Friam

On old question

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Nick Thompson

On old question

Dear Roger, and anybody else who wants to play,

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

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

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

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

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

Nick

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

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

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

Marcus G. Daniels

Re: On old question

Nick,

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

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

Marcus

From: Friam <[hidden email]> on behalf of Nick Thompson <[hidden email]>
Reply-To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Date: Wednesday, October 24, 2018 at 12:22 AM
To: Roger Critchlow <[hidden email]>, Friam <[hidden email]>
Subject: [FRIAM] On old question

Dear Roger, and anybody else who wants to play,

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

Nick

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

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

Roger Critchlow-2

Re: On old question

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-- rec --

On Wed, Oct 24, 2018 at 2:56 AM Marcus Daniels <[hidden email]> wrote:

Nick,

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

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

Marcus

From: Friam <[hidden email]> on behalf of Nick Thompson <[hidden email]>
Reply-To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Date: Wednesday, October 24, 2018 at 12:22 AM
To: Roger Critchlow <[hidden email]>, Friam <[hidden email]>
Subject: [FRIAM] On old question

Dear Roger, and anybody else who wants to play,

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

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

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

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

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

Nick

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

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

Marcus G. Daniels

Re: On old question

Roger writes:

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

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

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

Marcus

gepr

Re: On old question

In reply to this post by Nick Thompson

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

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

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

On 10/23/18 11:21 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:

> Dear Roger, and anybody else who wants to play,
>
>
>
> While waiting for my paper, /Signs and Designs/, to be rejected, I have gone back to thinking about an old project, whose working title has been “/A Sign Language/.” And this has led me back to Robert Rosen, whose /Life Itself/ I bought almost 9 years ago and it has remained almost pristine, ever since. In the chapter I am now looking at, Rosen is talking about “organization.” Now, I have been thinking about organization ever since I read C. Ray Carpenter’s early work on primate groups back in the late 50’s. It seemed to me at the time, and it seems to me reasonable now, to define the organization of a set of entities as related in some way to the degree to which one can predict the behavior of one entity from knowledge about another. Now the relationship is not straightforward, because neither total unpredictability (every monkey behaves exactly the same as every other monkey in every situation) nor total unpredictability (no monkey behaves like any other monkey in ANY
> situation) smacks of great organization. The highest levels organization, speaking inexpertly and intuitively, seem to correspond to intermediate levels of predictability, where there were several classes of individuals within a group and within class predictability was strong but cross-class predictability was weak. On my account, the highest levels of organization involve hierarchies of predictability. Thus honey bees and ants are more organized than starling flocks, say.
>
>
>
> This is where the matter stood at the point that I came to Santa Fe and started interacting with you guys 14 years ago. You-all introduced me to a totally different notion of organization based – shudder – on the second law. But I have never been able to deploy your concept with any assurance. So, for instance, when I shake the salad dressing, I feel like I am disorganizing it, and when it reasserts itself into layers, I feel like it ought to be called more organized. But I have a feeling that you are going to tell me that the reverse is true. That, given the molecules of fat and water/acid, that the layered state is the less organized state.
>
>
>
> Now this confusion of mine takes on importance when I try to read Rosen. He defines a function as the difference that occurs when one removes a component of a system. I can see no reason why the oil or the water in my salad dressing cannot be thought of components of a system and if, for instance, I were to siphon out the water from the bottom of my layered salad dressing, I could claim that the function of the water had been to hold the water up. This seems a rather lame notion of function.
>
>
>
> Some of you who have been on this list forever will remember that I raised the same kind of worry almost a decade back when I noticed the drainage of water from a basin was actually /slowed /by the formation of a vortex. This seemed to dispel any notion that vortices are structures whose function is to efficiently dispel a gradient. It also violated my intuition from traffic flows, where I imagine that rigid rules of priority would facilitate the flow of people crossing bridges to escape Zozobra.
>
>
>
> It’s quite possible that my confusions in this matter are of no great general applicability, in which case, I look forward to being ignored.

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

uǝʃƃ ⊥ glen

Prof David West

Re: On old question

In reply to this post by Nick Thompson

Nick,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

pretentiously yours,

dave west

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

Dear Roger, and anybody else who wants to play,

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

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

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

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

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

Nick

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

============================================================

FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv

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

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

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

gepr

Re: On old question

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

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

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

--
☣ uǝlƃ

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

uǝʃƃ ⊥ glen

Nick Thompson

Re: On old question

In reply to this post by Prof David West

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

Nick

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

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

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Prof David West
Sent: Wednesday, October 24, 2018 10:20 AM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] On old question

Nick,

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

pretentiously yours,

dave west

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

Dear Roger, and anybody else who wants to play,

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

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

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

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

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

Nick

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

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

Prof David West

Re: On old question

In reply to this post by gepr

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

davew

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

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

Nick Thompson

Re: On old question

In reply to this post by Marcus G. Daniels

Thanks, Marcus,

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

Nick

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

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

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Marcus Daniels
Sent: Wednesday, October 24, 2018 12:56 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>; Roger Critchlow <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] On old question

Nick,

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

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

Marcus

Dear Roger, and anybody else who wants to play,

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

Nick

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

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

Steve Smith

Re: On old question

In reply to this post by gepr

Glen/Nick/Marcus/Dave/et alia -

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

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

This paper:

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

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

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

- Steve

On 10/24/18 8:49 AM, ∄ uǝʃƃ wrote:

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

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

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



On 10/23/18 11:21 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:

Dear Roger, and anybody else who wants to play,

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

Steve Smith

Re: On old question

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

1.1.3 The modeling relation: how we perceive

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

mr.gif (4013 bytes)

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

Mixed Reality States in a Bidirectionally Coupled Interreality System

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

Glen/Nick/Marcus/Dave/et alia -

This paper:

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

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

- Steve

On 10/24/18 8:49 AM, ∄ uǝʃƃ wrote:

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

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

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



On 10/23/18 11:21 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:

Dear Roger, and anybody else who wants to play,

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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Nick Thompson

Re: On old question

In reply to this post by Prof David West

Thanks, everybody, for your responses.

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

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

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

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

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

Let that be a lesson to you.

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

Nick

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

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

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Prof David West
Sent: Wednesday, October 24, 2018 12:16 PM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] On old question

davew

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

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

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

> focus on maintaining organization using energy-material harvested from

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

> > pretentiously yours,

> --

> ☣ uǝlƃ

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

> at St. John's College to unsubscribe

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

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

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John Kennison

Re: On old question

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

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

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

--John

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