Re: Friam Digest, Vol 167, Issue 58

[jon zingale]

Wrt Nick's response, I personally think anthropomorphism

is fine. Until there is a clear (perhaps formal) system we are

working inside, anthropomorphism is an efficient way to

'throw mud' on developing metaphor. That aside, I agree

with Nick that if we had something like consensus on what

phenomena was on the table to describe, we could do all of

this heavy machinery justice.

Jon

On Mon, May 29, 2017 at 2:32 PM, <[hidden email]> wrote:

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Today's Topics:

   1. Re: Any non-biological complex systems? (Stephen Guerin)
   2. Re: Any non-biological complex systems? (Nick Thompson)
   3. Re: Any non-biological complex systems? (Stephen Guerin)
   4. Re: Any non-biological complex systems? (Nick Thompson)
   5. Re: Any non-biological complex systems? (glen ?)
   6. Re: Any non-biological complex systems? (Nick Thompson)
   7. Re: Any non-biological complex systems? (Stephen Guerin)
   8. Re: Any non-biological complex systems? (Marcus Daniels)
   9. Re: IS: Ruminations from the M.I. S. WAS: Any non-biological
      complex systems? (Barry MacKichan)


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Stephen Guerin <[hidden email]>
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Cc: 
Bcc: 
Date: Mon, 29 May 2017 11:43:28 -0600
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Any non-biological complex systems?

I agree. 

It would still be left open as to whether you choose do model the weather, economics or defense systems as Dynamical Systems, Complex Systems (ABM) or Discrete Event Queuing models. The whole coupled system could be one way or the other or most probably a hybrid

To take an example of traffic modeling that we've done we use all three:

For large spatial areas with many roads, we'll model traffic as a Dynamical System of coupled differential equations of traffic density flowing from sources to sinks. As we zoom in, we explode the road densities to agent-based complex systems models that can have driver-driver interactions that allows for congestion and traffic jam dynamics. As we get to intersections, we transition from agent-based models and model the intersections as a discrete event queue where the traffic light is moving cars from incoming road graph edges to outgoing edges.

On Mon, May 29, 2017 at 11:33 AM, Marcus Daniels <[hidden email]> wrote:

Stephen writes:

 

“Dynamical Systems and Complex Systems language are often used interchangeably by different complexity researchers and the boundaries are fuzzy in practice.

 

I would say a modelling effort would be more of interest to the Complex Systems community, if say, a weather model were coupled to a weather modification effort and the weather modification effort was coupled to economic or defense concerns.   In your second example, it is not crucial to have a sophisticated physics model of the weather.   In the example above, it would be.

 

Marcus

 

 

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---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Nick Thompson <[hidden email]>
To: "'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group'" <[hidden email]>, "'Eric Smith'" <[hidden email]>
Cc: 
Bcc: 
Date: Mon, 29 May 2017 14:10:52 -0400
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Any non-biological complex systems?

SG,

 

There are now THREE issues lurking here between us.

 

IS THE CRITERION FOR A SYSTEM ARBITRARY: You say yes; I say no.  We’ve already covered that ground.

 

IS A HURRICANE A SYSTEM:  For me, that is the question of whether the collection of thunderstorms we call a hurricane interact with one another more than they interact with their collective surroundings.  Another way to put this question is in terms of redundancy.  If we were to go about describing the movements of the thunderstorms of a hurricane, would we get a simpler, less redundant description if we referred their movements to the center of the hurricane.  I think the answer to this question is clearly YES.

 

IS A HURRICANE COMPLEX?  For me, complexity means “multi-layered” .  So, a complex system is one composed of other systems.  A hurricane is a system of thunderstorms which themselves are a system of thermals (handwaving, here).  Thus a hurricane is at least a three-level system.  So, yes.  It is complex.

 

SS, am I splitting hairs or playing at language?  Absolutely not.  Or if I am, shoot me now before I do more harm. What we are arguing about here is whether complexity science actually has a wet edge, or whether you are painting yourselves into a corner.   I gather that you, and most of the folks on this list want to define complex in terms of its dynamics.  In other words you want to define Complexity-sub-SG as the causes of complexity-sub-NST. My suspicion is that this kind of definition will lead you into a devastating circularity loop, similar to the circularity loop that follows when people define adaptation as whatever natural selection produces.  Being in a circularity loop is like participating in a square dance; it’s lots of fun, and you work up a sweat, but you don’t actually get anywhere. It is circular reasoning, I suspect, that gives complexity talk some of the aura of a cult. 

