Re: [FRIAM] A question for the emergentists among you
Robert, Why do you hope my answer is not true? -- Russ A On Sat, Oct 10, 2009 at 10:10 PM, russell standish r.stand...@unsw.edu.auwrote: On Sat, Oct 10, 2009 at 08:21:08PM -0600, Robert Holmes wrote: Wow, I post a question, go on a 6-hour hike and this is what I come back to... I still don't feel that I've got a straight answer to my question, other than Doug's (which I suspect is the most accurate) and Russ's (which I really hope isn't true). So let me try again: once I've established that a phenomenon is emergent by using a yet-to-be developed metric (Owen's formalism) or philosophic enquiry (Nick's other's approach) - then what? In fact, let's not limit ourselves to the present situation (because I suspect that the current answer is simply Nothing. Identifying emergence is an end in it's own right). What would you *like* to be able to do once you'd attached the emergent label to a phenomenon? What's your best case, your grand vision? Imagine the best of all possible worlds and tell me: what would you want to be able to do once that emergent label gets attached? -- Robert My very short answer is compute the (informational) complexity of the emergent thing. That's what I want to do. -- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Mathematics UNSW SYDNEY 2052 hpco...@hpcoders.com.au Australiahttp://www.hpcoders.com.au 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 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
[FRIAM] A new form of cloud
Something for the meteorologists: http://www.wired.com/science/planetearth/magazine/17-10/st_clouds -- R 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
Re: [FRIAM] CNET reviews Psystar's Snow Leopard-based Open(Q) | Crave - CNET
russell standish wrote: OSX on a VM partition would be fantastic news for me, if the price is right. If that comes to fruition, there won't be any more $25 OSX upgrades from Apple, that's for sure. Fedora 11 and Ubuntu 9.10 work on MacBooks, but not on external drives. The hybrid GPT/MBR partitioning is just voodoo as far as I can tell, but it is possible to have Windows 7, Fedora 11 and Snow Leopard on the same laptop (I do). Due to partitioning limitations, I had to restrict my Fedora 11 partition to a single partition, and not use ext4 (so that I could boot from the same partition) nor have a swap drive (loopback swap files work though). VMware isn't always an option if you are working with hardware like GPUs. It's easier with desktops (e.g. Mac Pro), where you can take a whole SATA drive. Otherwise, VMware Fusion is a great product IMO. 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
Re: [FRIAM] A question for the emergentists among you
Merely an expression of a personal preference: if there is no point is true, it tells me that emergence is and can only ever be pure science. As a practitioner, I prefer my science applied -- R On Sun, Oct 11, 2009 at 12:22 AM, Russ Abbott russ.abb...@gmail.com wrote: Robert, Why do you hope my answer is not true? -- Russ A 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
[FRIAM] (no subject)
Robert, Great clouds. Spectacular example of what we see fairly often in the hours following a sharp cold front passage when one looks up through the cold air to the bottom surface of the warm air above. Right? By the way. We NEED meteorologists on FRIAM. N Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology, Clark University (nthomp...@clarku.edu) http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ 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
Re: [FRIAM] A question for the emergentists among you
By definition science isn't applied. Whether or not new scientific results have application is a different question. My claim is that understanding the underlying mechanisms of emergence is a scientific question in the same way that understanding the underlying mechanisms of what makes some substances elements and other compounds is a scientific question. Certainly there are applications of that knowledge. But the knowledge itself is simply science. How can it be disappointing if the answer to what is emergence? also turns out to be new scientific knowledge? I would find it disappointing if it turns out to be anything else, One of the possibilities for anything else is that emergence is something that occurs (only) in our heads and has nothing to do with the observed phenomena themselves. That's the emergence-is-ontological vs. emergence-is-epistemological argument. My position is that emergence is ontological, i.e., that emergence reflects objective aspects of the nature and is not just a matter of how we look at things. -- Russ A On Sun, Oct 11, 2009 at 7:19 AM, Robert Holmes rob...@holmesacosta.comwrote: Merely an expression of a personal preference: if there is no point is true, it tells me that emergence is and can only ever be pure science. As a practitioner, I prefer my science applied -- R On Sun, Oct 11, 2009 at 12:22 AM, Russ Abbott russ.abb...@gmail.comwrote: Robert, Why do you hope my answer is not true? -- Russ A 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
Re: [FRIAM] A question for the emergentists among you
Thus spake Owen Densmore circa 10/10/2009 11:47 AM: To FRIAM: how would you answer this question by Dennett: Are centers of gravity in your ontology? .. i.e. are they real, do they exist? My answer is: Yes, centers of gravity are real. But I qualify it with as real as anything else we _use_ as the basis for action. Everything we _do_ is real and any thing that effects and affects that _doing_ is real. So, because we use centers of gravity to, say, build bridges, centers of gravity are real. However, because emergent properties are totally useless (except as sorcerous rhetorical babble), they are not real. When/if someone answers Robert's question, i.e. shows us a practical _use_ for the label, then it still won't be real; but it'll be much closer. You actually -- act-ually, same root word as active and actor -- you actually have to use some thing for that thing to be actual/real. A merely hypothetical claim that some thing _could_ be used is inadequate. Centers of gravity are actually used; they effect and affect actions (act-ions). To be clear about my stance, nothing just is. Reality (if we have to use the concept) consists entirely of actions, processes, verbs. There need be no nouns. Hence, unless a hypothetical noun participates directly in a verb, we're free to ignore it because it doesn't matter. It is inactive and, hence, unreal. Centers of gravity are useful and used. Hence, they exist. -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-222-9095, http://agent-based-modeling.com 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
