Is reality complex? / Redux: Free-will

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

Dear John K.,  interleaving ....

John Kineman wrote:
>
> Jamie,
>
> Thanks for the biographical - it is interesting and important to hear
> each other's personal stories, I think, because so much of what we think
> and which path we take is based on impressions from experience and our
> particular inquisitiveness. Your story was very illuminating and
> reminiscent of much of my own, except that I have never entered much of
> the higher professional circuits on this stuff (attempting to do so now
> via the University research appointment). For me it began as a personal
> side-line that eventually became my main obsession and has now taken
> over virtually all my work and most of my play. Anyway, I find much in
> common with what you say, except for the parts I don't understand.

:-)

> On that note, see comments below:
>
> James N Rose wrote:
>
> >Dear John K.,
> >
> >Thank you for forwarding Judith Rosen's
> >remarks on my Nov 1 postings.
> >
> >I'll re-cap a bit, then comment ...
> >
> >
> >...
> >
> >The bind (not paradox) I find in the question of free-will
> >resides in something I mentioned above.  It's been seen
> >in other guises by many people, and endlessly debated
> >of course, but here, we frame it in words/memes peculiar
> >to Logic ...  and Rosen.  :-)
> >
> >Is it reasonable, reliable, or even valid, to go the Liar's
> >Paradox one-better, and enunciate:
> >
> >Can a fixed deterministic rule (presumed to preface and
> >frame the existence of this or any possible universe)
> >specify the existence of perfect open indeterminancy?
> >
> >Substitute the word 'specify' with the word 'model'
> >and Rosen's Rule rises to the fore.
> >
> >Or, is determinism a limitform afterfact of indeterminism?
> >
> >Again, a Rosen Rule situation.
> >

> [J.Kineman]
> I understand this as the complementarity (as defined in physics)
> relationship represented by a non-commuting modeling relation; i.e.,
> that there are a many to many relationship between structures and
> functions, once functions themselves are taken seriously in the theory
> (which most are opposed to doing).

Yes; with the reminder that typical evaluation methods choose
commutative or non-commutative as the/a framing qualia.  What
we are more deeply and extensively dealing however with is a
natural world which is a performance space in which commutative
_and_ non-commutative are co-positionally present.  Compounded.

Like the visual field/ground phenomenon.  Our minds afix on one
or the other, when we are challenged to now 'superpositioned-ly'
"see" both within a single thought-percept.

> >
> >Or,
> >
> >Does it even make sense to talk about partial v. complete?
> >Why fret over perfect 1 to 1 mapping?

> My understanding is that the perfect 1:1 mapping, i.e., full commutation
> of the modeling relation, is Rosen's definition of machine and thus
> determinism. From this view, it seems to be an artifact of theory rather
> than nature; except that we can point to machines that behave like a
> commuting modeling relation in those specific aspects that are devoid of
> formal contingencies (encodings and decodings), which are also involved
> with the still mysterious idea of "abstraction."
>
> So, in this view, is free-will tied up with abstraction??

hmmmmm.  Well, in a sense it could be, but only because abstraction
is a form of generalization, and generalization is a tranform which
cancels out (or actually, accumulates) all instance specification
variables that would give individual local results, and treats
the full extent of the statespace as an optionspace therefore.  And
free-will is actions chosen via confrontation with optionspaces.

My personal preference though is to retain 'determinism' even
in organic/life systems, by recognizing that the determinism qualia
arises from living in a universe which endures on performance rules,
pandemic to a fault.   Which relational situation generates minds
which reject such a straightjacketing paradigm.  Its a real bear
of a situation.  The 'health' of ever improving optionspaces (the
darwinian paradigm writ large so as to now include all systems
not just living ones) is so intrinsic without exception, that it
includes the 'percept' (meme) that a self-performance image
of perfect volitional free-will is as life-sustainingly crucial
as each act of respiration.  It reinforces integrity and self-ness
within all environmental extensions.


> >
> >Whether partial or complete, model or nature, there is
> >indisputable relation between them, and its those aspects
> >which are of priority.  In truth, there are no perfectly
> >closed systems, only virtually closed or sufficiently closed
> >ones.
> >

> Yes, that makes the most sense to me as well.

Excellent!

> >Rose Reasoning insists that its the 'translations of
> >information between classes and sets' that's important.
> >The performance rules of information and communication
> >engagements and transformations, rather than 'does one
> >content account for some other content?'.
> >

> The idea that information itself is a natural entity seems a related
> concern; one I am intrigued with in regard to ecosystems.

I mused some many years ago that 'information' is the
basic unit of existence; anything that is variable
provides units of integrable 'information' (time, distance,
sequence, mass, relevance, etc.) they all end up being
cross-coordinatable because they share being 'information'.

