Dear John and colleagues,
The problem is old and transcends the domain of physics. Leibniz, for
example, was deeply troubled about the position of the soul in the new
mechanic philosophy. Traditionally, one opposes "grace" against "nature,"
and only by assuming a harmonia praestabilita the reduction to physics could
be warranted. The harmonia praestabilita "fixes" the next-order system.
Nowadays, we no longer oppose nature to grace, but to culture. Culture adds
degrees of freedom. As Marx said, "Die Natur baut keine Maschinen." These
cultural solutions are also not fixed: the steam engines of Marx's time are
now to be seen in musea.
> An interesting question is how we can add dimensions to a
> model of a system that is justified by our knowledge of the
> system. We do know that in standard physics, all
> possibilities are given by the phase space of the system.
> That is a matter of definition, so Loet is simply violating
> technical terminology in the passage quoted above. If we add
> dimensions to a model without justification, it is very easy
> to get the appearance of emergence without any reality to back it up.
The problem is in the concept of "reality" which you use. This reality of
physics does not include the social system as an order of expectations
or--to say it with Leibniz and Husserl--as another monad. If this
justification is dismissed as a transgression of the physical reality, then
the transdisciplinary communication stops and we would live in "two
cultures." From my perspective, however, your discourse can be understood as
one which contains a specific set of rationalized expectations about
"reality" or "nature" which can no longer understand the models of that
reality as parts of that reality. Insofar as a physicist manages to do this,
one has to assume that the models are already contained in this reality from
an origin. This is precisely Leibniz's position: everything (the phase
space) was given by God at the moment of the Creation and revealed to us
because of His Grace. Our access is thus secured transcendentally.
If order is not given ex ante, but constructed ex post, reality becomes an
order of expectations. Physics then is the discourse which provides us with
access on expectations concerning nature. One of the assumptions of the
specific discourse of physics is that the phase space is already given (and
revealed).
With best wishes,
Loet
________________________________
Loet Leydesdorff
Amsterdam School of Communications Research (ASCoR),
Kloveniersburgwal 48, 1012 CX Amsterdam.
Tel.: +31-20- 525 6598; fax: +31-20- 525 3681;
[email protected]
; http://www.leydesdorff.net/
> -----Original Message-----
> From: fis-bounces@listas.unizar.es
> [mailto:fis-bounces@listas.unizar.es] On Behalf Of Dr. John
> D. Collier (by way of Pedro Marijuan<marijuan@unizar.es>)
> Sent: Tuesday, January 31, 2006 4:33 PM
> To: fis@listas.unizar.es
> Subject: [FMG-SPAM] - RE: [Fis] biological "dynamics" -
> Bayesian Filter detected spam
>
> At 12:34 AM 2006/01/30, Stanley N. Salthe wrote:
>
> Loet said:
> >Dear John and colleagues:
> >
> >The issue is, in my opinion: under which conditions is the
> emerging system >able to develop an additional degree of
> freedom? If this is the case, the >situation cannot be
> contained in the phase space ex ante.
>
> We may ask, what is entailed by the addition of a degree of
> freedom? In my just previous posting (pasted in below) I
> noted that the addition of biological constraints to a
> chemical system, or the addition of social contraints to a
> biological system, each time limits further the freedom with
> which involved molecules can take up positions in spacetime
> with respect to each other, by initiating strong correlations
> between them. As well, increasing amounts of entropy
> production would be taken over by activities involving
> supramolecular configurations. From the point of view of the
> involved molecules, the impostion of biology and sociality
> amount to increasing degrees of UNfreedom. In fact, the
> degrees of freedom that are instituted by biological and
> social informational constraints would not have existed, as
> such, in a purely physical-chemical system, and so the
> molecules would have been freer to move around as
> individuals. I think it is not always clearly seen that the
> emergence of new realms in nature (e.g., biology, sociality)
> involves the imposition of MORE constraints upon a
> phsical-chemical system).
>
> Yes. This was basically my point when I said originally in
> reply to Loet that additional levels don't open more
> possibilities, but constrain the possibilities. Loet tries to
> distinguish in recent posts between the model and the object.