Re: [FRIAM] A question for the emergentists among you
From my perspective, which is probably a minority, your question makes very little sense. The basic conditions for emergence were laid down by Mill in 1843, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/27942/27942-h/27942-h.html#toc53, and there's not much to it: when you combine some things, the properties of the whole are an obvious combination of the properties of the parts; when you combine other things, the contrary. Mill didn't name it as emergence, that came later. He wasn't the first to identify the conditions, either, but that's where our seminar studies started. All of the authors we've been reading agree to Mill's definition of emergence. They all recognize the appropriateness of the label. They all recognize the same category of phenomena as deserving the label. In short, every schoolboy knows emergence when he sees it. So, your question places in the hypothetical future something which factually happened at least 166 years ago. What the authors disagree about is the significance of the category. Some want it to be simply an aspect of our ignorance, remedied by progress. Some want it to be the transcendence of material causation, amen. Some want it to be the nature of reality, russian dolls of causation nested inside other russian dolls. So, your question doesn't even acknowledge the issues that are under debate. My discussion of dog packs was supposed to suggest that the recognition of the category is actually prehistoric. Language is filled with words for collections of X some of which aren't obvious combinations of X's, and the words often have associated verbs and adjectives that cannot be applied to the individuals. A single cow cannot stampede. Successfully hunting large grazing mammals with hand tools required understanding of individual animal behavior and of herd behavior, and it required the ability to act upon the appropriate theory, individual or herd, at the appropriate time. Was there a survival advantage to learning the lesson that one should look for exceptions to the rule that more is simply more? -- rec -- On Sat, Oct 10, 2009 at 8:21 PM, Robert Holmes rob...@holmesacosta.comwrote: Wow, I post a question, go on a 6-hour hike and this is what I come back to... I still don't feel that I've got a straight answer to my question, other than Doug's (which I suspect is the most accurate) and Russ's (which I really hope isn't true). So let me try again: once I've established that a phenomenon is emergent by using a yet-to-be developed metric (Owen's formalism) or philosophic enquiry (Nick's other's approach) - then what? In fact, let's not limit ourselves to the present situation (because I suspect that the current answer is simply Nothing. Identifying emergence is an end in it's own right). What would you *like* to be able to do once you'd attached the emergent label to a phenomenon? What's your best case, your grand vision? Imagine the best of all possible worlds and tell me: what would you want to be able to do once that emergent label gets attached? -- Robert 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 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
[FRIAM] Theory and practice
Warning: Rant! Robert wrote: I still don't feel that I've got a straight answer to my question, other than Doug's (which I suspect is the most accurate) and Russ's (which I really hope isn't true). So let me try again: once I've established that a phenomenon is emergent by using a yet-to-be developed metric (Owen's formalism) or philosophic enquiry (Nick's other's approach) - then what? And a little later: Merely an expression of a personal preference: if there is no point is true, it tells me that emergence is and can only ever be pure science. As a practitioner, I prefer my science applied And in between, bizarrely: It's an interesting read - and the depressing thing is that it shows how little the theory has progressed in 41 years (41! count them!). Glen wrote: A merely hypothetical claim that some thing _could_ be used is inadequate. Centers of gravity are actually used; they effect and affect actions (act-ions). To be clear about my stance, nothing just is. Reality (if we have to use the concept) consists entirely of actions, processes, verbs. There need be no nouns. Hence, unless a hypothetical noun participates directly in a verb, we're free to ignore it because it doesn't matter. It is inactive and, hence, unreal. Centers of gravity are useful and used. Hence, they exist. Doug quotes his parrots! Good heavens! I can understand a preference for application; I'm an engineer myself and only feel truly satisfied when scientific enquiry has come full circle and augmented the physical world in some manner, but what is it with the continuous sniping at curiosity, discussion, exploration of ideas? I'm sure I need not list examples of theory that lay dormant for years before filling some vital, practical niche. Why the exasperation with, at times almost hostility towards, the process that runs (necessarily, as the low-hanging fruit thins out) from curiosity, through philosophy, science and math, engineering to useful systems? Or relegating partial, developing fruit of the process to the realm of fantasy? A large part of what we're curious about turns out to be irrelevant, a large part of philosophy turns out to be useless, or simply wrong; much research is sterile. Sure, demand efficiency from these processes -- more, as one moves closer to practical implementation -- but how about cutting the people who engage in them *some* slack? What the hell? I mean, these aren't a bunch of crackpots spewing bunk. It's smart people grappling with something difficult that is not well understood by anybody, and it concerns a class of systems that touches on every aspect of our lives in vital ways. If there is the possibility of additional insight, any insight, how about some applause when people spend their own resources to advance their understanding, and share it for free as they go! Rikus 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
