Steve,
I suspect that your dislike for the triangle example is that it isn’t Mysterious enough. In the classical literature on Emergence, the chemical properties of water are the salient example. (I.e., why combining Hydrogen and Oxygen, gets you something like water.) Elemental as that question might seem to be, it is still, I gather, a mystery, although not a Mystery. (Water is apparently a wildly aberrant compound whose maximum density, for instance, is reached a few degrees before it freezes. Hence ice floats.)
When trying to understand a class of phenomena, a strategy might be to find an example that is stripped of all but the ESSENTIAL complexities of the class of things one is curious about. Do you agree that’s sometimes a useful strategy? If so, then you apparently believe that the triangle example is TOO simple.
If so, what would you offer as the SIMPLEST example of the phenomenon of emergence?
Nick
From: [hidden email] [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Steve Smith
Sent: Tuesday, September 20, 2011 10:56 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Mind-Body (was: The Psychology Of Yogurt)
Good Fellow Friamers, Nick, Jochen, Glen, Eric, and everyone who ever ate Joghurt/Yogurt/Kefir (spoilt milk by any other name) -
I am perhaps too lazy to go back and reread this entire thread carefully to see precisely what has been asked and answered, what has been swept under the carpet, and what has been tossed over the fence into the neighbor's yard to deal with and what has been waxed up eloquently for a totally tubular ride inside the curl of the crashing wave of insight and understanding.
BUT... the mind-body problem as I *experience* it is the subjective mystery (which if I were more spiritual/religious, might actually be a Mystery as well) of why my consciousness seems to disembodied, why it, at best, depending on my mood and circumstance seems to hover inside my head, just behind my eyes, a little above and usually to the right? Other times it expands and fills the general region I am inhabiting physically, often floating about my head, but sometime centered more near my chest, my heart I suspect... or other times my spleen or large colon (after ingesting spoilt milk).
But most of this (if not simple rhetoric and imagry to dazzle my faithful readers (all three of you)) is some kind of metaphorical projection. The head-centering thing might be about my primary sensory organs being located there, the heart centering might be about the center of my more autonomic systems (heartbeat breathing, digestion, elimination) and a cultural metaphor or metonym (heart for the entire collection of viscera), the more expansive thing (filling the room, the glade, the entire mountainside or valley) as some kind of projection of self onto all that I apprehend directly in the moment. And perhaps when I unroll a map or pick up a globe (bwahahaha!) in my hands, this also accounts for my feeling of grandiosity that almost always rolls in (bwaha!).
I would say that by no means is the mind-body problem solved. It is at best well ignored or well sublimated or well explained-away. I think the logical-positivists (of which there appear to be no small number here) cannot even apprehend the question, much less the possibility of an answer in our lifetimes?
If there is ANY Mystery in the world (for me), it is the collective mysteries of emergent phenomena. At least for me. And among the mysteries of human experience, the mind-body problem is one of the fundamental ones for me. That I am not given much to invoking Mystery, could be my deep sense of rational athiestic humanism that I am blessed/cursed/saddled/riddled with.
I take task with Nick for his use of emergent to describe the properties of 3 sticks fastened well at their corners and their triangleness. I agree/understand that a qualitatively *new* property exists in the triangle that did not exist in the individual sticks... and perhaps it is mere semantics that separates the emergent nature of vortex from the water molecules and the (I won't call it emergent) *collective* nature of triangle from sticks.
Perhaps it is my training/experience in the Proto-Artificial Life work of the early/mid 80's. I think I need to reserve the world emergent for systems which are not merely qualitatively different in the whole than they are in the parts, but which achieve this through some self-organizing process. Autocatalytic networks, sand dunes, gliders and guns for gliders in ConwayLife, etc. I suppose if Nick were to throw 1000 sticks and 1000 blobs of glue into a hopper and stir them about for a few 1000 seconds and then shake them out onto the ground noticing that *some* of the sticks managed to connect up with blobs of glue end to end such that they formed various arrangements of linear chains, and some of them were to form various n-gons, and even perhaps that statistically the triangle pattern was more common than the n-length chain or the n-gons where n > 3, then I'd be inclined to say emergence! The glueballs "stickiness" might be calibrated such that they only adhere to "ends" (and not eachother), and the minimum angles might preclude sticks lining up in parallel and the agitation might be just great enough to shake off appendages from n-gons with extra 'whiskers'... Triangles (and tetrahedra) would be the most likely structures to be "accidentally" created and the most stable (fewest remaining degrees of freedom once joined up). By explaining it this way, I may undermine the mystery in the emergence (and thereby the emergence itself?)
