Friam - Re: Reductionism - was: Young but distant gallaxies

Friam

Re: Reductionism - was: Young but distant gallaxies

Posted by Kenneth Lloyd on
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/Young-but-distant-gallaxies-tp839193p1075494.html

Robert,

Are you referring to the Casamir effect in a vacuum? I suppose it all depends on how you conceptualize a void.

I would certainly agree that inequality and irreversibility are forms of asymmetry. Asymmetry is what happens in reflection and dispersion in recurrent networks. There are temporal forms of asymmetry too, which was part of the original discussion about distant galaxies, the speed of light, and what inference we can make about distant objects from light that's possibly billions of years old that is just now reaching us.

Read: The Ransom of Red Shift - no don't, I got confused. That was Ransom of Red Chief. Never mind.

Ken

From: [hidden email] [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Robert Cordingley
Sent: Monday, September 08, 2008 9:30 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Reductionism - was: Young but distant gallaxies

I'm reading "The Book of Nothing" by John D. Barrow which begins with a history of the concepts of zero, nothing, 0 (the place holder) and the void and moves smoothly on through sets and on to quantum physics. The book raises lots of questions for me and Ken's post struck a chord. On page 235:

"Yet, despite the symmetry of the laws of Nature, we observe the outcomes of those symmetrical laws to be asymmetrical states and structures. Each of us is a complicated asymmetrical outcome of the laws of electromagnetism and gravity. ... One of Nature's deep secrets is the fact that the outcomes of the laws of Nature do not have to possess the same symmetries as the laws themselves.... it is possible to have a Universe governed by a very small number of simple symmetrical laws (perhaps just a single law) yet manifesting a stupendous array of complex, asymmetrical states and structures that might even be able to think about themselves."

If physicists find the perhaps one law (the Grand Unified Theory?) isn't that the ultimate in reductionism? Everything else is just playing in the resulting stardust.

So is the study of complexity just another way of looking at the asymmetries?

Apparently too Descartes denied that a vacuum could exist (ibid p119), let alone 0, but now physicists ideas of what a vacuum is seem to make it something other than a complete void, possessing zero-point energy. So may be D had a point?

Robert C

Kenneth Lloyd wrote:
Steve,

Good job on the defense of a reductionist position. I utilize a five phase approach to the study of complex systems.

Definition - Analysis - Normalization - Synthesis - Realization (DANSR)

Reductionism has its place in the analytical phase at equilibrium. Analysis is normally a study of integrable, often linear systems, but it can be accomplished on non-linear, feed-forward systems as well. The synthesis phase puts information re: complex behavior and emergence back into the integrated mix and may be "analyzed" in non-linear, recurrent networks. This is actually a probabilistic inversion of analysis as described in Inverse Theory.

Bayesian refinement cycles (forward <-> inverse) are applied to new information as one progresses through the DANSR cycle. This refines the effect of new information on prior information - which I hope folks see is not simply additive - and which may be entirely disruptive (see evolution of science itself) .

The fact this seems to work for complex systems is philosophically uninteresting, and may ignored - so the discussion can continue.

Final point: Descartes ultimately rejected the concept of zero because of historical religious orthodoxy - so he personally never applied it to the continuum extension of negative numbers. All his original Cartesian coordinates started with 1 on a finite bottom, left-hand boundary - according to Zero, The Biography of a Dangerous Idea, by Charles Seife.

Ken

From: [hidden email] [[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Steve Smith
Sent: Sunday, September 07, 2008 6:42 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Cc: Aku
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Reductionism - was: Young but distant gallaxies

Orlando-

You can find good references in Wikipedia on this topic, including the Descartes references.

Reductionism
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Descartes held that non-human animals could be reductively explained as automata — De homines 1662.

Reductionism can either mean (a) an approach to understanding the nature of complex things by reducing them to the interactions of their parts, or to simpler or more fundamental things or (b) a philosophical position that a complex system is nothing but the sum of its parts, and that an account of it can be reduced to accounts of individual constituents.[1] This can be said of objects, phenomena, explanations, theories, and meanings.

All -

IMO,
Reductionism(a) is a highly utilitarian approach to understanding complex problems, but in some important cases insufficient. It applies well to easily observable systems of distinct elements with obvious relations operating within the regime they were designed, evolved, or selected for. It applies even better to engineered systems which were designed, built and tested using reductionist principles.   I'm not sure how useful or apt it is beyond that. Some might argue, that this covers so much, who cares about what is left over?... and this might distinguish the rest of us from hard-core reductionists... we are interested in the phenomena, systems, and regimes where such does not apply. This is perhaps what defines Complexity Scientists and Practitioners.

Reductionism(b) is a philosophical extension of (a) which has a nice feel to it for those who operate in the regime where (a) holds well. To the extent that most of the (non-social) problems we encounter in our man-made world tend to lie (by design) in this regime, this is not a bad approach. To the extent that much of science is done in the service of some kind of engineering (ultimately to yield a better material, process or product), it also works well.

Reductionism(b) might be directly confronted by the "Halting Problem" in computability theory.   Reductionism in it's strongest form would suggest that the behaviour of any given system could ultimately be predicted by studying the behaviour of it's parts.   There are certainly large numbers of examples where this is at least approximately true (and useful), otherwise we wouldn't have unit-testing in our software systems, we wouldn't have interchangeable parts, we wouldn't be able to make any useful predictions whatsoever about anything. But if it were fully and literally true, it could be applied to programs in Turing-Complete systems.   My own argument here leads me to ponder what (if any) range of interesting problems lie in the regime between the embarrassingly reduceable and the (non)-halting program.

But to suggest (insist) that *all* systems and *all* phenomenology can be understood (and predicted) simply by reductionism seems to have been dismissed by most serious scientists some while ago.   Complexity Science and those who study Emergent Phenomena implicitly leave Reductionism behind once they get into "truly" complex systems and emergent phenomena.

I, myself, prefer (simple) reductionistic simplifications over (complex) handwaving ones (see Occam's Razor) most of the time, but when the going gets tough (or the systems get complex), reductionism *becomes* nothing more than handwaving in my experience.

- Steve
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============================================================
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