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Hello, Pete,
I am glad I ask that question and you picked it
up so amicably.
Thank you for taking the time for such a
comprehensive reply.
Your post is "beautiful" (in more than one
'context'!!) and I will read it several times again. (I usually don't have the
endurnce to read so long posts in their entirety and still focus on the
details).
It is "more" than one I would pick out 'quotes'
from to argue.
The only startling thing in it was the statement
that "you, as a physicist" - reading your cultural logic, style and
understanding
I would add "on the side". (No offensive purpose
against physicists, but the physics-principle brainwashing in college is bound
to impose a more focussed restriction on the mind).
So let me repeat my question and add
another one to it:
what is your (more than reduct-physicist) take
on "energy" - and
if I may, add to it on "information" as
well?
And a private question: do you have a
website where I could learn more about your whereabouts/whatabouts?
Thanks again
John M
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Friday, July 09, 2004 4:25 AM
Subject: My Wrap-Up: RR-centric "Process"
Definition?
Hi John M:
All the points you
raise are valid, as is most of what Ionel was kind enough to offer. In fact, I
would say that all of what has been offered in response to my original
question is valid from one perspective or another... that is, within one
context or another.
You're not going to see me defending a
reductionist perspective in any kind of thoroughgoing way as a general
epistemological approach...at least not as a superior one. But
it has its utility. Operationally, I'm a pragmatist, by which I mean that the
final arbiter of the "rightness" of any methodology is the answer to the
bottom-line question, "Does it yield useful
results?", wherein usefulness is determined by one's purpose in
asking the question in the first place.
I defend everyone's right to
bring volitional purpose into the endeavor of scientific inquiry, as long as
that purpose is subject to the overriding constraints of observation and
natural law. To state it succinctly (if somewhat quaintly), the universe is
smarter than we are.
Purpose is a motivating impetus to inquiry, but it's not a constraint...except maybe to the
extent that, if the inquiring minds' impetus is not possessed with a big
enough burn to know, those of faint heart will wimp out at the first
substantial challenge. I like RR's way of dealing with that: let the problem guide you toward its own
solution. With that attitude, the work of discovery becomes
more like play. J. Robert Oppenheimer said it well:
"I could
solve my most complex problems in physics if I had not given up the way of
thinking common to children at
play."
The
inseparability of the purpose of the inquiring mind from the nature and
results of the inquiry itself is, by now, an unarguable aspect of the way the
universe works, as we can best perceive it or infer it. Well...I guess there
are probably some folks who would argue about that inseparability, but I'm not
one of them. Contemporary physics chased the reductionist perspective to
an epistemological dead-end in quantum theory. In attempting to reconcile the
theory with the reality it purports to describe, the ultimate test is
empirical -- exactly as it should be -- and that's where it dead-ends:
"OK...we've got a great handle on
the velocity of the electron (actually, the momentum)...now where exactly
is the doggone thing???!!"
Well, that's the problem,
isn't it...you can't really tell; if you're going to insist on knowing a great
deal about the momentum, you're going to have to accept knowing a great deal
less about position, and it's not because nature decided to be perverse about
it. The reason "uncertainty is conserved", as I like to state it, is that you
can't drive the uncertainty out of the model when you've built it in from the
very beginning. Same thing as in the quantum measurement problem, which is the
fruit of seeds sown long ago in the assumptions made about how we define
"quantity". It worked, as long as we didn't look too closely.
The
reductionist paradigm assumes that, no matter how closely we look, we can
always look even more closely. Heisenberg revealed that notion
as a prejudice. It's a prejudice that we can shake off as long as we
stick to a view of physical reality that's constructed from idealized systems
as its building blocks -- for example, chambers partitioned by adiabatic walls
(no such thing), or objects moving on frictionless surfaces (ditto) -- and we
get away with it in the same way that a blues guitarist gets away with not
being in perfect tune at the live gig. "Close enough
for blues" is a real-world methodology that accommodates
Context "A" -- playing live in a bar on Saturday night, where the receiving
ethanol-infested minds don't much care about an eighth tone one way or the
other. But in Context "B" -- the recording studio -- you use a different
standard.
It's the same way in science. What works for
describing a system of billiard balls or the ballistic trajectories of
artillery shells doesn't work in describing something as "simple" as a
hydrogen atom with absolute precision. There's a different purpose involved in
each case. If you assume that the same purpose applies, eventually that
assumption breaks down. It's just a natural consequence of the different kinds
of knowledge one wants to obtain in studying different kinds of systems. I
would argue that a hydrogen atom isn't anywhere near as simple as it is
presumed to be. Consequently, the nature of one's assumptions have deep
ramifications in scientific inquiry in the sub-atomic domain.
Sounds
"obvious"...right? It's anything but obvious. Christiaan Morgenstern
said:
"The obvious
is that which is never seen until someone expresses it
simply."
Along comes RR, who simply states it in a matter-of-fact,
unapologetic way, and BAM!... you'd think Giordano Bruno had come back from
his immolation at the stake to pester the conventional "wisdom" with dangerous
new heresies. But as far as I can tell, RR has only thought his way through to
the end of a chain of reasoning that others did not have the imagination, or
the clarity of thought (or perhaps the guts) to face.
I acknowledge
that one coiuld infer an implicit assumption at the root of my original
question... namely, that there is some sort of... uh, übercontext in which a general definition
of process would be universally applicable. Stated that way, I would find
myself in rapid back-pedaling mode. I'd have hoped that my experience as a
physicist would have educated me out of such an epistemological frame of
reference. I have no evidence that the existence of such an übercontext is anything more than a
prejudicial hypothesis -- and not a particularly tenable one, at that. I think
I know better.
