Re: Crutchfield 's "Is anything ever new?"
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/Crutchfield-s-Is-anything-ever-new-tp3917261p3940282.html
I have had some experience with meetings on camera and have found them strained and unproductive. What has seemed to work a little bit here is for distant people who have read or who are reading the same book to comment on their reading electronically as we go along. But it ONLY works if people stick close to the text If people just use the text as a place to tee-off from, very soon the author becomes irrelevant and commentators talk past one another.
Just to get the feel of what that would be like, I have been working on my own summary of and commentary on Crutchfield. I attach the summary and also copy it in below. Note that I have made every effort to represent the original intent of the author as faithfully as I could. Commentary to follow. It would be interesting to see if others might contribute to such a document.
Crutchfield, James P. ( 2008) Is Anything Ever New? Considering Emergence. In, Bedau, M and Humphreys, P. Emergence: Contemporary readings in philosophy and science.
Accepting the notion that emergence is the coming-into-being of something new, Crutchfield interprets novelty in computational terms. His desire to make such a re-interpretation is justified by the observer-dependency of the criteria commonly used to support the assertion that some classically emergent phenomena such as the BZ reaction and Benard cycles are new In these cases, the newness defined by the theorists failure to anticipate the outcome. To escape the arbitrariness of defining emergence in terms of the weak theories of its describers, Crutchfield suggests that properties should only be regarded as new if they are intrinsic: i.e., new from the point of view of the system of which they are part and new in ways that increase the functionality of that system. For example, he writes
Competitive agents in an efficient capital market control their individual production-investment and stock-ownership strategies based on the optimal pricing that has emerged from their collective behavior. (p 271)
and
What is distinctive about intrinsic emergence is that the patterns formed confer additional functionality which supports global information processing. (p. 272).
In intrinsic emergence, the system itself, or a subsystem within it, forms a model of the system, and it is by reference to changes in this internal model that the system is judged new. Such internal models are prone to the same tradeoff between verisimilitude and completeness that afflicts any external scientific model. The best compromise in this tradeoff can, according to C. be taken as the best description of the actual structure of the system.
But in what terms do we evaluate this outcome? One solution is to employ ideas from the theory of discrete computation, since all a scientist can ever know is his data stream and since analyzing structure in streams of data is what computation theory understands best.. Computational theory answers these sorts of questions in terms of the classes of machines it can recognize in the data stream.
the architecture of the machines themselves represents the organization of the information processing, that is, the intrinsic computation. (p 276)
He thus provides the following definition of emergence:
. A process undergoes emergence if at some time the architecture of information processing has changed in such a way that a distinct and more powerful level of intrinsic computation has appeared that was not present in earlier conditions. (p279)
The most promising area for the application of these ideas is in resolving the contemporary debate on the dominant mechanisms operating in biological evolution. (p. 279). None of the protagonists in the argument between biological Selectionist, Historicist, and Structuralist approaches to evolution have an adequate theory of biological structure. Crutchfield proposes a computational mechanics to explain evolutionary changes in structure in which innovation occurs via hierarchical machine reconstruction.
His conclusion is that
With careful attention to the location of the observer and the system-under-study, with detailed accounting of intrinsic computation, quantitative measures of complexity, we can analyze the patterns, structures, and novel information processing architectures that emerge in nonlinear processes. In this way, we demonstrate that something new has appeared. [p 284]
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,
Clark University ([hidden email])
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
http://www.cusf.org [City University of Santa Fe]
> [Original Message]
> From: Owen Densmore <[hidden email]>
> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
> Date: 11/3/2009 10:06:28 AM
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Crutchfield 's "Is anything ever new?"
>
> Does the enthusiastic response to Nick's seminar suggest having it
> held on-line for those unable to show up at the Santa Fe Library?
>
> I'm sure it could easily be done with skype or some similar technology.
>
> I ask because we are exploring ways to address "higher education" in
> Santa Fe. Santa Fe is pretty rural, so does not have a university to
> call its own. It *does* have several schools, profs, PhDs, think-
> tanks and so on, but not organized yet into access to higher
> education. (i.e. upper undergraduate through graduate studies).
>
> Nick is doing good work in this area .. he can tell you more if you
> ask him.
>
> -- Owen
>
>
>
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