Urban myths in contemporary cosmology

[Carl Tollander]

http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2008/06/urban_myths_in_contemporary_co.html

Egan fans (and others!) may find this of interest.

C.

[Günther Greindl]

Carl,

thanks for the link, nice discussion going on there.
Greg is right on track with the argument that DA etc fail because we are
not sampled beforehand - there is no fact of the matter of who we are
before we experience anything.

Although the discussion there is a bit too inimical to the Boltzmann
brain (BB) idea: it does show serious flaws with current cosmology,
maybe even deeper lying flaws in some other assumptions. Because of this
heuristic value, exploring BBs is important IMHO.

Cheers,
G?nther

Carl Tollander wrote:

> http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2008/06/urban_myths_in_contemporary_co.html
>
> Egan fans (and others!) may find this of interest.
>
> C.
>
>
> ============================================================
> 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
>

--
G?nther Greindl
Department of Philosophy of Science
University of Vienna
guenther.greindl at univie.ac.at
http://www.univie.ac.at/Wissenschaftstheorie/

Blog: http://dao.complexitystudies.org/
Site: http://www.complexitystudies.org

[Carl Tollander]

G?nther,

I was particularly struck by Greg Egan's statement:

"The only ?Copernican principle? I?d consider worth defending would be
one that avoids coincidences, rather than one that assumes typicality. "

Any complex system emerges from some context and has a history. I would
go so far as to say that its very situatedness and history is what
enables it to be complex.

As soon as a BB arose, that had had no "actual" history, it would not be
able to adapt relative to an environment of other BB's (why would we
assume they were discrete) or other non-BB environments. It does not
seem to me that any BB would persist. Therefore whether BB's exist is
less a matter of whether they are typical in some thermodynamic sense
than whether they can emerge and persist at all.

The BB discussion has value as a catalyst, however, in that it shows
that we have few mature conceptual tools with which to have such a
discussion. In particular, most of the discussants exhibit some chagrin
that not only do they not share a notion of what an 'observer' might be,
but that their individual notions about the definition of such an entity
have begun to seem to them less than coherent.

Those who have had great hopes for the contribution of complexity theory
to fields like systems biology and quantum gravity (myself among them)
might reasonably have expected that we would have gotten past the
observer question by now. Alas, at least in my thinking, it is not so.
We might coherently speak about autonomy and agency, we might build some
very nice social software search engines, but these are either asking
somewhat different questions or going after typicality in various ways.

The study of Complexity lacks a coherent theory of the emegence of
(complex) observers. I'm speaking of such a theory in the abstract, and
not about humans or fruit flies or whether an observer must be
self-aware, autonomous or able to recognize itself in a mirror. I'm
particularly groping for something beyond a simple notion of whether an
observer is 'typical' in some given environment and more how
observerness emerges and operates in coevolutionary or epigenetic
situations.

My current bias is that such a theory would dovetail with similarly
abstract notions of selection, possibly in a category-theoretic
framework, though there are doubtless other candidates waiting to be
tripped over. I suspect we'll know when we're on the path when we can
generally talk about "algebras of observers", or some such without
losing everybody who's not trained in Quantum Mechanics or having the QM
people roll their eyes at our naivete.

best,
Carl

/If you have a lot of relationships, your life is complicated.
If your relationships have relationships, your life is complex.
/

G?nther Greindl wrote:

> Carl,
>
> thanks for the link, nice discussion going on there.
> Greg is right on track with the argument that DA etc fail because we
> are not sampled beforehand - there is no fact of the matter of who we
> are before we experience anything.
>
> Although the discussion there is a bit too inimical to the Boltzmann
> brain (BB) idea: it does show serious flaws with current cosmology,
> maybe even deeper lying flaws in some other assumptions. Because of
> this heuristic value, exploring BBs is important IMHO.
>
> Cheers,
> G?nther
>
> Carl Tollander wrote:
>> http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2008/06/urban_myths_in_contemporary_co.html 
>>
>>
>> Egan fans (and others!) may find this of interest.
>>
>> C.
>>
>>
>> ============================================================
>> 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
>>
>

[Günther Greindl]

Carl,

a very interesting post, thanks!

> I was particularly struck by Greg Egan's statement:
>
> "The only ?Copernican principle? I?d consider worth defending would be
> one that avoids coincidences, rather than one that assumes typicality. "

I think he was talking about the cosmological perspective here;
"coincidences" at the level of biological systems etc would then be
theoretically, if not practically derivable from the ultimate theory.

> The BB discussion has value as a catalyst, however, in that it shows
> that we have few mature conceptual tools with which to have such a
> discussion.

I agree!

> In particular, most of the discussants exhibit some chagrin
> that not only do they not share a notion of what an 'observer' might be,
> but that their individual notions about the definition of such an entity
> have begun to seem to them less than coherent.

Have you looked at this?:

The information integration theory of consciousness
by Giulio Tononi
in Velmans, M. & Schneider, S. The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness
Blackwell Publishing, 2007, pp. 287-300

An overview can be found here:
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/jun08/6315

> The study of Complexity lacks a coherent theory of the emegence of
> (complex) observers. I'm speaking of such a theory in the abstract, and
> not about humans or fruit flies or whether an observer must be
> self-aware, autonomous or able to recognize itself in a mirror. I'm
> particularly groping for something beyond a simple notion of whether an
> observer is 'typical' in some given environment and more how
> observerness emerges and operates in coevolutionary or epigenetic
> situations.

Would the above theory fit your desiderata? Or are you looking for
something different?


Cheers,
G?nther
--
G?nther Greindl
Department of Philosophy of Science
University of Vienna
guenther.greindl at univie.ac.at
http://www.univie.ac.at/Wissenschaftstheorie/

Blog: http://dao.complexitystudies.org/
Site: http://www.complexitystudies.org

[Russell Standish]

On Sun, Jun 15, 2008 at 05:26:39PM +0200, G?nther Greindl wrote:

>
> Have you looked at this?:
>
> The information integration theory of consciousness
> by Giulio Tononi
> in Velmans, M. & Schneider, S. The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness
> Blackwell Publishing, 2007, pp. 287-300
>
> An overview can be found here:
> http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/jun08/6315
>

Interesting reference G?nther! Its not overly convincing, however (or
at least the online abstract you point is overly vague on
detailes). It does remind me of Philemotte & Bersini's "intrinsic
emergence" (Bersini's paper in ALife 9 or P & B's paper in ECAL05).

A brief summary of their idea (if I have the gist right) is that
emergence is detected whenever a dramatic reduction of complexity of a
system is produced by adding in a "detector" or "observer" to the
system. This is quantifiable, at least for their CA examples. Tononi's
\Phi seems to be nothing other than this reduction in complexity - so
it would seem to me (off the bat) that he is just measuring emergence (which
in the brain might well be a measure of consciousness, but is dubious
in other systems).

Anyway, all these ideas are very immature, but nevertheless interesting.

--

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