Are the holes in your map helping you read the territory?

This is an exchange with Frits Smeets on Azimuth, John Baez’s wide ranging mathematical physics blog.   The original topic is the 12/13/11 “What’s up with the solar transition“, and why isn’t it happening when seeming so “logical” to so many.

See Also:

SEA Energy Accounting: far more holes than cheese 3/9/12

– Self-organization as “niche making” 3/25/12

Principles for detecting and responding to system overload 9/4/12

How mismeasures steer us wrong 10/26/12

The basic problem is that systems that are highly organized as cells of complex relationships and work by themselves, like the great proliferation of systems that develop by growth, the working relationships between their internal parts is untraceable.  So other parts of the universe “out of the loop”.

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In a world of systems leaving us “out of the loop”
an observer’s view is riddled with holes,
like Swiss Cheese!

The exchange starts on that topic, and in the last two entries turns to the deeper problem of why the natural holes in our information about nature are missing from the physicists notion of a world describable by equations, or “phase space”.     fyi, you might browse at the start and read carefully toward the end.

Holes in our information for things built from the inside. (Oh gee, never thought of organization as something different from enumeration.... )

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