I know I'm like returning to 2008 when Nick was leading a study group on emergence and this may all be quite remedial, but I'd say along with the mind-body question, the emergence question has not been answered. One may be a special case of the other?
Directly responsive to Nick's challenge about the "problem" of mind-body vs vortex-water... I think it WAS stated but as a special case of "self-organizing system" style emergence... In fact, I wonder if a minor stretch cannot caste the *air column/spiral*) inside the water-spiral as a spandrel, and in my example of sticks, glue balls, and n-chains and n-gons (and 2/3d meshes/n=hedra, etc), the properties *we* deem interesting of triangles (e.g. their strength under compression, tension, torque) are NOT properties of their natural selection in their natural environment (the vat where they were stirred by Nick's hairy knuckled paw<grin>) but rather properties suitable for survival in yet another environment (Nick sorting through the joined sticks and piling the triangles up high declaring "what a good form are these!").
Guerin invokes symmetry breaking, but is there not also symmetry establishing? Is that not some of what makes a triangle a Triangle (3-gon having some properties we humans/engineers get all excited about)? By joining the ends of the sticks with some degree of strength or stiffness, 3 at a time, we reduce the degrees of freedom of the system... the three sticks are suddenly locked in a plane and other than rotations around the axes of the sticks themselves and rotations and translations of the resulting triangles, there is no remaining degrees of freedom? Is this not the mystery Nick first brought to our attention when he went swirly with us? Asking us why would a system (vortex) *emerge* within a larger system (basin/drain/water/spinning earth/gravity/atmospheric pressure/etc.) when it actually reduces the rate of energy dissipation. I think the original question was directed at Guerin and the rest of us dogpiled Nick in his absence (he was rather busy laying in the sun in San Diego if I recall) with a whole range of lame to serious, sympathetic to unsympathetic offerings.
In response to Doug's response to Nick's rememberance of the dogpile... I understand why Doug thought he (and others) were rightous in their dismissals of nick's questions, but I also understand why Nick heard it as pissiness. Odd how there can be more than two sides to a given conversation!
I think I've exercised out all my need to ramble for the day... glad you (if you made it this far) enjoyed it, even if only through morbid fascination.
- Steve
Jochen,
This is starting to remind me of the vortex-drain-water discussion. You recall that I was castigated by experts on the list for trivializing fluid dynamics by asking a naïve question about wash-basin drainage. Explaining vortices in washbasins was beyond my understanding. The complexity was just too great. The devil was in the details, and I was not well-trained enough to know them, let alone to build a theory of wash-basin drainage.
Critical as they were for my asking the question, NONE of them asserted that there was a vortex/water problem in the same sense (I suspect) that some would like to assert that there is a mind/body problem.
Emergence can always seem mysterious, if one is the right frame of mind. How mysterious are the structural properties of a triangle, as I hold in my hands three unconnected sticks of wood! The British Emergentist Philosophers (Mill?) liked to say that we should approach any instance of emergence with Natural Piety. Well, bugger that!
To channel Eric, here. Yes there are mysteries, but there is no Mystery.
Best,
Nick
From: [hidden email] [[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Jochen Fromm
Sent: Tuesday, September 20, 2011 2:20 AM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Mind-Body (was: The Psychology Of Yogurt)
If the mind-body problem is solved, we can say how the mind emerges from the body, i.e. from the interactions of billions of neurons and joghurt cells. Can we?
-J.
Sent from Android
"ERIC P. CHARLES" <[hidden email]> wrote:
Nick,
In his last paper, "William James as a Psychologist," Holt tells us that the William James was never one to shun contradictions, and that the one outstanding contradiction in psychology is: The mind seems dependent upon the body, while the mind also seems independent of the body.
Traditionally psychology and philosophy try to somehow divide up the turf, but James insisted the problems of the mind and of the body cannot be solved independent of each other. Another way to phrase this would be to say that the problems of knowledge are ultimately identical to the problems of physiological psychology.
I wager that you no longer understand the problem, because you are familiar with the century worth of work supporting James's position. A century of research showing that mind and body are not different in such a way as to allow for a 'mind-body' problem. People who don't know about this work still think it is mysterious.
Eric
P.S. My hunch is that all scientific fields have complaints about things that were solved long ago, but that people still insist are mysterious. Since there are lots of computer people on the list. Imagine that you were stuck in a room with people debating whether there were any problems that computers couldn't solve. You keep trying to convince them that there are well known classes of problems computers cannot solve, and much of the work on this problem was solved long ago, and that there is no 'can computers solve everything' mysterious. However, no matter how much you protest, they are so vested in the mysteriousness that they don't believe you.
