Ann Racuya-Robbins wrote: > Why does a law have to be simpler? What is simpler? > This makes the problem seem like it is technical not ontological...i.e. what > is need is greater computing power. If one wants to think about how an organism works without simplification, and be able to poke and prod at it, one way to go is to try to capture the chemistry and physical dynamics of its cells, down to its atoms and electrical fields in a simulation. One would aim to avoid proliferation of crude approximated submodels (platonic solids describing cell types or organs or whatever), in favor of physics. That is, you go as down as far as you can using data and to specify everything. But doing this is not actually computationally feasible, even if sufficient data were available, and that's not even close either.
Of course, even a well-informed physics model will still be an approximation. My point is that if one wants to capture an organism (or even just a single cell), without compromising on the mathematical formulation, and without throwing away details, it is off-the-charts hard. Maybe in ten or twenty years it will be possible to do one cell. > I think there are many ways of grasping > what happens in organisms beside computer simulation...compassion for > example. Compassion is also a simplification. There's the animal, and then there's the way you feel for the animal. But the way you feel is not the animal. You have no way to know what the animal is actually feeling except from what you can infer by interacting with it, or by scanning it with a futuristic functional MRI. Marcus ============================================================ 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
