On 8/12 Steve replied: “Very clear..among your best.” regarding my reply to Nick:
For related concepts see the notes for Aleks Jakulin’s presentation on my work at the June 2011 Foo Camp “System archetypes & anarchetypes“

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Nick, Ok, but by saying systems are a “standing wave” is to say they’re mechanically repetitive rather than recurrently creative.   The systems of direct concern to people are most often repetitively creative, not mechancal.  They’re not representable by equations at all, but are observably physical systems, locally evolving.

If what you understood by the way I described “local exploratory development” seems covered by “digital time” and entropy, then I’m explaining it badly.

It applies more to the growth phase of what you’d call “a gradient tunneling” processes.  

Before a spark discharge occurs an ionization cascade, that precedes the spark, somehow scavenges energy to build up from a non-process to initiate the development of a large scale energy transfer system.   Degrading the gradient happens *after* the process for doing that has developed.

That’s both what one observes, and an application of the continuity law(1) that beginning a process takes a process, a period of syntropy, preceding the decay of the gradient and the breakdown of the process and a net entropy.  It’s the buildup of the process that becomes the ionization wave that first energizes the spark.  The question is how would such a pre-emergent series of ‘accidents’ first start tunneling through the gradient wall.

I think what you invariably see at every level are sequences that start as runaway developmental processes (¸¸¸.·).   Gradients are never relieved without them taking place it seems.

To me that’s similar enough to how animals and people explore their own environments to find openings that lead to more openings to “misuse” a perfectly good English word and attach some esoteric scientific meanings, and call that syntropy that precedes every growth process “exploratory development”.    Exploratory development often seems to become ‘systematized’, like economic growth has, but then also always upsets itself by altering the environment in which it operates [and that its development explores]. pfh

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Nick’s had commented on 8/11:
“I missed the “time is an everywhere local process” aspect of his paper, and agree wholeheartedly with you and have believed that for years. I think time has to be viewed as ally having two meanings, one of wich is digital and the other real-valued.  All physically confined systems are oscillatory, and one can count the oscillations digitally – anyone at any point in the universe can agree as to the digital count for a particular system.  That is one measure of “time.”  The other is the continuous real-valued “time” on which we can only agree at the limit of distances approaching zero.  All physical clocks in fact hve two common elements – an oscillator and a ratchet.- which means they all are digital and all are subject to the Second Law of Thermodynamics; given that, it is probablyh appropriate and necessary to set up the definition of the irst time to take those characteristics into account, leading to the conclusion that this “time” and temperaure need to be mesured in the same way.  Untrue of the real-valued time.” na

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And I replied on 8/12:
The reference seems implied by both his effort to explain snowflake formation as a local evolutionary process and 2nd pp on p10 “the uniqueness of the behavioral perspective is that it identifies emergence in the spacetime domain as a remnant of a process of natural selection in the behavioral domain”.

I would add to the 1)‘digital’ and 2)‘real-valued’ meanings, the 3)‘developmental’ meaning of time as the accumulation of conserved change whether by coincidence, local random evolutionary processes, or by the active exploratory development (self-animating) processes that are so evident in higher level learning systems. For the latter two the progression of time is not about the working of any sort of deterministic clock, but about the local processes of change.

I myself think that when you look at processes of conserved change you mostly find that time of type 3 is the actual dominant in determining the course of events, and types 1 & 2 amount to record keeping and explanatory principles needed for us to explain complex systems in a simplified way.

