Re: Free-will, interdependence

["James N Rose" <***>]

On Wed, 12 Nov 2003 08:23:28 -0500, Dan Fiscus <***> wrote:

>James and all,
>
>A few comments re: this thread...
>
>
>> [Jamie]
>> Long story short, I see us existing in a universe that 'makes sense', there's
>> a reason for everything.  Even 'emergence' has a lineage.  And so must
>> the percept and meme of 'free will'.  Even in unbounded domains.
>
>A catch-22 I see in ecology (theoretical, applied, ecosystems) is
>that independence (free-ness) is achieved through interdependence.
>No organism is self-sufficient or self-sustaining or self-causing, but
>ecosystemic teams of autotrophic and heterotrophic organisms and
>the closed loops of energy and matter and info flow they embody
>and co-create can self-sustain and self-cause to a large degree
>(still need energy and matter, at least so far as life has evolved).

Good point, Dan.  Open environments in the natural world
act in two ways, which are difficult to separate/co-integrate/
appreciate sometimes.  The open environment is an active
source of energy and materiales the living dynamic entities
need 'to continue their being'.  But it is also a passive source
of opportunities and options .. which when chosen/taken/acted-on
impact further energy/materiales income and further options.
To which of course is added the now understood mechanism
of emerged-tiers and all the active/passive relations added to the mix,
and so on.

I don't think I'd say it's a catch-22 so much as a challenging compounding
of phenomena to realize the co-workings of.  But that's my personal bent,
for describing what you've presented.

>Another crux comes when you try to link free will to self-building.
>Like life is free to do everything except cut the old umbilical cord
>before the new lifeline is safely established. There is a kind of
>blind spot that must be covered, again by at least two models,
>views or agents acting in cooperation, each seeing and covering
>the other's blind spot. This can come into play in generalizing the
>Turing Test for intelligence - the lifeline to physical substrate is
>more fundamental that higher order functions like cognition. If
>I can walk up to a computer and pull its plug, it is obviously not
>as intelligent as a human, in the extended sense of intelligence as
>"knowing how to live".

There be a few seminal differences between the artificial and the natural,
as I see it (allowing me to talk like Long John Silver for the moment).
The artificial can be disconnected from its performance environment,
where as high-percent integrated systems (life) cannot.

The physical manifestation distinction I came to appreciate between
the two types of systems came down to identifying hardware versus
software.  All AI systems as known till know -start- with a communications
disconnect from the very beginning. A biased presumption that hardware is
separate from instructions, that codings and rules accomplish 'something
else' and themselves stay invariant from that which they educe into
happening in the world.  Living - natural - systems are quite the opposite.
The codes/instructions are materially based and that material is susceptible
to being impacted, pressed, stressed or modified by the things its
'caused into being'.  That is, all systems are vulnerable to negative/positive
feedback, which feedback can alter the material form and therefore the
'instructions'.  At all levels and in all ways in living systems, the hardware
-is- the software.   That's a really crucial distinction to acknowledge and
make, I feel.   It really makes tangible many of the relational distinctions
Rosen identified vis a vis performances and scopes of difference.

>Interesting issues ya'll raise...
>
>Dan
>

Thanks, Dan.

Jamie
11/12/03


>
>Dan Fiscus
>Ecologist/Research Assistant
>University of Maryland
>Center for Environmental Science
>Appalachian Lab
>301 Braddock Rd
>Frostburg, MD 21532
>301-689-7121 (phone)
>http://al.umces.edu/~fiscus/research