I've tried to catch up with this thread and probably failed to grok most of it. But it strikes me that your coarse- and fine-graining formulation of abstraction and Nick and Eric's true/real distinction are both instances of what I'll call "layer prejudice". I almost want to call it a form of reductionism as a criticism of Nick's original posted paper and the conception of "Natural Design" as a favoritism for the fine-layer structure over the meta-stuff (self, agency, intention, etc.). But neither your coarse-/fine- nor the true/real distinction seem to fully commit to reduction, perhaps for different reasons.
Like mathematicians, maybe we have to ultimately commit to the ontological status of our parsing methods? Are the equivalence classes things-in-themselves (Platonic)? Or are they merely convenient/useful fictions (Construction) we use to parse an *inherently* dynamic (perhaps even unstable or mystical/hidden[†]) world? It's unclear to me why we have to be "layer prejudiced". Why can't both the fine and coarse things have the same ontological status? The example of the unicorn is unfortunate, I think, because the properties of unicorns are essentially stable. Given a particular culture, every little girl knows what a unicorn is and can predict with certainty what another little girl will expect to see when presented with one. Hence, studies of unicorns *will* eventually stabilize as long as the underlying culture is stable. This is exactly the same type of statement one might make about the multiverse. We can predict the properties of spacetime outside the observable universe *if* the underlying multiverse is stable. These little unicorn experts eventually evolve into "shut up and calculate" adults who hang unicorns from their rear view mirrors, nostalgic for the (innocent) days when they were committed to the status of unicorns. (At least 1/2 the cheesy XMas movies Renee's made me watch involve reinvigorating one's belief in "magic", "santa claus", or "christmas spirit", much like Einstein or Russell might have felt after their paradigms were successfully challenged.) So why would statements about unicorns have a different ontological status than statements in physics? And, further, why would the subjects of statements about unicorns have a different status than the subjects of physical laws? It seems reasonable to claim that the answer to my question is: one's metaphysical commitment (Platonic or Construction). [†] By which I intend something like B.C. Smith's "ontological wall", Hoffman's Interface, or OOO's withdrawn objects ... not the spiritual stuff. p.s. In this post, I *wanted* to talk about quasi-periodicity, the perhaps-periodic-within-some-larger-context signals that we can successfully classify as periodic for some (but not other) purposes. It seems to me this prejudice toward "convergence" and the ontological status of limit/horizon points Nick and Eric keep claiming Peirce was after fits methods for quasi-periodicity to a tee. But if we proceed with a badly formulated problem, all we'll get is a badly formulated solution. If we don't know where we're going, how will we know when we (do or don't) get there? For what purposes should unicorns be metaphorically real and for what purposes should they be metaphorically fictitious? I demoted quasi-periodicity to the postscript because I'm worried that not enough of us have enough experience learning they've been *tricked* by pareidolia. But, ultimately, concepts like stationarity target the meta-friendly question of whether the coarse- can be stable while the fine- is unstable. And if we admit to a multi-level hierarchy, perhaps level N is unstable, level N+1 is stable, and level N+2 is (again) unstable? Why not? p.p.s. Merry Christmas! >8^D -- ∄ uǝʃƃ ============================================================ 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 archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
