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Dear John and Pete,
Coming back from my nerve-braking
and exhausting house restoration work, the first postings (I skipped the
previous ones to save my sanity) I saw were yours on "purpose and enquiry
couple".
If the universe is smarter than us,
with which I humbly agree, I wonder what the science may claim as
different from theory and philosophy. The reality for us is an onion-like
abstraction with endless depth and unexhaustable layers, where the purpose and
enquiry work hand in hand in a practically never ending process for finding
their meeting point or unity by peeling the onion layer by layer. In this
process art is more versatile than the rest. I believe, the art is
also the closest ally of the universe with a somewhat similar
texture.
Also the following statement made
by Pete as " Any system that is truly in equilibrium is hiding out from 'the
rest of the universe' and I am not even sure that is possible in any absolute or
permanent sense. " expresses well the impossibility of
sticking to one type of science or the other as reflecting the reality. This
perhaps explains the RR's agony and the continuing efforts in reaching
a theory encompassing all in one in a fluid manner.
Could I be further enlightened by one of you or others
in sorting out the inseparable purpose and enquiry in the process of
searching the reality or getting a little bit smarter?
My best,
Ayten
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Friday, July 09, 2004 2:24 PM
Subject: Re: My Wrap-Up: RR-centric
"Process" Definition?
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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