Having thus qualified my question as not being
presumptive of such a prejudice, I still have enough firm ground to stand on
in knowing what my purpose was in
asking the original question:
Here on
planet Earth, in the 21st century, given the nature of the specific kinds of
complex systems I'm working with, is it possible to construct, infer,
deduce, induce, or otherwise cobble together a working definition of
"process" that captures the underlying sense of what I mean when I
talk about processes in general?
As it turned out, the one I thunk up and posted earlier
was good enough for that purpose. Further discussion might be interesting, but
by definition such discussion serves a different purpose than the one that
motivated my question. In other words, a different definition of "process"
addresses a different context. That's perfectly valid, as long as one is clear
about how that context relates to one's purpose in extending the inquiry
further. Since my original purpose was satisfied by my definition, it's
end-of-impetus for me... in that specific case.
So, in the end, Judith nailed it right out of the gate
(as usual): Ultimately, you can draw the criteria by which you define
"general" as widely or as tightly as you like, but no matter what scope or
range of real-world conditions those criteria establish, the very act of
specifying them automatically defines a context, and we're right back to the way RR
most likely would have answered my question... with another question: "In what context?" The imp. [Him, I
mean...well, actually, her too. ;-)
(Judith, you know exactly what I mean, don't
you?!)]
As to my mention of "far-from-equilibrium" systems, that's my
Prigogine influence showing through. I typically use the term in a much more
general sense than Prigogine did (I think), so you have to take it with at
least a tablespoon of salt. If you want my official, real-world physicist's
position on the subject of "equilibrium" here it is: "Boring." ...by which I
mean, not interesting for most of my purposes. It's also not real. Any system
that's truly in equilibrium is hiding out from "the rest of the universe" --
and I'm not even sure that's possible in any absolute or permanent sense.
Gravity is pretty pervasive, you know.
Some have equated equilibrium
with death, but if death is the termination of all life processes, then the
very thing called "the system" isn't even really the same system any more once
it's dead. In that case, the system doesn't "go to equilibrium"; rather, it
ceases to exist as a coherent system. After it's dead, it exchanges energy and
information with its environment in entirely different ways...all of them just
as irreversible as the ones it used when it was alive, except that now it
cannot maintain coherence; it dissipates its own structure, not just the available energy
& information it finds in its environment. That's a very different kind of
"dissipation" than what Prigogine referred to in his concept of
"far-from-equilibrium, dissipative structures".
Anyhow, I don't have
any problem with the concept of "equilibrium" as Prigogine used it. Like the
rest of our conceptual tools, it's context-dependent. All equilibrium "states"
are, as you have correctly pointed out, really just snapshots of continuous
processes. For example, the concept of punctuated equilibrium in evolution is
a tool by which we can view speciation as a kind of quantized process, with
relatively long periods of little change, punctuated by discontinuities that
occur over much shorter periods of great change. The living systems that
reside in the long-duration periods are hardly in "equilibrium" with their
respective environments, but that's not the context in which the concept of
"punctuated equilibrium" is useful. IOW, it's not congruent with the purpose
for which the conceptual tool was created.
So we're back to
context-dependency as an epistemological absolute. Like everything else in
science, equilibrium is a concept that can be used as a tool by which
comparisons can be made. It's a reference point... an anchorpoint for
discussion or description within a given context. If we don't bother to define
the context, we don't really know what we're talking about. We have to start
somewhere. We keep the parts that work, jettison (or stash for later
retrieval) the parts that don't, and hope we can find them later when we
(invariably) realize that our very concept of "what doesn't work" is a
decision based on imperfect, incomplete information about whatever we're
studying. No tool is perfect for all tasks; if such a tool existed, my
workshop and laboratory would look very different...very sparsely
accommodated, very simple. As it is, they are...er, "very richly entailed", as
RR might say.
Of course, my predilection for stashing all the stuff
that "didn't work" contributes to that effect. (heh)
Best
regards,
Pete
John M wrote:
Hi, Pete,
as I indicated in my reflect to Ionel, I
have some 2nd thoughts upon your general (process, that is).
"process (general): The sequence of energy or information
exchanges that effect or define a system?s transition between an initial
state and a final state."
I cannot refer to this "en. or info xchngs"
since I have no idea what you mean by "energy" (used, however, all over
physix).
Info is also a term to be identified in this
usage. Finally I may suggest to ponder "changes" for "exchanges" - can be 1
way.
I accept 'something' that "effects or
defines". That's more than what I scribbled (influencing only).
However I strongly objected
in the first reading to restrict the "process" concept to changes between
(the system's) initial and final state. You correctly identified this point
in the subsequent text - so no objection.
"System in a different context" and "process
space" seem to me as pertaining to (reductionistic) limited topical
model-systems.
while I am all for the practicality of
reductionist endeavors, I like and use the result of such: our technology,
in cleaning up the theoretical meanings I would keep away from the cut-off,
limited models and their discussion. A 'natural system' (as I understand
RR's wording - and so far nobody objected over many months I asked for it on
this list) meaning the 'maximum model' with unlimited connections - has no
'different context' or 'process space'.
One word on 'far from equilibrium': a
reductionist snapshot called equilibrium is an artifact in a world of
ceaseless changes.
It shows the XVIII-XIXc primitive
(scientific) view of "the world as a THING". Complex is everything, unless
we cut it into boundaries, when the formed model 'seems' less
complex.
Where do we go from here?
Regards
John M (previous content snipped)
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