Re: [FRIAM] A question for the emergentists among you
I find it odd that we're arguing about the value of creating a theory for emergence. Follow me back just a few years. irony Lets see: why would we want a theory about Chaos. Its just when things are messy, right? Poor Lorenz and his weather equations .. if only he had be better with error calculations he would have certainly gotten good results. Tisk tisk. And the poor iterated logistics equation. Why on earth didn't they try harder, clearly the series would eventually repeat. Sloppy, sloppy methodology. And so what if it is weird, just forget it and approximate. I mean, what the heck does the sill word chaos mean anyway? .. its just when things go wrong and the silly scientist or engineer is not doing their calculations correctly, right? No use in any of this. What good would it be for silly old Lyapunov to succeed in defining chaos. His exponent certainly doesn't help my work! And Feigenbaum! A brilliant guy, but moody over bifurcation and whether or not it has hidden structure. What a waste! You silly folks trying to formalize chaos and find good techniques for non-linear dynamics are just wasting my time. It'll never work. Just stick with the old proven ways and just perturb them a bit or be happy with the first order approximation. /irony I'm ashamed of you! Surely you are not against developing new theories, right? Maybe this makes it clearer: Divergence is to Chaos as Emergence is to Complexity .. thus studying emergence may do for Complexity what hard work done by the Heros of Chaos did for their silly science. What the heck is Chaos anyway? Right. Bad Friam! Bad Friam! -- Owen 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
Re: [FRIAM] A question for the emergentists among you
On Sun, Oct 11, 2009 at 2:10 PM, Russ Abbott russ.abb...@gmail.com wrote: Roger, Well said. But there is a further question. Can anything be added to your (Mill's) statement that when you combine some things (e.g., combining a bunch of cows into a herd) the result has properties that the components lack. That is, what, if anything, can one say about those phenomena that exhibit this property? Do those phenomena have anything in common? Wimsatt lists four heuristics for establishing aggregativity of properties: swap identical parts in the aggregate; increase or decrease the number of parts in the aggregate; take the aggregate apart and reassemble it; and freedom from non-linear interactions between parts. The heuristics aren't necessarily independent of each other, but neither are they necessarily dependent. So, there are four kinds of emergence which fail just one heuristic, six kinds which fail two different heuristics, four kinds which fail three different heuristic, and one kind which fails all four heuristics. So that's 15 different flavors of emergence, which is perhaps an overestimate, but Wimsatt is still soliciting for additional heuristics. -- rec -- 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
Re: [FRIAM] A question for the emergentists among you
With aggregativity defined that way, Wimsatt notes that Very few system properties are aggregative. Then what? Is the point that emergence, defined as failure of aggregativity has now been fully characterized? Problem solved? I wouldn't agree with that. I think there is more to say than just a negative definition. An interesting example to which this approach might be applied is an ideal gas. Such a gas satisfies all the aggregativity conditions. Yet it has properties (the gas laws) that the individual components lack. -- Russ A On Sun, Oct 11, 2009 at 3:01 PM, Roger Critchlow r...@elf.org wrote: On Sun, Oct 11, 2009 at 2:10 PM, Russ Abbott russ.abb...@gmail.comwrote: Roger, Well said. But there is a further question. Can anything be added to your (Mill's) statement that when you combine some things (e.g., combining a bunch of cows into a herd) the result has properties that the components lack. That is, what, if anything, can one say about those phenomena that exhibit this property? Do those phenomena have anything in common? Wimsatt lists four heuristics for establishing aggregativity of properties: swap identical parts in the aggregate; increase or decrease the number of parts in the aggregate; take the aggregate apart and reassemble it; and freedom from non-linear interactions between parts. The heuristics aren't necessarily independent of each other, but neither are they necessarily dependent. So, there are four kinds of emergence which fail just one heuristic, six kinds which fail two different heuristics, four kinds which fail three different heuristic, and one kind which fails all four heuristics. So that's 15 different flavors of emergence, which is perhaps an overestimate, but Wimsatt is still soliciting for additional heuristics. -- rec -- 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
[FRIAM] Abstract Algebra
What's everyone's favorite modern/abstract algebra book? By that I mean a book on algebraic structures, including: (From Wikipedia) Algebraic structures Magma Set S with binary operation + Semigroup Associativity of + Monoid Existence of identity element for + in S Group Existence of inverse elements for + in S Abelian group Commutativity of + Pseudo-ring Associative binary operation · Distributivity of · over + Ring Existence of identity element for · in S Commutative ring Commutativity of · Field Existence of inverse elements for · in S .. and linear algebra too would be part of the tree. Basically good, very clear, hopefully fun or brief .. both would be hard to believe in! A book along the line of Linear Algebra Done Right by Sheldon Axler. Please do not ask why I would care about theory! -- Owen 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
Re: [FRIAM] A question for the emergentists among you
