Glen -
It is not my nature to take exception to your oft curmudgeonly (or is it
contrarian?) style but in this case I want to question the implications
of what you say here when you suggest that we are conflating vague
concepts merely because they are vague.
But we have to be careful not to arbitrarily swap one vague concept for another. Just because
"interesting", "life", and "complexity" are all vague doesn't mean they're
analogs
MY point (at least, not trying to speak for others) was/is that
"interesting", "life", and "complexity" might very well be highly
superposed or even "conjugated" (to introduce an extremely overloaded
technical term).
I suppose to disambiguate, I believe that "Life" is a subset of "Complex
Systems" and life in the larger sense of ALife is a larger subset of
complex systems, though probably still a *proper* subset? The outer
bounds of he vagueness of "Life" convolved with the inner bounds of
vagueness of Complex Systems might allow them to become identical? The
question of "Interesting" seems to be sharpened (or is it dulled?) by
the subjectivity of the term... I suppose "interesting" is usually
defined by being simultaneously "familiar enough to be relevant" and
"unfamiliar enough to be novel". Since we are LIfe ourselves, it seems
likely that we find *life itself* at least relevant and as we expand the
definition of Life it becomes more novel and interesting, up to
embracing all of "complexity"... to the extent that the Alife movement
expanded the consideration from biological life to proto-life and
quasi-life, I'm tempted to claim that *they* would include *all* of
complex systems... admitting that the specific boundaries of all the
above *are* vague.
To re-iterate, I think there IS good evidence to consider "complex
systems" and "life" as highly related and it seems obvious that they
would be "interesting", though I suppose there should be things outside
of that domain which are also obviously "interesting". Agency is another
hairball to sort through and I won't attempt much except that in MY
definition of Life, "Agency" is one of the qualities of proto-life. To
that extent, it would seem that complex systems composed *of* entities
with agency are as likely as any "biological system" to exhibit
complexity, etc.
As for "Russ clarifying his question", I think this can be a rhetorical
device? It has always seemed to me that Science really degenerates to
"asking the right question" where when properly formulated, the "answer
becomes obvious"... in some sense, I think THIS is what passes for
elegance, the holy grail of scientific theory?
I do wish I could be as concise as you generally are, but I definitely
lack the discipline if not the skills for that.
Mumble,
- Steve
On 5/25/17 11:36 AM, glen ☣ wrote:
Maturana and Varela, Robert Rosen, Mark Bedeau, Stuart Kauffman [†] (as well as a huge ecology of others) have written
about this to no avail, apparently. We _insist_ on having our ambiguity and eating it, too. In the end, it's
rhetorical trickery (of which I'm no less culpable than anyone else) to use words like "complexity",
"emergence", "interestingness", "agent", etc. in a technical context without making
_some_ (any!) attempt to disambiguate.
There are bottom-up rhetorical tactics (Newman, Moore, et al), where they reserve their
vague-speak for the vague contexts, and simply tolerate their own and others higher order
pattern-matching homunculi to imagine categories like complexity and agency. And there are
top-down tactics (M&V, Rosen, et al), where the rhetoriticians try to speak directly
about the "can't define it but I know it when I see it" categories. If you view
these two rhetorical tactics as inductive vs generative (e.g. back-tracking), respectively,
you can appreciate both.
But we have to be careful not to arbitrarily swap one vague concept for another. Just because
"interesting", "life", and "complexity" are all vague doesn't mean they're
analogs. We need Russ to clarify his question before we'll have anything useful to say about it.
[†] Including this "gem" by Kauffman: https://arxiv.org/abs/1303.5684, wherein
he proceeds to treat subjects Rosen had treated way earlier, way better, and with no
citation of Rosen, to boot. [sigh] But, hey, defection can be profitable.
On 05/25/2017 05:23 AM, Steven A Smith wrote:
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"?
On 5/25/17 5:59 AM, Steven A Smith wrote:
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:
http://alife.org/conferences-isal-past?page=2
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/Chemoton
which 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_set
I 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.
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