RE: [Fis] CONSILIENCE: When separate inductions jump together

In commenting upon Malcolm's posting on consilience, Aleks responded in
ways that triggered my own response, as here below:

>>Here are three questions that might be discussed:
>>
>> (1) Is the consilience of inductions a clear notion? What
>> does it mean for facts to be of a different kind?
>> Why is this especially significant?
>
>AJ: I wonder what makes consilience different from prediction of untried
>instances. There is a question of the level of abstraction that we are
>operating at. In "prediction of untried instances" we are examining the
>ability of a particular model to be applicable to situations that were not
>used to build the model. In "consilience of inductions" we apply the model
>built with observations of apples and stones to observations of moons and
>planets.
>
>A somewhat different view is that consilience is about the creation of a
>variable and/or a pattern that is defined for a large number of diverse
>situations. Consilience = generality. Such an interpretation would make "4)
>Convergence of the theory" redundant, as increasing the generality of a tool
>is how simplicity is acheved through a reduction in the number of cognitive
>tools.
>
>> (2) Do examples of consilience occur in sciences outside of
>> physics?
>
>How about mathematics? Ultimately, all branches of science make good use of
>notions of summation, multiplication, integration, of histograms and
>probability distributions. Any kind of an abstract concept that can be
>applied to various variables of a particular type are subject to
>consilience. Entropy and energy are particular concepts that, at an abstract
>level, can be applied to many areas. If you allow me to oversimplify: in
>physics, energy is, well, energy; in economics, energy is money; in biology,
>energy is food; in chemistry, energy is heat; in psychology, energy is
>motivation; etc.
>
>In these examples, I am examining the consilience not of hypotheses, but of
>scientific "tools" (calculus: applicable whenever there are variables and
>infinitesimal quantities) and "patterns" (second law of thermodynamics:
>applicable whenever there is a notion of energy and a notion of space).
>
>Best regards,
>
> Aleks

     SS: I have been urging a very general pattern or ALL dssipative
structures, including living ones -- what I call the canonical
developmental trajectory. This structure can be shown most simply as
immature -> mature -> senescent. In my hands it is described in very
general infodynamic terms, as:
IMMATURITY: system relatively small and unformed, experiencing tremendous
intrinsic (per unit mass) energy throughput used in its growth and
construction, but producing large amounts of entropy at the same time. This
system was started as a trivial spin-off from a larger dissipative
structure.
MATURITY: This stage endures for a while only in the most stable kinds of
systems, basically in biology and ecology. It is a pause between immaturity
and senescence. The system has become definitive for its kind, has
powerful command of strong gross and mass-specific energy flows for
recovery from perturbations, and can spin off other instances in
reproduction.
SENESCENCE: The system, even though it is definitve, keeps loading in
information, and this information leads to overload, as the system becomes
overconnected, leading to functional underconnectedness and lags in
response time, and therefore fails in recovery from perturbations. A
consequence of this is that the intrinsic energy flowthrough begins to
decline. As well, its behavior becomes overdetermined internally and
stereotyped.
     First descried in organisms, this applies as well to ecosystems, and
to abiotic dissipative structures like tornadoes. In fact, I would be
interested to here of a counterexample!
     So, if one could demonstrate cogently that this is truly a universal
pattern, in the material world at least, would gathering cases under its
aegis be enacting a consilience?

STAN

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Received on Thu Sep 16 22:21:10 2004