Dear Glen,
This is another error on my part. The text should read:
All of this, it seems to me, can be accommodated by – indeed requires – a common language between information entropy and physics entropy, the very language which GRANT seems to argue is impossible.
In fact, I did see you as “on my side” in the argument, although, I confess I did not wholly understand how you reached your conclusion.
Right now I am trying to get ready for a trip, so can’t deal with the substance of your argument, but look forward to doing so in a few days.
I would like to apologize to everybody for these errors. I am beginning to think I am too old to be trusted with a distribution list. It’s not that I don’t go over the posts before I send them … and in fact, what I sent represented weeks of thinking and a couple of evenings of drafting … believe it or not! It seems that there are SOME sorts of errors I cannot see until they are pointed out to me, and these seem to be, of late, the fatal ones.
All the best to everybody,
Nick
-----Original Message-----
From: [hidden email] [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of glen e. p. ropella
Sent: Thursday, August 05, 2010 10:49 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] entropy and uncertainty, REDUX
Nicholas Thompson wrote circa 08/04/2010 07:04 PM:
> All of this, it seems to me, can be accommodated by – indeed requires
> – a common language between information entropy and physics entropy,
> the very language which Glen seems to argue is impossible.
This part confuses me. As I understand it, Grant was on one side of the dialectic, arguing that organization is (or at least can be) independent of uncertainty. I was on the _other_ side, claiming that they aren't independent, but can be distinct. I.e. Grant's claiming they are fundamentally different things. I'm claiming they are distinct aspects of the same thing.
Grant resolved this (off-list) with his further explanation that he is treating both meanings (organization vs. uncertainty) as distinct measures of the behavior of the same system. As measures, he defines (or wants to define) them with independent co-domains so that they are _allowed_ to vary independently, if that's how it all turns out when he applies the measures to the system. That's not to say that, with any particular system, they will or won't... just that they _might_. Then, if he studies a huge sample of systems and, in all cases, they vary in a correlated way, I can step in and make my assertion that they are aspects of the same thing. If not, then he can step in and make an assertion that they really measure different things. But until we have the separated (not conflated) measures for the two separated concepts, we will stay lost in the conflation.
But, to my knowledge, neither of us have made the case that the the language used to express the measures is fundamentally different, much less impossible. In fact, I think the original irritant for Grant was that because the language used to describe the two is so similar that it leads directly to the conflation between the two concepts. So Grant is lamenting the fact that the two (independent) concepts are expressed in the same language. I would take it even further and say that the two (distinct but intimately related) concepts _should_ be expressed in the same language because they measure the same thing, just in different ways.
So, I'm confused why you think I argue that the common language between the two would be impossible.
--
glen e. p. ropella, 971-222-9095, http://agent-based-modeling.com
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