2nd Post to FRIAM following yesterday’s post (1st follows) re: Stewart Kauffman’s ”Reinventing the sacred” lecture
So, partly prompted by how it seemed Kauffman got there. There’s a particularly curious “hiding place” for nature’s accumulative individuality and complex behavior within an otherwise “deterministic” universe obeying universal natural laws…
Between the laws,… a “hiding place” for nature’s vitality!
It’s the somewhat deceptive meaning of “uncertainty”. If you prove an uncertainty for some outcome it means that actual events will “at most” do one thing, and “at least” do another. That’s “information” about a probability of behavior, not a specification for individual behaviors.
It specifies the “range of freedom” within the system for non-conforming individual behaviors, which could perhaps lead to accumulatively diverging behaviors. When you multiply successive uncertainties, the accumulative uncertainties are essentially limitless.
Uncertainty is really both a measure of the freedom for individual differences within a system, and at the same time the a measure of the limits beyond which individual differences have no effect. The range beyond which individual differences have no effect specifies with certainty the potential for deterministic system control.
It means that statistical mechanics is a way of describing where accumulative individual behaviors do not matter, not a statement that they never matter. What is hiding is that within the uncertainties of natural law nature is free to develop accumulative diverging effects, the eventful stuff.
Accumulation is not “vitalism”, but a process that sometimes builds things that “have vitality”, as an emergent property. In my approach to systems study that’s what watching animated accumulations of events is about.
Observed divergence in accumulating change is a process that shows vitality, and one you can use to closely examine how animated events develop and what becomes of them.
d’zzat help…? ;-) Phil Henshaw
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First post:
Reinventing the Sacred: Science, Faith and Complexity
Sep 30, 2008 Stuart Kauffman, Institute for Biocomplexity and Informatics,
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1380403261776709885
Alfredo,
Thanks. Wow, I’m sorry trying to talk about my work has been a struggle over language, somehow, but you could hardly ask for a better recommendation for it than Kauffman’s numerous rigorous and compelling reasons why a new approach fitting his problem statement like mine does is needed. If anyone knows people in the larger Santa Fe community that might be interested in successful applications for the world Kauffman painted, locating good answerable questions about physical system evolutionary processes by direct study of them, please pass this on to them.
It’s the accumulative creativity of processes throughout the universe, not deducible in any reasonable approximation by any known kind of general laws or language. It’s how natural form is continually changing in new improbably creative ways and presented to us as an integrated record of inexplicable emergent systems combining countless “pre-adapted” features which no means of guesswork would ever have identified as having local opportunistic value.
It’s that intractable distributed historiosity of complex organizational developments that displays the need for a new technique of learning about them lacking any means to realistically represent them or what they are doing. What seems possible is a tractable mathematical historiology of developmental system design that allows you to at least begin a rigorous exploration of the individual design and development of physical systems themselves, directly.
I even like his reverence for the discovery that coming to grips with this apparent true form of nature that has been hidden in sight from us for so long calls for more than the normal level of rethinking, our ideas of reality, our ideas of what’s sacred. Still, even after proving over and over that we can’t represent natural form with any language, he still didn’t yet seem to see that the perfect representations already exist, and all we need is to learn was how to study them.
The opportunity to make the switch away from representing form with universal laws and math is finding a method of diagnostic exploration of the systems of interest themselves. As I’ve mentioned before, www.synapse9.com/PICS.htm my method should even work interactively with exploratory modeling at some point, because it points to where systemization is occurring and changing, and maybe reveals interesting “cybernetic body parts” to project from the real phenomena and use in definitional form.
Reconstructing the evolutions of natural form can start from tracing the temporary conservation of their local laws ¸¸¸¸.·´ ¯ `·.¸¸¸¸ It’s a present useful approach to studying real individual systems, at least if you accept looking for simple questions first, and then looking around for others.
Best, Phil Henshaw
HDS systems design science ¸¸¸¸.·´ ¯ `·.¸¸¸¸