Commenting upon Igor's reaction to my posting:
Loet:
>>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
>
>Igor:
>We should be very specific about what do we take as a system here. If
>this is an individual organism, then we cannot talk about evolution and
>new emerging degrees of freedom.
>If, however, we discuss the population, or species, (and only this is, in
>my opinion, the correct level of discussion here), we surely do have the
>increase in the degrees of freedom. At biochemical level, as new
>biochemical reactions are added to metabolism, and the corresponding
>phase space (for example, the phase space of metabolite concentrations)
>increases its dimensionality, hence extra degrees of freedom occur. At
>cell structural level, when new organelles evolve. At morphological level
>of the whole organism, when new organs appear. At environmental level
>(new food chains).
SS: Based in the usage in evolutionary biology, I have formulated
definitions of:
Evolution = the irreversible accumulation of information
Development = predictable directional change (or, leaving out the observer,
constitutive change)
All materal changes include aspects of each kind of change. At the
level of individual organisms, evolution is usually referred to as
'individuation'. It could result in new degrees of freedoom in some
cases. (1) Suppose we have a kind of fish that is capable of walking on
the bottom of a pond. One individual happens to be more adventurous than
others in the population, and manages to come out of the water for a short
time. Having learned to do this, this individual adds it to its repertoire
of behaviors. Or, suppose a human being suddenly succombs to having
seizures. After this, the number of degrees of freedom in the individual's
behavior has been increased by the addiion of an entirely new category..
JC: >> 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.
>
>Loet: 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).
In the world of science, the actual takes precedence over the posssible,
which can be unlimited. Early in the Big Bang science finds a purely
physical world. This is soon followed by the origin of baryons and we now
have the constraints of a material world added to those of physics. Much
later biological constraints became actualized, and so on. In this view,
the occupiable phase space is ever increasingly narrowed by the additon of
new constraints, and the system could be described as senescing, having
exchanged unlimited possibility for one single conrete actuality. The
degrees of freedom opened up by the emergence of new realms of nature did
not increase the size of the phase space AS GIVEN BY physics. Instead,
volumes of this space have become linked by the cohesive tendencies of,
e.g., materiality, biology, and sociality, thereby decreasing the
configurational entropy of the purely physical phase space. What Loet is
calling for is for us to assign these linkage groups (organisms, cities,
etc,) their own degrees of freedom, which did not exist prior to these
emergences. However, it has not been excluded -- although few scientists
would invoke the possiility -- that among the early, purely physical
configurations, there appeared fleetingly microscopic configurations that
later we would take to be characteristic of, e.g., organisms, or cities, at
larger than microscopic scale. An even less congenial- to- science
viewpoint here would be that of Structuralism, which would see such
pre-emergent momentary actualizations of future macroscopic forms as having
been called for by structural attractors which would, in the stickier
future world, become accessed permanently in chemistry, biology and
sociality. Thus, the present world would have been immanent already in the
purely physical world, and, again, there would have been loss of
(potential) degrees of freedom.
Obviosly it is necessary to state why such a view could have any validity
at all. The reason is that there are too many unexplained SIMILARITIES in
Nature, from vortices, waves and trees to particularities like the products
of convergent evolution in biology, including even similarities at the
ecosystem level between different faunas.
In any case, if one DOES take up the structuralist view, then even the
larger than microphysical degrees of freedom actually preceded their
actualization, and once again we do not have the emergence of any NEW
degrees of freedom during the evolution of the world. Indeed, if there
were (and why not?) deep structures that failed to successfully entrain the
physical world, their potential degrees of freedom were never actualized,
and so even large scale degrees of freedom will have diminished during
evolution.
STAN
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Received on Fri Feb 3 10:25:22 2006
