Re: models, sensory perception

[Howard Pattee <***>]

John,
Pardon my massive snipping, but I have a short attention span.
John K wrote: But one possible point of confusion for me is that Newton's ideas were much 
more limited than just the idea of states, which probably deserves some attribution other 
than NP. His notion was that it was all syntactically closed in normal space and time, 
and that to me is the actual historical NP, which the foundations of physics is certainly 
beyond.
HP: I?m not sure Newton thought his models were closed. It is actually very difficult, if 
not impossible, to think like Newton (or anyone else that lived a few centuries ago). I 
can?t even think like my grandmother. Some historians of science claim that the most 
common metaphor was the clock that was at the time the epitome of pure mechanism. It is 
certainly a persistent metaphor as evidenced by Schroedinger using it in What Is Life?  
Forces were all local and fields and action-at-a-distance were unimaginable. A ?model? at 
that time meant an iconic mechanical model like an orrery. Even Maxwell had to have his 
mechanical ether to conceive of fields.
Max Born places the end of the Newtonian Paradigm with Hertz whose sparse modeling 
conditions allowed him eliminate Maxwell?s ether and even Newton?s forces in his 
electromagnetic theory. He regarded fields as entities in their own right that should be 
described without mechanical models. We also owe Hertz the actual empirical discovery of 
electromagnetic waves.
The second part of his epistemology is most important to modern physics:
Hertz: ?For our purpose it is not necessary that they [images] should be in conformity 
with the things in any other respect whatever. As a matter of fact, we do not know, nor 
have we any means of knowing, whether our conception of things are in conformity with 
them in any other than this one fundamental respect.?

This one fundamental respect is just the formal/physical commutation relation that Rosen 
first drew in AS:

?[That] the form which we give them [our images] is such that the logically necessary 
[inferential] consequents of the images in thought are always the images of the necessary 
natural [causal] consequents of the thing pictured.?

John K: To say that RR's view abstracts time away is to say the opposite, that it was 
fundamental and general, then removed by the analysis or view. RR's view, as I read it, 
is actually that the more basic reality is timeless and that time itself is an 
abstraction we that observers (or measuring systems) impose on nature, i.e., a limitation 
on nature or "reality" without which it remains complex.
HP: I agree. This is why some physicists consider extremum and symmetry principles more 
fundamental and more general that any particular dynamics. Others do not, and these are 
understandable preferences if you know how differently mathematicians and 
experimentalists think. Mathematics as formal systems are timeless structures. One does 
not have to be a Platonist to prefer synchronic models because whether a computation or a 
theorem is true or false does not depend on the time of day. On the other hand, if one is 
actually preparing a system for measuring initial conditions, time is crucial.
HP: "but by themselves synchronic models are not directly testable models."
JK: I'm not sure we can say that.
HP: On further thought, I agree. Measurement for dynamic initial conditions require time, 
but pattern recognition in general can be time independent.
JK: But the more important issue, and what I believe Rosen was intending by the 
criticism, was not the ability to consider relational models in physics, but he habit in 
physics to ultimately dismiss the functional part as either unknowable or reducible. One 
can get away with that in physics and still have something important to say about nature, 
but then it is not extensible to biology.
HP: I agree that was Rosen?s intent and there are still narrow-minded physicists. But on 
the whole the present mood of physics is no longer reductionistic.
JK: There is no conceptual link between the wierdness that physics are drawn to 
fundamentally and that which emerges in living systems, for most people. This is because 
the habit of considering sensory perspectives as primary reality separates the two 
domains where complexity emerges big time.
HP: I agree. It is a serious problem. Our evolved senses and brain structures do not 
conform to the weirdness that physics experiments (e.g., delayed choice, non-locality, 
decoherence) have imposed on us.
JK: Then the proper question is more aimed at what causes the middle ground where things 
are things in a sensory way, i.e., where do simple systems come from and why have living 
systems managed to escape that kind of abstraction and simplification?
HP: Good luck. I have no answers yet.
Howard