On Sun, Oct 11, 2009 at 4:44 PM, Russ Abbott russ.abb...@gmail.com wrote: With aggregativity defined that way, Wimsatt notes that Very few system properties are aggregative. Then what? Is the point that emergence, defined as failure of aggregativity has now been fully characterized? Problem solved? I wouldn't agree with that. I think there is more to say than just a negative definition. Very few system properties are aggregative, almost all system properties are emergent. There are a lot of varieties of emergence to be dealt with. Maybe all the short, catchy slogans have been already been taken? An interesting example to which this approach might be applied is an ideal gas. Such a gas satisfies all the aggregativity conditions. Yet it has properties (the gas laws) that the individual components lack. Ah, let me count the ways: a simple hard sphere gas, as in Helium or Neon, which adds finite volume and van der Waals forces to the ideal gas; the diatomic hard sphere gas, as in Hydrogen or Oxygen, which adds rotational angular momemtum and vibrational energy; the asymmetric diatomic gas, such as Carbon Monoxide, where the center of gravity is off center; the polar asymmetric diatomic gas, such as Hydrogen Fluoride, which has a positive and negative ends; water vapor, which forms hydrogen bonded clusters; ionic gases; molecules with internal rotational degrees of freedom; oxygen and ozone in equilibrium with ultra-violet radiation; smog; vog; weather; solar wind; These are all sorts of non-ideal gases; all, more or less, non-aggregate in their properties; all, more or less, introducing new ways to be emergent; all, more or less, reducible to aggregate properties if you add enough information about the particle structure and theory about inter-particle interactions. This helps? -- rec -- 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
Re: [FRIAM] A question for the emergentists among you
On Sun, Oct 11, 2009 at 4:44 PM, Russ Abbott russ.abb...@gmail.comwrote: An interesting example to which this approach might be applied is an ideal gas. Such a gas satisfies all the aggregativity conditions. Yet it has properties (the gas laws) that the individual components lack. I read this better the second time through. The gas laws are pretty well explained by the kinetic theory - that the gas is composed of atoms which have mass and velocity and the atom kinetic energies follow Boltzmann's distribution. I suppose that one might call the Boltzmann distribution an emergent, but once one has any collection of individuals which have individual properties, one gets a distribution that describes the property in the collection, so it's a pretty low surprise emergent. Now, there was an interesting paper in arxiv.org about systematic coarse graining of molecular dynamics simulations to compute non-equilibrium thermodynamic properties, http://arxiv.org/abs/0910.1467, which had some bearing on this, -- rec -- 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
Re: [FRIAM] Abstract Algebra
I. N. Herstein Topics in Algebra On Sun, Oct 11, 2009 at 5:13 PM, Owen Densmore o...@backspaces.net wrote: What's everyone's favorite modern/abstract algebra book? By that I mean a book on algebraic structures, including:(From Wikipedia) *Algebraic structures*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algebraic_structure *Magma* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magma_%28algebra%29 Set http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Set_%28mathematics%29 *S* with binary operation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_operation + *Semigroup* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semigroup Associativity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Associativity of + *Monoid* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monoid Existence of identity elementhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_elementfor + in *S* *Group* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_%28mathematics%29 Existence of inverse elementshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverse_elementfor + in *S* *Abelian group* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abelian_group Commutativity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commutativity of + *Pseudo-ring* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudo-ring Associative binary operation · Distributivity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributivity of · over + *Ring* Existence of identity element for · in *S* *Commutative ring* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commutative_ring Commutativity of · *Field* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field_%28mathematics%29 Existence of inverse elements for · in *S* .. and linear algebra too would be part of the tree. Basically good, very clear, hopefully fun or brief .. both would be hard to believe in! A book along the line of Linear Algebra Done Right by Sheldon Axler. Please do not ask why I would care about theory! -- Owen 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 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
[FRIAM] Different topic
Far, far removed, thankfully, from the topic of 'should, or should not FRIAMers be encouraged to ramble enthusiastically about [pick your topic] in the never ending goal of advancing science'. Topic du Jour, for those who have lost count: emergence, and should we (or not) expect anything of substance to (pardon me) emerge from discussions thereunto. Ok, the different topic: Today I was, with mixed anticipation, looking forward to watching the 2009 remake of The Day The Earth Stood Still. The mixed nature of my anticipations were rooted in a} the movie got shitty reviews, b) it would be the first actual 1080p movie that I would stream from my fileserver to my new Linux home entertainment center, and c) I like good science fiction. Imagine my surprise to discover that a) the movie was a shitty remake of the wonderful 1951 classic which starred Michael Rennie. Keaneu Reeves was but a pale imitator in the role of Klaatu. b) I did not have enough bandwith to stream the movie from my file server, and c) the science fiction was pretty pathetic, compared to the original. The BluRay 1080p movie is 8.8 GB, which translates to about 1.9 - 2.2 GB/sec streaming rate necessary to watch it. I was unpleasantly surprised to discover that my supposedly 300 Mbps (37.5 MB/s) 801.11N wireless network capped out at around 2 MB/s. The movie would go for bit, then get all choppy, then lose sound, then stick. As it turns out, life is all about the bottlenecks, and working around them... Is it flawed Linux drivers for my 801.11n USB wireless internet hardware that is the problem, or is it the hardware? Or, perhaps, is it the massive flux of pscitticene* *brainwave activity from the Parrot Farm that is creating emergent GHz interference patterns with the 801.11n TCP stack? Rigorous investigation is indicated. Later, we will return to the current raging *emergence* controversy, at which time we will vigorously engage in the discussion about whether or not the history of chaos science is a basis upon which we should wish to build a platform of emergence science. --Doug - 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