On Mon, Sep 19, 2011 08:19 PM, "Nicholas Thompson" <[hidden email]> wrote:
Glen,
I realize that you didn't start this thread, so you may be as perplexed as I
am, but, what exactly IS the mind-body problem?
Also, not that it's essential, but could you DISAMBIGUATE? I, of course,
instantly assumed you were referring to number eleven.
Flying Spaghetti Monster, the deity of Pastafarianism, a parody religion
FIFA Soccer Manager, a video game about football management
Fighting Spirit magazine, a professional wrestling periodical
Film Score Monthly, a record label and online magazine
Forgetting Sarah Marshall, a motion picture
Free Software Magazine, a computing periodical/website
Free software movement, a sociopolitical movement in computing
Fiji School of Medicine, the central medical school of the University of
the South Pacific
Fixed Survey Meter, an instrument used by the British Royal Observer
Corps during the Cold War to detect nuclear fallout
Folded spectrum method, a Solver for Eigenvalue problems
Free Speech Movement, at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1964
Finite-state machine, a model of computation
Field service management, optimization of the field operations of
technicians
Fatih Sultan Mehmet (as Mehmed II), 7th sultan of the Ottoman
Empire
Fabryka Samochodów Małolitrażowych Polish car factory
Federated States of Micronesia, an Oceanic island nation
Fort Smith Regional Airport (IATA code: FSM) in Arkansas, United
States
Mauritian Solidarity Front, in French Front Solidarité Mauricien
(FSM)
THANKS,
Nick
-----Original Message-----
From: [hidden email] [[hidden email]] On Behalf
Of glen e. p. ropella
Sent: Monday, September 19, 2011 5:46 PM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Fwd: The Psychology Of Yogurt
glen e. p. ropella wrote circa 11-09-19 03:30 PM:
> Nicholas Thompson wrote circa 11-09-19 01:07 PM:
> You are talking to a man with an insulin pump. I start to think VERY
> BADLY if anything goes wrong with it.
>
> Yeah, I don't know either. But part of my fascination with this topic
> lies in the use of psychedelic drugs (not _my_ use of such, of course
> ... the FSM knows I would never touch such stuff). We (humans
and
> some animals, it seems) purposefully make worse some specific body
> processes in order to "think badly".
>
> It seems to me that a little "bad thinking" now and again can be
a
> Good Thing(TM).
Oh, I forgot to mention that I think this issue (mind-body problem) is
intimately related to the old adage "the dose is the poison".
Whether an
alteration in a physiological process is "bad", "good",
"better", or
"worse", depends a very great deal on just how altered the process is.
It seems reasonable that a little of the poisonous ethanol on a regular
basis is "good" and a debilitating inhibition of dopamine production
is
"bad". But there is a large swatch of gray in between where
"bad" and
"good" are too oversimplifying to be useful.
In any case, it's pretty easy for me to see a mind-body problem and to see
it as a fundamental, immediate, medical issue. I've experimented quite a
bit with my own mind-body dichotomy by switching hands on various tasks. I
recently switched _back_ to using my right hand to brush my teeth. When I
switched to my left (something like 10 years ago), I could barely
finish the
job without tiring out my arm. None of the muscles worked in any way that
might be called efficient, even though I felt like I was telling my body to
behave the same way it did when I'd use my right hand. Well, I finally got
good at doing it with my left hand, although in a different way from what I
remember for my right hand. I used my wrist much more with my right hand,
and my elbow much more with my left hand. Well, when I switched just
recently, I seemed to be using my right arm like I learned to use my left
arm! I.e.
very little give in the wrist and most movement in the elbow. I'm now
trying to re-learn to use my wrist more with my right hand. If I do, then
I'll switch again and try to do the same with my left.
Although this sort of thing may not _seem_ like a mind-body problem, it most
definitely is. Despite our realization that the mind is embodied, there may
be some processes that can be swapped out, a perfect "impedance
match", with
another process (like an artificial eyeball, limb, or insulin pump).
And
yet, there may not be any such processes.
If every little mechanism in our body has a salient impact on our mind, then
the mind-body problem disappears. But if not, then the mind-body problem
becomes one of requirements analysis, scaling, and the autonomy of various
components.
--
glen e. p. ropella, 971-222-9095, http://tempusdictum.com
============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
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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
Eric Charles
Professional Student and
Assistant Professor of Psychology
Penn State University
Altoona, PA 16601