Posted by
Carl Tollander on
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/Urban-myths-in-contemporary-cosmology-tp526297p526306.html
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.
>>
>>
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