Re: Friam Digest, Vol 62, Issue 16

[Nick Thompson]

Thanks, everybody.  this will require careful study.

Back to you all when I have done my homework.  

Nick

Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,
Clark University ([hidden email])

> [Original Message]
> From: <[hidden email]>
> To: <[hidden email]>
> Date: 8/16/2008 10:00:50 AM
> Subject: Friam Digest, Vol 62, Issue 16
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> 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]>
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> <[hidden email]>
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> 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 --
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> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 2
> Date: Fri, 15 Aug 2008 12:03:01 -0600
> From: Don Begley <[hidden email]>
> Subject: [FRIAM] Frito Pie Friday @ 7:00 PM
> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
> <[hidden email]>
> Message-ID: <[hidden email]>
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>
> Simon says let's do it again.
>
> Summer's fading, we're losing our interns to Stanford & Brown, and we  
> are submitting our first full RFP. Seems like reason to gather and  
> confab.
>
> 7:00 tonight, Friday, August 15 at the complex.
>
> -d-
>
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> 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
>
>
>
>
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> End of Friam Digest, Vol 62, Issue 16
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