maybe an interesting (but relevant) question is also "what is
interesting?"
It seems that we, as examples of complex, organized, far-from-equilibrium, systems of dissipative systems entities find other examples with similar (subsets) of those properties "interesting"... I'm not sure what a system without those properties would call interesting (or if it could/would call anything anything).
I think what you are calling "interesting" are systems exhibiting nonlinear phenomena, self-organization, and aghast! emergence. I think therefore that such systems exhibit proto-life-like properties by definition. Your exclusion of systems arising from biological (explicitely alive) systems seems to be trying to niggle at the root of "what is life"?
Russ -
I *think* I know what you are getting at, but I don't think we are there yet in this discussion.
I think we've come full circle to the challenges we encountered in the early days of Artificial Life. The first year or two of ALife conferences had a lot of focus on "what IS life?" It is a bit too early in the morning for me to give this proper consideration but as I remember it, there were many examples of systems with life-like or more to the point proto-life-like properties. I doubt I can put my hands on my proceedings from ALife I and ALife II easily and couldn't pull them up online beyond this:
I think your intuition that "unless all of physics would be" is correct, especially when caveated by your own reference to dissipative systems which go on to imply far-from-equilibrium and irreversible systems.
A precursor to the ALife work was that of Tibor Ganti:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemotonwhich invoked "metabolism" and "self-replication" as qualities of proto-life.
It seems like Autocatalytics Sets are useful and near-minimal abstractions?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autocatalytic_setI feel like my maunderings here are vaguely circular when concatenated with your own but I hope someone more incisive than I takes an interest in this discussion and tightens these ideas up a little.
- Steve
On 5/24/17 10:25 PM, Russ Abbott wrote:
I'll buy the ones Steven Smith mentioned. But those are mainly weather and related. I guess that could be generalized to weather and geology.
I don't see why formation of galaxies, stars and planets would be considered a complex system phenomenon unless all of physics would be.
A vortex or hurricane or other dissipative system?
I'd rule out high speed trading since it's done with computers and works only because it interacts with people trading.
All the examples I like (weather, etc.) are open systems that have energy flowing through them. That often generates interesting phenomena. (As we mentioned above dissipative systems.) Do you think that's enough to qualify a system as complex? (I know, as Steve said, it's a fuzzy term.) They all reflect "emergence" of some sort -- even though I don't like that term these days. But they lack the quality of complexity that we find in systems containing agents with some degree of autonomy.
Are there any non-biological, non-human, non-computer systems that would qualify as consisting of autonomous agents?
On Wed, May 24, 2017 at 8:48 PM Gillian Densmore <[hidden email]> wrote:
Although Donder's Son may have a fine example. The clouds (gas things) Jupiter or saturns weather are fine example of complicated stuff only those planets make.
On Wed, May 24, 2017 at 9:04 PM, Steven A Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:
============================================================"Complex Systems" being a somewhat fuzzy concept, this is hard/easy to answer.
Any physical system comprised of large numbers of similar or identical elements which interact and yield non-linear collective behaviour seems like a good enough definition for your purposes. Sand dune formation and (breaking) waves and cloud formation/dissipation all seem like pretty good candidates, not to mention the aforementioned weather in general. Earthquake/Rift/Mountain formain seems like a good fit as well as wind/rain erosion of soil in general.
On 5/24/17 8:56 PM, cody dooderson wrote:
Is a vortex like a funnel cloud or the Saturn's hexagon considered a complex system?
Cody Smith
On Wed, May 24, 2017 at 8:31 PM, Marcus Daniels <[hidden email]> wrote:
High speed trading comes close to not involving people. Other examples that come to mind involve some autonomous (biological) agent creating demand. For example, energy or data or transportation networks are responding to a logistical demand created by people. Netflix (vs. adaptive routing) is a demand created by people.
As companies like Google begin to build agents that build models and satisfy constraints the requests they initiate will become more adaptive.
From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Russ Abbott
Sent: Wednesday, May 24, 2017 6:59 PM
To: FRIAM <[hidden email]>
Subject: [FRIAM] Any non-biological complex systems?
Are there any good examples of a complex system that doesn't involve biological organisms (including human beings)?
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FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
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