 

Now, circularity in scientific reasoning is not quite the anti-heuristic poison I have always taken it to be.  Much interesting research has been done within the circular adaptionist frame work of contemporary evolutionary psychology, for instance;  I don’t know complexity science well enough to say, but the success of Simtable is evidence enough to me of its creativity.  But, I would argue, that despite all this scientific activity, not much progress has been made concerning the fundamental question of the selective origins of natural design.  In a similar way, hearing you guys argue, I wonder if much progress has been made on the question of what conditions make possible the spontaneous progressive layering of natural systems.   Or if it has been done, it has been done by people who did not define complexity in terms of its processes, but rather in terms of its products.

 

Eric Smith? 

 

 

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 Stephen Guerin
Sent: Monday, May 29, 2017 1:11 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Any non-biological complex systems?

 

 Nick asks:

Is a hurricane a “complex system”? 

 

It depends. What is your metaphor (model) of a hurricane? 

 

If I wanted to understand how a hurricane forms, I might model dissipative structure formation in the presence of temperature and pressure gradients. I would call this a complex system.

 

If I needed to add a hurricane track simulation to our Simtable, for the purposes of how my customers would use it for emergency planning, it would probably be enough to model its track as a random walker biased by global winds and a curve parameter to represent the Coriolis effect. I would not call this a complex system.

 

 

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Stephen Guerin <[hidden email]>
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Cc: Eric Smith <[hidden email]>
Bcc: 
Date: Mon, 29 May 2017 12:29:59 -0600
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Any non-biological complex systems?

On Mon, May 29, 2017 at 12:10 PM, Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

SG,

 

There are now THREE issues lurking here between us.

 

IS THE CRITERION FOR A SYSTEM ARBITRARY: You say yes; I say no.  We’ve already covered that ground.

In my post, I said it is not arbitrary. It's a function of what the researcher is trying to use it for or explain.

 

 

IS A HURRICANE A SYSTEM:  For me, that is the question of whether the collection of thunderstorms we call a hurricane interact with one another more than they interact with their collective surroundings.  Another way to put this question is in terms of redundancy.  If we were to go about describing the movements of the thunderstorms of a hurricane, would we get a simpler, less redundant description if we referred their movements to the center of the hurricane.  I think the answer to this question is clearly YES.

Yes you could model the movement in a simpler way by modeling the movement of the center point. And that was my second model of a hurricane as a random walker biased by a global wind vector and Coriolis curve term. And I said that was not a complex system.

 

 

IS A HURRICANE COMPLEX?  For me, complexity means “multi-layered” .  So, a complex system is one composed of other systems.  A hurricane is a system of thunderstorms which themselves are a system of thermals (handwaving, here).  Thus a hurricane is at least a three-level system.  So, yes.  It is complex.

I agree about complex systems as having multiple layers - a macro scale and a micro scale. I would say there's one system. If I was trying to model a hurricane in my first example of an emergent vortex dissipating temperature and pressure gradients, I would model the air with a combination of air particles and patches of air - at LANL they would describe these as particle in a box models or hybrid lagrangian and eulerian models. I would not introduce thunderstorms at the micro level. But there's many ways to skin a hurricane :-)

Some would say the micro level air particles and air cell components which I would model as finite state machines (agents with a lower case "a") are systems in their own right and have boundaries. I don't see the benefit of calling them systems as their aren't multiple interacting components within them. But don't feel like arguing too hard here.

 

Eric Smith? 

Yes, where are you Eric Smith?

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Nick Thompson <[hidden email]>
To: "'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group'" <[hidden email]>
Cc: 
Bcc: 
Date: Mon, 29 May 2017 14:45:12 -0400
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Any non-biological complex systems?

SS,

 

I was going to let this go, but now see that I can’:

 

.  I did hear Nick ask if a system could (somehow?) choose it's own boundaries and dismissed it as (yet another) distraction

 

I hate anthropomorphism in all its forms, so despite the plain meaning of these words, I did not mean this anthropomorphically.

 

My “high bit” as Owen used to say, is distinguishing between the thing we are explaining and the thing we are explaining it WITH.  If I have anything to contirubute to this conversation it is to make you all aware that you keep sliding back and forth between those two things. So when I asked SG if a system “get’s a voice” in whether it is a system or not, I was only asking if there was a “thing-with-properties” out there that we are curious about before we begin bring to bear all the heavy weaponry of complexity talk.  My candidate for the “thing that excites our curiosity” is multilevel systems, whether or not they involve organisms.  I promise I have NO INTENTION of asking a huriicane if it is a system, and I wouldn’t trust the answer if I got one.

