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
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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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