> This principal applies to either, and the distinction is irrelevant.
>
> An interesting question is how we can add dimensions to a
> model of a system that is justified by our knowledge of the
> system. We do know that in standard physics, all
> possibilities are given by the phase space of the system.
> That is a matter of definition, so Loet is simply violating
> technical terminology in the passage quoted above. If we add
> dimensions to a model without justification, it is very easy
> to get the appearance of emergence without any reality to back it up.
>
> A standard procedure in classical physics is to include
> constraints on the system in the dimensionality of the system
> by using generalized coordinates. A simple but typical case
> is a bead on a ring, which has the constraint of being on the
> ring. So we can reduce the dimensionality by taking a one
> dimensional bounded space with the spatial dimensions of
> angle (and dynamic dimension of angular momentum), yielding a
> two-dimensional problem. A good internalist model of a system
> (endophysics) should always use the minimal generalized
> dimensions that are empirically required to describe the
> system. That gives the best empirically supported
> dimensionality of the system.
>
>
> Failure to see this, I think, happens because these
> emergences are often viewed as ways that the world comes to
> transcend its previous limitations. I think this perspective
> is misleading. What substance this viewpoint has can be
> appreciated when -- after instituting new degrees of freedom
> -- it happens that they do NOT get fixed, but remain
> as part of informational entropy instead. Now the emergent
> system seems
> to have acquired, indeed, more degrees of freedom to play
> with, even though degrees of freedom have been lost at the
> lower levels.
>
> I am unclear that degrees of freedom are lost in this case. I
> think that typically the size of the space, not the number of
> degrees of freedom is reduced. On the other hand, despite the
> loss in size, in an emergent (non-Laplacean -- see below)
> system may have more dimensions, since the new higher level
> order is not fully deducible from the lower, nor, as Loet
> sort of noted in a previous post, can the higher level fully
> control the lower level. In emergent systems there is in
> increase in logical independence of the constraints on the
> system, and hence an increase in dimensionality (understood
> as per the endophysics approach).s
>
>
> This is to say that
> degrees of freedom appear as openings and opportunities only
> when they are NOT fixed. To the extent that a system
> acquires more and more degrees of freedom AND they also get
> fixed, that system gets inceasingly nailed down by
> information (this information 'overload' is the basis of a
> strong theory of senescence). Thus, a biological system,
> say, or social system, is interesting only to the extent that
> its various possibilities remain uncertain. From the point
> of view of molecules at lower than biological / social
> levels, degrees of freedom opened by the emergence of these
> higher integrative levels impose barriers to their freedom to
> move whether they are fixed or not. These new degrees of
> freedom can create openings and possibilities ONLY at the
> higher levels, after closing down possibilities
> at the lower levels. With emergence, some of the possibilities of
> activity by a system will have moved upscale from the molecular level.
>
> Assuming this can be restated without blurring dimension in
> the sense of size with dimension in terms of degree of
> freedom, this would be right.
> That is presupposing a lot of technical work, however. I
> think it is very important that we keep as clear as possible
> what problems have been solved and which are still open.
>
>
>
> John said:
>
> >In my original complaint I was objecting >to the idea that
> sociality alone is sufficient to produce new >information
> (or new information capacity). The issue is similar to >that
> of whether or not neural nets can produce anything new
> >(substitute social nets to get the argument for the social
> case >mutatis mutandis). Jerry Fodor argues that they
> cannot, since space >of possibilities is not increased by
> anything that happens in the >net.
> I think that this might not be quite correct. If
> there come to be habitual connections between certain nodes,
> like feedbacks in emergent 'autocatalytic' loops, the rates
> of reaction of such regions will become slower than the
> average for the network, and if that rate is significantly
> different, even a new level of scale might emerge. In the 'unevolved'
> network it might be that the rates of communication between
> nodes would be power law distributed, but if different rates
> are not allocated to certain regions (as would be the case
> that I just described) but could emerge anywhere in the
> network, then there would have been no emergence of a new level.