Re: [FRIAM] A question for the emergentists among you
Roger, I've lost track of what your point is. I said that the attempt to find the appropriate abstractions to characterize emergence is valid science. Are you agreeing? Disagreeing? Neither? Both? And what does Winsatt have to do with it? Are you saying that his aggregativity has captured the essence of emergence -- and that there is no more science left to do? That it hasn't captured the essence of emergence? (But then why did you mention it in the first place?) So where are we with respect to whether or not it is worthwhile attempting to understand/chacterize emergence--your original question. -- Russ A On Sun, Oct 11, 2009 at 5:04 PM, Roger Critchlow r...@elf.org wrote: On Sun, Oct 11, 2009 at 4:44 PM, Russ Abbott russ.abb...@gmail.comwrote: An interesting example to which this approach might be applied is an ideal gas. Such a gas satisfies all the aggregativity conditions. Yet it has properties (the gas laws) that the individual components lack. I read this better the second time through. The gas laws are pretty well explained by the kinetic theory - that the gas is composed of atoms which have mass and velocity and the atom kinetic energies follow Boltzmann's distribution. I suppose that one might call the Boltzmann distribution an emergent, but once one has any collection of individuals which have individual properties, one gets a distribution that describes the property in the collection, so it's a pretty low surprise emergent. Now, there was an interesting paper in arxiv.org about systematic coarse graining of molecular dynamics simulations to compute non-equilibrium thermodynamic properties, http://arxiv.org/abs/0910.1467, which had some bearing on this, -- rec -- 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
Re: [FRIAM] A question for the emergentists among you
Robert, (Building a bit off of Roger and Owen...) Not to be trite, but the answer is obviously that different people have different reasons for wanting to discuss emergence. Some of the reasons would match your criterion for usefulness, others wouldn't. One reason for doing this, that receives right criticism on this list, is a sort of pure nominalism - we just want to name things so we can pretend we understand them. Only a slight step away from this is a desire to define and name the thing and then stop (with no pretense of understanding). I don't think anyone on this list is doing either of those things, but there seems to be a lot of suspicion that some (or all) might be. Other goals may be deemed more laudatory depending on your disposition. That said, I suspect few have a goal as concrete in its usefulness as what you are looking for. I suspect that most people's goals can be divided into two kinds: 1) Those who wish to define emergence because they suspect we will be able to determine which of those things we care about are emergent and which are not. These people presume that a good definition will allow us to continue as usual with most things we care about, while identifying better ways to analyze and discuss those few things that are emergent. That is, we will know from the start that certain ways of treating those things (mathematically, scientifically, metaphorically, etc.) will be insufficient, and we might even be able to identify ways of treating those things that are acceptable for all emergent phenomenon. Think of this maybe like the legal distinction between a tort and or a crime... it's nice to know which you are accusing something of, because the best way to proceed differs by type. This is very useful to know, even if you don't have in mind yet any particular things you are accusing someone of. 2) Those who wish to define emergence because they suspect we will find that everything we care about is emergent. That is, there are people who suspect that our ways of analyzing most everything is too simplistic and based on false assumptions, and that we globally need more sophisticated ways to discuss and analyze topics of interest. The situations I am most familiar with that are in dire need of revision are simplistic notions about perception, cognition, and development. The ideas that you can reasonably talk about genes for single phenotypes, that perception can be reduced to sensation, or that cognition can be separated from physiological processes on the one hand and social processes on the other, are all surely silly. I can't think of a good metaphor for this one, sorry. Certainly there are people on the list with other goals (at the least, more specific goals), but hopefully will be a satisfactory answer to your question nonetheless. Eric On Sat, Oct 10, 2009 09:58 AM, Robert Holmes rob...@holmesacosta.com wrote: What's the point of determining whether a phenomenon is emergent or not? What useful stuff can I actually do with that knowledge? In other areas of my life, classification can have actionable consequences. For example, I can use the sophisticated pattern-matching algorithms and heuristics embedded in my brain to work out that the three animals wandering through my house can be categorized as cats and not dogs. And that is useful, because it tells me that I should buy cat food and not dog food when I go to PetCo. So what is an equivalent example with emergence? Once I've attached the emergent label to a phenomenon, then what? -- Robert 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 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
Re: [FRIAM] Different topic
