Thanks, Nick.

Grant

On 2/7/11 10:12 AM, Nicholas Thompson wrote:

Grant,

 

The article was collected in an edited volume by Ashby and is available on Google Scholar.  I am rushing now, but if you don’t find it easily, please get back to me and I will find it for you. 

 

Nick

 

From: friam-boun...@redfish.com [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of Grant Holland
Sent: Monday, February 07, 2011 9:57 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group; desm...@santafe.edu
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] A question for your Roboteers out there

 



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Eric,

Would love to read the Ashby/Conant article. I don't see at download link on the page at SFI website however. Any other suggestions how I can download it?

Thanks,
Grant

On 2/6/11 7:27 AM, Eric Smith wrote:

Nick, hi,  
   
Been meaning to send this for a couple of days.  There is a paper on  
the role of models in control theory, which is perhaps profound or  
perhaps a tautology (Mike Spivak comments that the two naturally go  
together):    
   
Conant, Roger C. and W. Ross Ashby. 1970. Every Good Regulator of a  
System Must   
be a Model of That System. International Journal of Systems Science 1  
(2):89-97.  
   
This should be available for download from a link "Foundations of  
Complexity" on the SFI website.    
   
Presumably it's like a room with mirrors at both ends, which isn't a  
true infinite regress, because the images get less resolved at each  
reflection.    
   
One models onesself, presumably, not with the intent that the model be  
realistic, but only that it serve some particular purpose.  So we  
don't encounter Turing-completeness paradoxes, since an internal model  
is not required to be a model of itself, but only a model of some  
aspect of itself, or even of that self's interaction in some  
contexts.    
   
The recursive character does indeed make me think of language, as  
Jochen says, though not necessarily that the two are "the same" thing.  
For the model to be a part of the self, and in that sense, an object  
in its own right, and also to serve as a referent to something else  
through a suitable system for interpretation, reminds me of the way a  
word is both an object subject to manipulation, and a referent to  
other objects.  But somehow words are easier.  They are objects with  
respect to syntax, mophology, phonology, etc., and referents with  
respect to semantics, though I doubt that those distinctions are as  
clean we carelessly might suppose.  Is it right, then to say as  
counterpart, that internal models, as parts of the self, are objects  
under some explicit grammar for handling them, and referents with  
respect to a semantics for which that model-language provides  
addressing?  
   
It would be interesting if there is a common structure of recursion,  
and a "syntactic" sort of cognitive primitive, which underlies many  
forms of internal modeling, of which only one is the use of a  
grammatical language.  In other words (and replacing what Dennett does  
say with what I wish he would say), it is not that language enables  
internal modeling, but rather that, in certain cognitive domains, both  
build from recursive functionality that we find expressed in the use  
of internal models and also in the use of grammatical language.  (I  
say "certain cognitive domains" to avoid the Pinker/Fitch/Chomsky  
assertion that recursion is exclusively human and exclusively  
linguistic-within-human.  That seems a conclusion one can reach only  
by selectively ignoring almost everything we know about the world.)    
   
I suppose that extending some of Russell's thoughts on "proper names"  
to deal with other parts of speech would be a way to try to constrain  
our thinking empirically.  Maybe a lot of this has already been done.  
It's not an area I have had time to learn about.  
   
Eric  
   
   
   
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