 

Also, I don’t one understands what philosophy can do for science if you call it sophistry.  If you were happily painting the floor of a room and I pointed out that you had neglected to leave yourself a way out of the room, you wouldn’t call that sophistry, no matter how well the painting was going at the moment or how beautiful the painted floor looked.  That’s the role of philosophy in science.

 

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 Steven A Smith
Sent: Monday, May 29, 2017 12:02 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Any non-biological complex systems?

 

Glen -

> I think the sophistry around the defn of "model" is important, but a

> distraction from this conversation.  (I've got a few publications that

> target it almost directly if anyone cares.)

Yes, it was an aside, but I think an important one to help Nick follow/focus with us.

>    As Russ and Nick point out, this conversation is about the boundary and its ontological status.  Russ is leaping a bit further ahead and focusing on an _effect_ of the boundary while Nick (and I) are focusing on the prerequisite for symbol machines.

I appreciate your stating it this way.  I did hear Nick ask if a system could (somehow?) choose it's own boundaries and dismissed it as (yet

another) distraction but would now like to hear more.   It felt like an

anthropomorphism to suggest a system could "choose" it's own boundaries, but I'm open to having that explored if anyone can/will.

 

Similarly, your and Stephen's sparring about boundaries (compartments in

a refrigerator?) and the distinction of systems/subsystems, etc.    was

not something I felt able to parse out completely, so I'm hoping your post here leads to more elaboration of that question.

 

> 

> My claim is that Stephen's 3 examples are _not_ systems, much less complex systems at all because they are idealized out of their context.  In order to be systems, they have to have some sort of objectively determined boundary (like a petri dish).  Any bounded gob of goo can be thought of as a system.  An agent, however, must be _closed_ under some operation.  Hence, all agents are systems.  But not all systems are agents.  Whether the agent's boundary is loopy, self-defining, or not is the subject of Rosen's work (from which Kauffman's is derivative).

> 

> Whether a symbol machine can be merely a system (with an objectively determined boundary) or must be an agent (with some form of closure) is an important question.

I'm waiting with 'bated breath, and trying to guess if this is directly relevant to Russ's comment/question about "living in two worlds" of symbol AND energy processing (if I understood his point correctly).

 

I wish I had more to contribute myself, perhaps I should study Rosen again, some more.

 

- Steve

> 

> 

> On 05/28/2017 08:40 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:

>> [NST==>Ok, but the question before us is, Does the system itself “get

>> to participate” in determining its own boundaries.  <==nst]

> On 05/28/2017 08:35 AM, Russ Abbott wrote:>

>> Symbolic processing, including computers, is a step beyond switches.

>> Half a century ago Newell and Simon defined computers as physical symbol machines.

>> We and many biological organisms are  physical symbol machines also.

>> I think that's an important way to look at it.

>> 

>> The thing about physical symbol machines is that the rules of

>> causation they follow are more complex than those of physics.

> 

 

 

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---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: "glen ☣" <[hidden email]>
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Cc: 
Bcc: 
Date: Mon, 29 May 2017 11:49:30 -0700
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Any non-biological complex systems?

Ugh.  Sorry.  I often forget to use "other people's words" when I talk.  Sophistry is not a bad thing in my own private lexicon.  We are surrounded by sophismata (is that the right word?).  The disambiguation of the meanings of "model" is one such sophisma.  It is not resolvable, at least in the short term.  But every conversation about such disambiguation is fruitful and worthwhile.  It's just not the particular sophistry we need for this conversation.

On 05/29/2017 11:45 AM, Nick Thompson wrote:
> Also, I don’t one understands what philosophy can do for science if you call it sophistry.  If you were happily painting the floor of a room and I pointed out that you had neglected to leave yourself a way out of the room, you wouldn’t call that sophistry, no matter how well the painting was going at the moment or how beautiful the painted floor looked.  That’s the role of philosophy in science.

--
☣ glen




---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Nick Thompson <[hidden email]>
To: "'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group'" <[hidden email]>
Cc: 
Bcc: 
Date: Mon, 29 May 2017 14:53:33 -0400
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Any non-biological complex systems?

Thanks, Steve.

 

Larding below

 

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 Stephen Guerin
Sent: Monday, May 29, 2017 2:30 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Cc: Eric Smith <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Any non-biological complex systems?

