, Vol 62, Issue 16 ************************************* ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org |
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