Actually, I suspect that before any of that happens we will have a discussion about how bandwidth is in an emergent property not fully determined by any single piece of hardware (as the bottleneck analogy would lead one to believe). Of course, I know less about that than many on the lists, so I might get smacked down... but I know bandwidth is never perfectly constant, that its stability depends on the time frame within which it is viewed, and that at a suitably wide time frame the device point in the process causing the back up will vary. Eric On Sun, Oct 11, 2009 09:05 PM, Douglas Roberts d...@parrot-farm.net wrote: Far, far removed, thankfully, from the topic of 'should, or should not FRIAMers be encouraged to ramble enthusiastically about [pick your topic] in the never ending goal of advancing science'. Topic du Jour, for those who have lost count: emergence, and should we (or not) expect anything of substance to (pardon me) emerge from discussions thereunto. Ok, the different topic: Today I was, with mixed anticipation, looking forward to watching the 2009 remake of The Day The Earth Stood Still. The mixed nature of my anticipations were rooted in a} the movie got shitty reviews, b) it would be the first actual 1080p movie that I would stream from my fileserver to my new Linux home entertainment center, and c) I like good science fiction. Imagine my surprise to discover that a) the movie was a shitty remake of the wonderful 1951 classic which starred Michael Rennie. Keaneu Reeves was but a pale imitator in the role of Klaatu. b) I did not have enough bandwith to stream the movie from my file server, and c) the science fiction was pretty pathetic, compared to the original. The BluRay 1080p movie is 8.8 GB, which translates to about 1.9 - 2.2 GB/sec streaming rate necessary to watch it. I was unpleasantly surprised to discover that my supposedly 300 Mbps (37.5 MB/s) 801.11N wireless network capped out at around 2 MB/s. The movie would go for bit, then get all choppy, then lose sound, then stick. As it turns out, life is all about the bottlenecks, and working around them... Is it flawed Linux drivers for my 801.11n USB wireless internet hardware that is the problem, or is it the hardware? Or, perhaps, is it the massive flux of pscitticene brainwave activity from the Parrot Farm that is creating emergent GHz interference patterns with the 801.11n TCP stack? Rigorous investigation is indicated. Later, we will return to the current raging emergence controversy, at which time we will vigorously engage in the discussion about whether or not the history of chaos science is a basis upon which we should wish to build a platform of emergence science. --Doug - 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 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
Re: [FRIAM] Different topic
I read this to my MythBuntu server, and it's only comment was: ow, butthead. -- rec -- On Sun, Oct 11, 2009 at 7:05 PM, Douglas Roberts d...@parrot-farm.netwrote: Far, far removed, thankfully, from the topic of 'should, or should not FRIAMers be encouraged to ramble enthusiastically about [pick your topic] in the never ending goal of advancing science'. Topic du Jour, for those who have lost count: emergence, and should we (or not) expect anything of substance to (pardon me) emerge from discussions thereunto. Ok, the different topic: Today I was, with mixed anticipation, looking forward to watching the 2009 remake of The Day The Earth Stood Still. The mixed nature of my anticipations were rooted in a} the movie got shitty reviews, b) it would be the first actual 1080p movie that I would stream from my fileserver to my new Linux home entertainment center, and c) I like good science fiction. Imagine my surprise to discover that a) the movie was a shitty remake of the wonderful 1951 classic which starred Michael Rennie. Keaneu Reeves was but a pale imitator in the role of Klaatu. b) I did not have enough bandwith to stream the movie from my file server, and c) the science fiction was pretty pathetic, compared to the original. The BluRay 1080p movie is 8.8 GB, which translates to about 1.9 - 2.2 GB/sec streaming rate necessary to watch it. I was unpleasantly surprised to discover that my supposedly 300 Mbps (37.5 MB/s) 801.11N wireless network capped out at around 2 MB/s. The movie would go for bit, then get all choppy, then lose sound, then stick. As it turns out, life is all about the bottlenecks, and working around them... Is it flawed Linux drivers for my 801.11n USB wireless internet hardware that is the problem, or is it the hardware? Or, perhaps, is it the massive flux of pscitticene* *brainwave activity from the Parrot Farm that is creating emergent GHz interference patterns with the 801.11n TCP stack? Rigorous investigation is indicated. Later, we will return to the current raging *emergence* controversy, at which time we will vigorously engage in the discussion about whether or not the history of chaos science is a basis upon which we should wish to build a platform of emergence science. --Doug - 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 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
Re: [FRIAM] Different topic
Damn, no respect from every quarter. Sadly, I'm used to that. --DJR On Sun, Oct 11, 2009 at 7:57 PM, Roger Critchlow r...@elf.org wrote: I read this to my MythBuntu server, and it's only comment was: ow, butthead. -- rec -- On Sun, Oct 11, 2009 at 7:05 PM, Douglas Roberts d...@parrot-farm.netwrote: Far, far removed, thankfully, from the topic of 'should, or should not FRIAMers be encouraged to ramble enthusiastically about [pick your topic] in the never ending goal of advancing science'. Topic du Jour, for those who have lost count: emergence, and should we (or not) expect anything of substance to (pardon me) emerge from discussions thereunto. Ok, the different topic: Today I was, with mixed anticipation, looking forward to watching the 2009 remake of The Day The Earth Stood Still. The mixed nature of my anticipations were rooted in a} the movie got shitty reviews, b) it would be the first actual 1080p movie that I would stream from my fileserver to my new Linux home entertainment center, and c) I like good science fiction. Imagine my surprise to discover that a) the movie was a shitty remake of the wonderful 1951 classic which starred Michael Rennie. Keaneu Reeves was but a pale imitator in the role of Klaatu. b) I did not have enough bandwith to stream the movie from my file server, and c) the science fiction was pretty pathetic, compared to the original. The BluRay 1080p movie is 8.8 GB, which translates to about 1.9 - 2.2 GB/sec streaming rate necessary to watch it. I was unpleasantly surprised to discover that my supposedly 300 Mbps (37.5 MB/s) 801.11N wireless network capped out at around 2 MB/s. The movie would go for bit, then get all choppy, then lose sound, then stick. As it turns out, life is all about the bottlenecks, and working around them... Is it flawed Linux drivers for my 801.11n USB wireless internet hardware that is the problem, or is it the hardware? Or, perhaps, is it the massive flux of pscitticene* *brainwave activity from the Parrot Farm that is creating emergent GHz interference patterns with the 801.11n TCP stack? Rigorous investigation is indicated. Later, we will return to the current raging *emergence* controversy, at which time we will vigorously engage in the discussion about whether or not the history of chaos science is a basis upon which we should wish to build a platform of emergence science. --Doug - 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 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 -- Doug Roberts drobe...@rti.org d...@parrot-farm.net 505-455-7333 - Office 505-670-8195 - Cell 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
