Seminal Papers in --- reading nature's book--

[Phil Henshaw-2]

Yea, but somewhat useful descriptive rules are not what nature operates
with, is it?   The flaw in saying so is the same one Cosma pointed out
in his comments on Ashby, that the word 'evolution' isn't meaningful if
it's a matter of following rules.   If whatever you're talking about
isn't making the rules rather than following them you're just passing
the buck.   That's been my complaint about Darwin for years.  If
organisms are just shaped by form fitting to the constraints of
'selection' then you haven't really addressed the question at all, only
answered 'why' with 'just because'.   re:
http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/notebooks/ashby.html

My way of dealing with the problem is to identify processes that are out
of control rather than predetermined, and find lots of useful things
that way.   What I can begin to understand of that sort are things that
display flow, the physical system equivalent of derivative continuity,
patterns of change that require a continuous process of changing.   That
gives you a rigorous way to watch those kinds of processes develop and
change.   It's watching real things behave, instead of theories, and
definitely gives you a leg up for understanding where the things we find
describable actually come from.

Models that find new rules as subsets of old rules are what I think of
as 'reductionist'.  No doubt it's handy to ignore the discrepancies
between theory and reality, but that doesn't make reality come from
theory, same mistake as Ashby (and Bohr, ..as well as Ptolemy and Plato
I guess too).  Physical phenomena are expansionist (to coin an inverse
name that may not stick...) making all-together new form all the time as
the normal way of working, with our ability to roughly predict a few
things contributing to an illusion of control, but more from not paying
attention to the discrepancies as anything else.   Of course it's
impractical to consider all of reality in it's complete complexity all
the time, and so it helps to simplify things with some descriptive
rules, short of thinking that it's your own made-up rules that are
operative.   I sincerely think that was Einstein's gripe, not that he
couldn't grasp statistics, as I seem to hear all over these days!   It's
so very simple when you get right down to it, and shouldn't be confusing
to anyone as far as I can see.  Theory is a convenience, that's all.
Right?



Phil Henshaw                       ????.?? ? `?.????
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> -----Original Message-----
> From: Russell Standish [mailto:hpcoder at hpcoders.com.au]
> Sent: Sunday, June 17, 2007 9:41 PM
> To: Phil Henshaw
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Seminal Papers in --- reading nature's book--
>
>
> On Sun, Jun 17, 2007 at 09:14:24AM -0400, Phil Henshaw wrote:
> > How would one know if any analysis was or was not 'reductionist',
> > since the more general reason for reductionism being a complaint at
> > all is that analysis keeps leaving out all sorts of things that are
> > quite important in real relationships, and analysis can't represent
> > them. The problem is that the physical world is undefined
> and analysis
> > needs definitions.
> >
>
> If so, then they're using the word "reductionist" incorrectly
> IMHO. All models leave stuff out. That is the nature of
> modelling. A good model preserves a balance between what is
> left out and tractability.
>
> A reductionist model is one which doesn't have emergent
> phenomena. That is, everything the model produces is
> explained in terms of the specification language. An example
> is a model of the Earth-Moon system using Newtonian dynamics.
> The behaviour (the relative positions of the Earth and Moon)
> is entirely given by the specification language (which
> contains terms such as position and momentum).
>
> A good example of a nonreductionist model is John Conway's
> game of life. The specification language is a grid of cells
> that turn on or off according to a small set of rules. The
> behaviour is in terms of gliders, glider guns and other such
> curiosities. There are n o gliders in the specification language.
>
>
> Cheers
> --
>
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