What I never did hit on, but you just did in that
sentence, was to come up with a meme/name to capture
the sentiment I just defined.  You called information:
_the_ "natural entity".  I think that's wonderful, John. (!)


> >If the performance rules are applicable in alternatively
> >renderable domains, that trumps mapping.
> >
> >
> "Applicable" meaning partially? Then I think mapping is our primary
> interest, because the partial commutation where both the applicabilities
> and the inapplicabilities are interesting, is best discussed as a mapping
> issue. Where applicable means completely, then mapping is irrelevant, as
> there's no difference and thus no mapping process necessary to explain.

Ok, but I personally see the other approach being more fruitful:
explicating the transform rules and then process from rules,
between closed and open domains (which have 'members' in common)
rather than to stay with a possible tautology trap that fixates
on 'why' open and closed systems are different from each other.

'How (do) they function together?' seems the more worthwhile question
for me.

You see, this gets me to asking questions like: Once a computer
programs halts, can it start up again of on its own?  [Which
to me is a much more important question - in line with Rosen's/my
natural systems concerns .. than to ask the question "how can
you predict if a given program -will- halt?"]

You see, an algorythm or computer string which reinitiates or
re-instantiates -after- it has already completed its task and
halted at some point, requires being so persistently in touch
with itself and its environs in ways active and 'present', that
such a capable system carries and embodies all the qualifiers
that Rosen, I, others, have ascribed to 'living systems' [versus
'artificial'ly (partially) integrated systems].

> >Closure v. non-closure  and model v. nature becomes
> >secondary.  Not unimportant, just 'secondary'.

> In the fully commuting situation - i.e., mechanisms?

Non-commutative <comjoined> commutative.

> >If the performance lifetime of a system never feels its
> >limitations, then whether there -are- limitations or not
> >is moot.
> >

> Which I take as applying to the case of the 2nd Law thermo limits. Who
> cares about the universal reconning (which itself can be disputed) when
> the scale between universe and organism is so vastly different that
> there is little or no local effect except the rules of energy
> dissipation (Stan's point), which can be circumvented by design (my
> point). Also the higher energy (or material) requirements for
> circumventing 2nd Law thermo locally are all but irrelevant for the same
> reason; that locally the reserve of both energy and material is
> plentiful. Where it is not, we run into the issue of resource limitation
> which one could attribute to these laws, but even there biology has a
> workaround -- it reproduces and dies, thus changing the scale at which
> resources are required. So at every turn the so-called limits are
> circumvented. The apparent effort of doing that (it looks like effort to
> us, thinking energetically rather than purposefully) can be taken as
> proof that the physical laws are in force, or turning it around, the
> fact that such circumvention is common can be taken as creating a
> situation where it is not. Then there can be a chicken-egg discussion,
> which of course gets very philosophical.

Wow ... exactly the situation profoundly to be avoided!

My solution was to scrupulously avoid looking for 'yet
another law of the universe' to explain complex-systems
formation.  What I discovered instead was: local
enactions of entropy -produce- negentropy in nested
tier (agent) spaces.  This being a non-thermodynamic
general format of 'entropy', where any entropy value
assignment is really an inverse measure of the number
of internal information/communication events.  Higher
'entropy' values, means fewer interaction/communication
events.

This is why Clausius and Boltzman and Gauss and Shannon
et al. could all hone in on the same meme/word: entropy,
when looking at systems performances and engagements.

Entropy applies to 'work', it applies to 'information',
because energy translocations and information translocations
are all communication events.

> >If a system is functionally self coherent and consistent
> >and never experiences or enacts a conflict of fundamental
> >performance (sudden cube of the distance rather than
> >square of the distance behaving in some partial sector
> >of its whole, for example), then no forced impositioned
> >actions are interpretable as 'free will'.
> >
> >At least that's the view from this orbit.  :-)

> Not certain I understand this comment, or perhaps I'm in a different
> orbit. It seems to me that living systems are continuously resolving a
> fundamental performance conflict represented by a non-commuting modeling
> relation. The attempt to resolve that continuous mis-match
> (complementarity between form and function) logically produces pathways
> of development, life strategies, evolution, and many subtleties of human
> experience. It seems to define the requirement for inventiveness, which
> in the ultimate theoretical limit could include invention of physical
> laws (a separate discussion of ontologies).

Yeh, well, we each use different paradigms here; you see
complementarity and I see homeomorphs.  You see categorically,
I see cladistically.  You see form, I see performance.

Not all that different, just biased differently.

Jamie Rose
Ceptualist
<http://www.ceptualinstitute.com>