Re: [FRIAM] A question for the emergentists among you
Dear all, I am clearly being shunned. I keep trying to answer robert and nobody pays the slight attention to my attempts at answering. Next I will find my porch light shot out. After that my barn will be burned. Answer #1 let me take a quick whack at this. Before the recent epigenic revolution we focussed only on which genes we had, not on the arrangement of timing of events during development. It's example, I think, of the heurism of the emergentist viewpoint. Answer #2 Following wimsatt, the puffiness of pancakes is emergent because it depends on the order of mixing the ingredients. You mix the dry ingredients together, you mix the wet incredients together and THEN you mix the wet with the dry. Similarly, with a bread maker you dont want to mix the yeast with the salt, or with the water, in the first instance. If you are making pancakes from a recipe, because text is linear, the steps always appear in an order. For instance, most start with the flour and then add the baking powder and the salt, then the sugar, etc.. For pancakes, the order of these steps does NOT make a difference. Similarly, there are spacial instructions that dont make a difference: In a separate bowl it instructs you to mix the wet ingredients, but you can put the sugar and the salt in witht the eggs and the milk and the oil, if you like. Try to add the baking powder to the wet ingredients or to add it AFTER you have mixed the wet and the dry, and you have trouble. It is these sorts of facts that make the puffiness of pancakes an emergent property, and knowing on which sorts of temporal and spatial arrangements the emergent properties of a meal depends is what makes a flexible and skillful cook. Answer #3 Like any definition, a definition of emergence will serve us if it calls attention to crucial aspects of the systems we are curious about. So, for instance, let us say that we are curious about the whole properties of a system and we adopt Wimsatt's definition that a syetem is emergent if its properties are dependent upon the arrangement of its parts, either in time or in space. We are led to consider the robustness of the system properties against variations in the arrangements of its parts. Some system properties are senstiive to the arrangements of some part entities, not sensitive to others. Against some small changes in part arrangements, the system is strongly buffered; against others, it is highly senstiive. Further, we are led to inquire how the parts come to be arranged in a manner that facilitates emergence. Notice that arrangements of anythng are already at least nominally emergent properties. Organismic development is just a cascade of emergents, each emergent becoming part of an arrangement for the purposes of facilitating the next emergent in the cascade. I dont think you get to any of these questions by thinking reductionistically, and unless the questions are asked, you don't get the answers. Nick Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology, Clark University (nthomp...@clarku.edu) http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ - Original Message - From: Nicholas Thompson To: friam@redfish.com Sent: 10/10/2009 12:28:36 PM Subject: Re: [FRIAM] A question for the emergentists among you All, Following wimsatt, the puffiness of pancakes is emergent because it depends on the order of mixing the ingredients. You mix the dry ingredients together, you mix the set incredients together and THEN you mix the wet with the dry. Similarly, with a bread maker you dont want to mix the yeast with the salt, or with the water, in the first instance. If you are making pancakes from a recipe, because text is linear, the steps always appear in an order. For instance, most start with the flour and then add the baking powder and the salt, then the sugar, etc.. For pancakes, the order of these steps does NOT make a difference. Similarly, there are spacial instructions that dont make a difference: In a separate bowl it instructs you to mix the wet ingredients, but you can put the sugar and the salt in witht the eggs and the milk and the oil, if you like. Try to add the baking powder to the wet ingredients or to add it AFTER you have mixed the wet and the dry, and you have trouble. It is these sorts of facts that make the puffiness of pancakes an emergent property, and knowing on which sorts of temporal and spatial arrangements the emergent properties of a meal depends is what makes a flexible and skillful cook. Nick Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology, Clark University (nthomp...@clarku.edu) http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ - Original Message - From: Russ Abbott To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Sent: 10/10/2009 12:06:14 PM Subject: Re: [FRIAM] A question
Re: [FRIAM] A question for the emergentists among you
That was a quick whack? We operate on different plateaus. In different dimensions, more likely. On different planets, certainly. I was hoping for something more along the lines of Once I've attached the 'emergent' label to a phenomenon, I now know that I can apply the following scientific methodologies to solve my problem: a) ... b) ... c) ... --Doug On Sun, Oct 11, 2009 at 8:25 PM, Nicholas Thompson nickthomp...@earthlink.net wrote: let me take a quick whack at this. [...] 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
Re: [FRIAM] A question for the emergentists among you