>
> I once thought that this would do, Stan, but I no longer
> think so. Habit is not enough. However habits typically do
> form from autocatalytic loops, and something like these are
> required. More so, just mechanical loops are not enough,
> since these can be reduced to the component contributions (by
> numerical approximation, if nothing else, so they are
> amenable to a Lapalcian analysis). The cases I mentioned are
> not amenable to Laplacian analysis. I think this is the
> correct test for emergence, and it requires a dissipative
> system (or at least an available potential energy source or
> sink -- we know only of the latter). Fodor is right about
> connectionism. It is not sufficient. I do not mean by
> sufficient necessary. Of course there are networks in which
> emergence is possible. Specifically, ones that are not
> amenable to Laplacian analysis.
>
>
> STAN's posting:
>
> >Suppose we have two heterogeneous systems with the same
> numbers of the >same kinds of molecular constituents.
>
> >System A is purely physical/chemical. The states of the
> system pass on >endlessly to new configurations, each one
> >is historically unique but in >the long run the system is
> ergodic. It is not very far from the most >likely
> >configuration of thermodynamic equilibrium.
>
> >System B has further levels of organization (say, both
> 'biological' and >'social'). But we are reductionists, and
> we >seek to observe only the >chemical level constituents at
> any time. We will find that these low >level configurations
> >in System B are selected from possibilities that >might
> arise in System A. There is no new information here --
> >except >INFORMATION itself. That is, System A (except for
> the heterogeneity
> >itself) is one of pure informational >entropy, while system
> B has had >constraints put on possible configurations -- the
> emergent biological and >>social level constraints.
>
> >History has worked in System B too, but so has selection
> and preservation >of (using a Peircean term) 'habits' (=
> >information). So there is no >statistical difference in
> these systems at the phys-chem level, except >that state
> >transitions have been drastically slowed down (generating
> >friction) in System B. The generation of new historical
> >states (and of >entropy! -- which is produced as well
> during the higher level arrangings) >has been partially
> moved >upscale, to the higher levels in System B. But >at
> the molecular level, we find no states not observable in
> System >A, >merely strange associations of such states and
> lags in their replacements.
>
> >How might the transition from System A to System B be
> generated? By >accelerated expansion of the overall >system
> (as in the Big Bang). In the >Universe this has increased
> the force pulling matter together, so that >bigger >and
> bigger configurations (or configurational constraints) become
> >possible.
>
> >Is it possible that some phsical-chemical configurations
> might be reached >during imposition of the higher level
> >constraints that could not be >possible in System A? I
> don't think it is possible to know the answer to >this. If
> not, >then the only new thing to have emerged has been
> stability >of states, which, again, = information.
>
> Comment [JDC]: I think the last question should be posed in
> terms of likelihood rather than in terms of possibility. The
> intelligent designers (intelligent designians? intelligent
> designators? -- the
> IDniks) argue that what we see is impossible without
> guidance, but they mean highly unlikely. The possibility of
> self-organization increases the likelihood of macroscopic
> organization and its retention, since it presupposes cohesion
> (see my stuff on this very useful concept), making the
> unlikely much more likely. In fact from the lower level a
> non-Laplacean system will seem possible, but highly unlikely,
> which IDniks exploit. And the bulk of biologists (pace
> Dawkins) have left themselves open to this by not being
> sufficiently self-critical. The IDniks feed off scientific
> arrogance. (As does Fodor, actually -- he is a
> predeterminist, but hardly an IDnik, though I have never
> understood where he thought meaning does originate.)
>
> Enough for now. That ties up a bunch of things into a nice
> knot -- Fodor and the IDniks indeed.
>
> John
>
>
> --------------------------------------------------------------
> ------------------
> I've found the link between apes and civilised men - it's us.
> -- Konrad Lorenz Professor John
> Collier collierj@ukzn.ac.za Philosophy and Ethics, University
> of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban 4041 South Africa
> T: +27 (31) 260 3248 / 260 2292 F: +27 (31) 260 3031
> http://www.nu.ac.za/undphil/collier/index.html
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Received on Wed Feb 1 09:11:53 2006
