Re: [FRIAM] Any non-biological complex systems?

On Wed, May 24, 2017 at 6:59 PM, Russ Abbott wrote: > Are there any good examples of a complex system that doesn't involve > biological organisms (including human beings)? > Three most used non-biological examples I've seen are: - ferromagnetism (described with ising

Re: [FRIAM] Any non-biological complex systems?

.. And in the spirit of beating a dead horse about the head and shoulders with a wet noodle made of well mixed metaphors, I offer the following scholarly support (I hope) for my preferred use of the term "to inform" in this case.

Re: [FRIAM] Any non-biological complex systems?

Nick- Just to be contrarian, I have to ask how much the heat, humidity and mosquito-flux of MA "shaped" the mood of your response? I would still be tempted to suggest that those factors "informed" your mood and therefore response more than to have "shaped" them... Just sayin' - Steve

Re: [FRIAM] Any non-biological complex systems?

Nick - I'm sorry to break into your travel plans/recovery with my (ab)use of language. Unfortunately I do not remember any such admonishment in the past but am happy to take it in the moment. I can tell that this is one of your hot-buttons... maybe right up there with dangling participles

Re: [FRIAM] Any non-biological complex systems?

Steve, I have just arrived in MA in the Mosquito Infested Swamp and opened your message. Now I realize that this message is part of a high minded correspondence on profound matters, and that you have EVERY reason to have forgotten yourself. But STILL I want to remind you that you

Re: [FRIAM] Any non-biological complex systems?

Well, that seems to be the question Russ is asking. It would be more difficult to answer 'no' if we left off the symbolic part. Then we could argue about the closures, if they exist, of things like vortices and such. On May 25, 2017 5:09:38 PM PDT, Marcus Daniels wrote:

Re: [FRIAM] Any non-biological complex systems?

ok, but we are confined to the inanimate here? What natural inanimate objects do symbolic manipulation? Sent from my iPhone > On May 25, 2017, at 4:57 PM, glen ☣ wrote: > > I agree for the most part. But what M and Rosen (and to some extent > Shrödinger, Turing, von

Re: [FRIAM] Any non-biological complex systems?

I agree for the most part. But what M and Rosen (and to some extent Shrödinger, Turing, von Neumann, etc.) were trying to do is suss out the difference between living and inanimate systems. And that's worthy. You don't really need the "agent" concept for that work, though. I tend to prefer

Re: [FRIAM] Any non-biological complex systems?

I am surprised by the suggestion that a crude computational convenience (agents) would really have any one-to-one mapping with real things. Since we are not talking about biological neural systems nor artifacts from them, what sort of physical system would need to decouple symbols from their

Re: [FRIAM] Any non-biological complex systems?

Much joy and merriment to you and yours on your vacation. On Thu, May 25, 2017 at 3:14 PM, Russ Abbott wrote: > I think the weather example rests on the likelihood that we could have > complex weather without biology. > > On Thu, May 25, 2017 at 1:26 PM Steve

Re: [FRIAM] Any non-biological complex systems?

I think the weather example rests on the likelihood that we could have complex weather without biology. On Thu, May 25, 2017 at 1:26 PM Steve wrote: > And I agree completely with the idea of zooming in (enough) to be at least > hunting subSnarks on a domain composed almost

Re: [FRIAM] Any non-biological complex systems?

And I agree completely with the idea of zooming in (enough) to be at least hunting subSnarks on a domain composed almost entirely of Snarks... ((Or Snarkbait?) Beating the dead snark, I was mildly perturbed by the implication that the complexity of weather systems was more than incidentally

Re: [FRIAM] Any non-biological complex systems?

Thank you all for your interest and replies. I regret that I asked this question just before leaving for vacation. I'll be away for a week. Here are my thoughts, which I didn't want to impose before hearing other answers. A complex system involves agents with the following properties. - They

Re: [FRIAM] Any non-biological complex systems?

I agree completely. But if we look carefully at Russ' question: On 05/24/2017 11:00 PM, Russ Abbott wrote: > Can we think of anything that is non-biological, non-human, and not a > biological or human artifact that would qualify as an agent based system? And we consider the previous comments

Re: [FRIAM] Any non-biological complex systems?

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

Re: [FRIAM] Any non-biological complex systems?

I just looked up "Topological Insulator" (thanks Carl) and was blown away (once again) about things discovered/developed during my professional career that I had not heard of before but find relevant/fascinating to some of my work. I wonder if the boys (and girls?) of the Enlightenment felt

Re: [FRIAM] Any non-biological complex systems?

Metamaterials. Topological insulators. On May 24, 2017 6:59 PM, "Russ Abbott" wrote: > Are there any good examples of a complex system that doesn't involve > biological organisms (including human beings)? > >

Re: [FRIAM] Any non-biological complex systems?

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

Re: [FRIAM] Any non-biological complex systems?

The concept of an agent is even more ill-formed than that of complexity or emergence. All the well-defined versions of the concept tighten it down to specific domains. So, you'd have to refine your question even more in order to get a coherent answer. On 05/24/2017 11:00 PM, Russ Abbott

Re: [FRIAM] Any non-biological complex systems?

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

Re: [FRIAM] Any non-biological complex systems?

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

Re: [FRIAM] Get ready for Blockchain

Another little tip for those who type their emails in emacs (like I do). Under Option>Multilingual Environment>Toggle Input Method When it asks for "Input method" type tex. Now you can enter Unicode characters by typing their TeX equivalent eg ∀∀∃∃. Enjoy! ⌣ --

Re: [FRIAM] Any non-biological complex systems?

High speed trading does take on a life of its own and runs at a speed too fast for people to follow. As I said, though, I want to exclude human-produced artifacts. In addition, it's not clear there would be high speed trading if there weren't human traders they are trying to front-run. Agree,