RE: one legged elephants and other impossibilities…
8/27/06
Aleks,
> phil henshaw wrote:
> > Does it matter if the next great depression
> > knocks out 50% of all value for 50 years
> > instead of just 20% for 10?
> It depends on how revolutionary you are.
> If you want this monetary conception of
> the world to go away for good, you’d prefer
> a really big depression. A small depression,
> on the other hand, would keep the monetary
> economics around for a while longer.There’s something reactionary about your ‘revolutionary’. Just being angry at a system and taking satisfaction in it’s failures isn’t likely to provide it a path to some higher level of evolution. I think that’s particularly the case for things like money systems that fail because of working too well, their excesses. It’s going to be really hard to stomp them out by just stomping on them. They’ll just regrow in new places. The better fix for an unmanageable vehicle that keeps running off the road is to invent breaks and a steering wheel, no? Then maybe it’ll take us places other than the next greater disappointment.
> > Absolutely. It’s so strange that the
> > people who get interested in semantics
> > seem to make all words mutually defined
> > instead of connected to the features of
> > the world from which they were built!!
> Words is all they have. You can’t put features in Microsoft Word.
You use ‘features’ to mean what helps you identify ‘things-out-there’ in the world, that need to be referred to as existing outside the bounds of our information about them?
> > My whole cohort of 20 million visionaries tried opting out.
> > It didn’t work.
> Hmm, can you be more specific?
The 60’s revolution. We were very serious and had inspired visionary leaders popping out all over the place to paint pictures of an entirely new world. It was a global truth and joy ‘movement’, a ‘counter-culture’ of love and genius that we mistook for our right. We thought we could just choose which way we wanted to live and took it upon ourselves to do so. That didn’t work. It was a huge and strong force for change but was missing some of the essentials for transforming the human reality. One is that we were not able to replicate much of any part of the magic. It was an ephemeral burst of new passions and ideas that couldn’t be built on. We didn’t pay attention to forming the words for it, for one important thing, and it was all wrapped up with free sex and drugs. Another was survival. The economic environment is entirely controlled by what someone will buy, and we didn’t have much to sell, except the poetry of the music. We just wanted to give everything away so it wasn’t economically viable. What we thought was a permanent change in the world turns out to have been a possibly nice, but passing, vision no one could understand without having been there.
> > The last statement is the familiar one.
> > The tricky part is whether the ‘events’
> > that are fundamental are something you
> > point to, that remain undefined except
> > for telling others your way of locating them.
> > Is that how you see it?
> Events pretty much have to be representable
> in a formal way. When you have a record of
> them taking place, they’re data. When you don’t,
> they’re predictions.
I see events as either data points, or as complete successions of growth and decay processes that constitute the entire coming and going of a natural distributed system. The latter I call ‘whole events’ [¸¸¸.·´ ¯ `·.¸¸¸]. When recording events to be represented as single points I prefer to call them ‘measures’ (any act of measurement being a ‘whole event’ in its own right). If you have a lot of measures you can sometimes discern evidence of ‘whole events’ of a larger scale. That is a kind of ‘prediction’ that if you look out in the world for possible confirming evidence that you’ll find the type you’re looking for. It mostly works for finding things in the data that exist as independent real things in the world.
> > What interests me about your work, and
> > the similarity I see to Bob Ulanowicz’s, is
> > that it has the potential to be used as a
> > physical system identification tool of
> > immense power, finding the strengths of
> > relations that go beyond statistics. You’d
> > have to teach the tools what
> > to look for, of course.
> Right… Before one can apply these tools,
> you have to define features and events/objects.
> The tools can sometimes provide
> suggestions on what kind of features would
> be beneficial, or when the existing features
> are insufficient. But the tools don’t yet come
> up with a base conceptualization, nor with
> the problem you’d be trying to solve.
well, that’s what my interest in a mathematical definition of derivative continuity for finite sequences, and other shapes, is about. They’re really great identification features for autonomous physical systems and their emerging structural changes.
> Tomorrow I leave to Slovenia for a month. My
> email connection will be a
> bit sporadic. But have a good time!
That’s great you’re getting away! Maybe you’ll get in some mountains, as well as family and friends? Have a great trip.
> Aleks
Phil