roger will give a more complete answer, but let me just say that I think wimsatt would say that in point of fact, the idealness of ideal gasses exists only in the models. Aggregativity is for him a useful fiction. How a fiction can be a fiction and still useful, is the kind of issue dennett struggles with in his chapter. By setting the 4 criteria for aggregativity, wimsatt directs our attention to each of the ways in which it can fail. Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology, Clark University (nthomp...@clarku.edu) http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ - Original Message - From: Russ Abbott To: Roger Critchlow Cc: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Sent: 10/11/2009 4:45:59 PM Subject: Re: [FRIAM] A question for the emergentists among you With aggregativity defined that way, Wimsatt notes that Very few system properties are aggregative. Then what? Is the point that emergence, defined as failure of aggregativity has now been fully characterized? Problem solved? I wouldn't agree with that. I think there is more to say than just a negative definition. An interesting example to which this approach might be applied is an ideal gas. Such a gas satisfies all the aggregativity conditions. Yet it has properties (the gas laws) that the individual components lack. -- Russ A On Sun, Oct 11, 2009 at 3:01 PM, Roger Critchlow r...@elf.org wrote: On Sun, Oct 11, 2009 at 2:10 PM, Russ Abbott russ.abb...@gmail.com wrote: Roger, Well said. But there is a further question. Can anything be added to your (Mill's) statement that when you combine some things (e.g., combining a bunch of cows into a herd) the result has properties that the components lack. That is, what, if anything, can one say about those phenomena that exhibit this property? Do those phenomena have anything in common? Wimsatt lists four heuristics for establishing aggregativity of properties: swap identical parts in the aggregate; increase or decrease the number of parts in the aggregate; take the aggregate apart and reassemble it; and freedom from non-linear interactions between parts. The heuristics aren't necessarily independent of each other, but neither are they necessarily dependent. So, there are four kinds of emergence which fail just one heuristic, six kinds which fail two different heuristics, four kinds which fail three different heuristic, and one kind which fails all four heuristics. So that's 15 different flavors of emergence, which is perhaps an overestimate, but Wimsatt is still soliciting for additional heuristics. -- rec -- 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
Re: [FRIAM] A question for the emergentists among you
Ah can I change the requested line a small amount? Once I've attached the 'emergent' label to a phenomenon, I now know that I CANNOT apply scientific methodologies to the problem that treat the phenomenon as if: A) it is a simple aggregate of the ingredients B) its final state was determined by any individual ingredient C) its final state was determined by any number of 'purely internal' or 'purely external' factors D) its final state can be adequately described purely by reference to a lower level of analysis I wish I could give a positive answer rather than a negative one, but of course we won't have that until the task is done (under some notions of what the task is). Better that time? Eric On Sun, Oct 11, 2009 10:42 PM, Douglas Roberts d...@parrot-farm.net wrote: That was a quick whack? We operate on different plateaus. In different dimensions, more likely. On different planets, certainly. I was hoping for something more along the lines of Once I've attached the 'emergent' label to a phenomenon, I now know that I can apply the following scientific methodologies to solve my problem: a) ... b) ... c) ... --Doug On Sun, Oct 11, 2009 at 8:25 PM, Nicholas Thompson # wrote: let me take a quick whack at this. [...] 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 Eric Charles Professional Student and Assistant Professor of Psychology Penn State University Altoona, PA 16601 Eric Charles Professional Student and Assistant Professor of Psychology Penn State University Altoona, PA 16601 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
Re: [FRIAM] A question for the emergentists among you
Doug, you wrote Once I've attached the 'emergent' label to a phenomenon, I now know that I can apply the following scientific methodologies to solve my problem: Well, the experimental method or the comparative method, depending upon the domain we are dealing with. One has to tease apart the effect of the configuration of elements from the effects of the simple presense of the elements. Here's an example: Once upon a time, many people assumed that a set of properties possessed by groups of monkeys occured because of the manner in which groups were organized. Forty years ago, hoping to demonstrate this, I did a sseries of experiments in which the members of an artificial social group were convened dyad by dyad ... in other words the group had never met as a group but all the potential dyads of the group had met and had an opportunity to behave. Then I summed the dyadic behavior accross all the itneractions and wrote it up as if I was describing a group in the field. The variables of interest were indistinguishable. Therefore, I supposed, triadic, tetradic, n-adic etc., intereactions were not essential to the traditionally observed patterns in the variables of interest. So far as these animals were concerned and these variables being in a social group was just like meeting all the other members of the group one by one. Now, I dont really believe this to be true, but that was the answer I got, and had I not tired of running a monkey concentration camp, I would have continued research on this subject, and it would have been a study of the emergence of social order in monkeys. Nick Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology, Clark University (nthomp...@clarku.edu) http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ - Original Message - From: Douglas Roberts To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Sent: 10/11/2009 8:43:13 PM Subject: Re: [FRIAM] A question for the emergentists among you Once I've attached the 'emergent' label to a phenomenon, I now know that I can apply the following scientific methodologies to solve my problem: a) ... b) ... c) ... --Doug On Sun, Oct 11, 2009 at 8:25 PM, Nicholas Thompson nickthomp...@earthlink.net wrote: let me take a quick whack at this. [...] 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