For example, the “oscillator and a ratchet” concept is very useful for distinguishing between type 1 and 2  time , but when you force yourself to look at what is oscillating and what the catch is that allows the ratchet to inch forward, changing scales of observation to do it, I think you most often find complex developmental processes of one of the evolutionary types.   So, I’m happy to use time as a principle for organizing my data, but not to explain away how conserved change occurs at scales of organization beyond my data. pfh

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to which Nick replied on 8/12:

We are more or less tracking.  I’ve come to think that every system, from the elementary particle up through the ecosystem, is a space-curvature standing wave in 6-space, which because it is a standing wave, has a characteristic “time” in which it repeats itself.  By hypothesizing that the system has a constant time value, you discover that there is a necessarily-conserved varible, which is energy.  In the more realistic model recognizing that nothing survives forever, heat eplaces energy as the fundamental object.  And thestanding wave’s fundamental time constant is the arithmetic inverse of its temperature.  Visualized an object composed of curved lines and ask what happens if the objet is not all rotating at the same rate – the lines get tisted all out of shape – in tis cse that means inrease space curvature, theefore increased energy content.  So thee is a force tending to make the whole system rotate at the sme rate, i.e. the whole system have the sme temperature – and so are unified relativity, quantum theory, themodynamics.

Your third measue of ime is in my thinking an admixture of the “digital” time and entropy.  What’s going on in all of tis is tha information isfundamental, energy is not, and that heat will ultimately be found to be a more universal concept than energy, because it elates directly to entropy and therefore directly to information.

Are we tracking? na

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In response to my prior comment 8/12:

Nick, The reference seems implied by both his effort to explain snowflake formation as a local evolutionary process and 2nd pp on p10 “the uniqueness of the behavioral perspective is that it identifies emergence in the spacetime domain as a remnant of a process of natural selection in the behavioral domain”.

I would add to the 1)‘digital’ and 2)‘real-valued’ meanings, the 3)‘developmental’ meaning of time as the accumulation of conserved change whether by coincidence, local random evolutionary processes, or by the active exploratory development (self-animating) processes that are so evident in higher level learning systems.  For the latter two the progression of time is not about the working of any sort of deterministic clock, but about the local processes of change.

I myself think that when you look at processes of conserved change you mostly find that time of type 3 is the actual dominant in determining the course of events, and types 1 & 2 amount to record keeping and explanatory principles needed for us to explain complex systems in a simplified way.

For example, the “oscillator and a ratchet” concept is very useful for distinguishing between type 1 and 2  time , but when you force yourself to look at what is oscillating and what the catch is that allows the ratchet to inch forward, changing scales of observation to do it, I think you most often find complex developmental processes of one of the evolutionary types.   So, I’m happy to use time as a principle for organizing my data, but not to explain away how conserved change occurs at scales of organization beyond my data. pfh

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The thread had come from Steve sending Marc’s paper (2) around and my saying on 8/11:
Nick, Steve,
Thanks for notes on Marc van der Erve’s Physics of  Auto-emergence (2).  What attracts me is that he’s the first person I’ve seen who, like me, discards the “clockwork” idea of physics and treats time as an everywhere local process rather than a location in a formula.

I’ve been beating my head against a wall looking for anyone else who realized the necessity of doing that to get physics and real phenomena to fit better.     Still, I don’t really get what he’s talking about concerning astrophysics, and can see that he’s frequently speaking of ideas beyond the physics principles he uses, with metaphors.

What I found I needed to do years ago, to build a “physics of auto-emergence” myself, was create an empirical learning process for auto-emergent phenomena.   There’s no other possible way to represent them but by exploring the developmental processes by which they occur, as they are not required by the boundary conditions of deterministic physics, but independently arise within those bounds.

If he’s actually looking for what I developed as a method, or vis-à-vis, I expect he or I will find the connection between our theories sometime.   I only see that we both feel a need to depart from some of the same traditional assumptions of physics in about the same way to understand how things like unique snowflakes might be the rule rather than the exception. pfh

1) pfh – 1993 Law of Continuity in Change – unifying the conservation laws, to find the place of complex systems
2) mvde – 2008 Explaining Auto-Emergence in Physics and Society –

Phil Henshaw      ¸¸¸¸.·´ ¯ `·.¸¸¸¸ NY NY     www.synapse9.com
& re: Mark van der Erve www.marcvandererve.org