 

 

_______________________________________________________________________
[hidden email]

CEO, Simtable  http://www.simtable.com

1600 Lena St #D1, Santa Fe, NM 87505

office: [phone] mobile: [phone]

twitter: @simtable

 

On Mon, May 29, 2017 at 12:10 PM, Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

SG,

 

There are now THREE issues lurking here between us.

 

IS THE CRITERION FOR A SYSTEM ARBITRARY: You say yes; I say no.  We’ve already covered that ground.

 

In my post, I said it is not arbitrary. It's a function of what the researcher is trying to use it for or explain.

[NST==>Well, that sounds like arbitrary to me.  But it’s a subtle point, and bordering on the edge of a word-bicker, so I won’t pursue it now.  Someday, I would like to do a thing on “subjective vs objective” some day, but today time is limited.  <==nst]

 

 IS A HURRICANE A SYSTEM:  For me, that is the question of whether the collection of thunderstorms we call a hurricane interact with one another more than they interact with their collective surroundings.  Another way to put this question is in terms of redundancy.  If we were to go about describing the movements of the thunderstorms of a hurricane, would we get a simpler, less redundant description if we referred their movements to the center of the hurricane.  I think the answer to this question is clearly YES.

 

Yes you could model the movement in a simpler way by modeling the movement of the center point. And that was my second model of a hurricane as a random walker biased by a global wind vector and Coriolis curve term. And I said that was not a complex system.

 

 

IS A HURRICANE COMPLEX?  For me, complexity means “multi-layered” .  So, a complex system is one composed of other systems.  A hurricane is a system of thunderstorms which themselves are a system of thermals (handwaving, here).  Thus a hurricane is at least a three-level system.  So, yes.  It is complex.

 

I agree about complex systems as having multiple layers - a macro scale and a micro scale. I would say there's one system. If I was trying to model a hurricane in my first example of an emergent vortex dissipating temperature and pressure gradients, I would model the air with a combination of air particles and patches of air - at LANL they would describe these as particle in a box models or hybrid lagrangian and eulerian models. I would not introduce thunderstorms at the micro level. But there's many ways to skin a hurricane :-)

 

Some would say the micro level air particles and air cell components which I would model as finite state machines (agents with a lower case "a") are systems in their own right and have boundaries. I don't see the benefit of calling them systems as their aren't multiple interacting components within them. But don't feel like arguing too hard here.

 

Eric Smith? 

 

 

Yes, where are you Eric Smith?

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Stephen Guerin <[hidden email]>
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Cc: 
Bcc: 
Date: Mon, 29 May 2017 12:54:21 -0600
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Any non-biological complex systems?

All Hurricanes are Dynamical System or Hurricanes and Dynamical Systems are Dynamical Systems ;-p

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

On Mon, May 29, 2017 at 12:49 PM, glen ☣ <[hidden email]> wrote:

Ugh.  Sorry.  I often forget to use "other people's words" when I talk.  Sophistry is not a bad thing in my own private lexicon.  We are surrounded by sophismata (is that the right word?).  The disambiguation of the meanings of "model" is one such sophisma.  It is not resolvable, at least in the short term.  But every conversation about such disambiguation is fruitful and worthwhile.  It's just not the particular sophistry we need for this conversation.

On 05/29/2017 11:45 AM, Nick Thompson wrote:
> Also, I don’t one understands what philosophy can do for science if you call it sophistry.  If you were happily painting the floor of a room and I pointed out that you had neglected to leave yourself a way out of the room, you wouldn’t call that sophistry, no matter how well the painting was going at the moment or how beautiful the painted floor looked.  That’s the role of philosophy in science.

--
☣ glen

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

... [show rest of quote]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Marcus Daniels <[hidden email]>
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Cc: 
Bcc: 
Date: Mon, 29 May 2017 19:01:09 +0000
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Any non-biological complex systems?

Nick writes:

 

“In a similar way, hearing you guys argue, I wonder if much progress has been made on the question of what conditions make possible the spontaneous progressive layering of natural systems.”

 

You might look at the deep learning literature.  Starting from the Hubel and Wiesel, all the way to learning of optical flow.   There is surely more to it than just one directional layering, though.

 

Marcus

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Barry MacKichan <[hidden email]>
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Cc: 
Bcc: 
Date: Mon, 29 May 2017 14:32:08 -0600
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] IS: Ruminations from the M.I. S. WAS: Any non-biological complex systems?
Possibly off-topic, but I’m attaching a clip from my email program (MailMate on the Mac) that show the current message in the context of its thread. Each dot is clickable.

--Barry


On 28 May 2017, at 13:17, Nick Thompson wrote:


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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
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