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Dear John M,
Thank you for your comprehensive comments on my rather wooly
views triggered by Pete's purpose and enquiry complex. After having slept over
your points I 've got up smarter today, in the sense of empowered to hit the
center, not to go cowardly around it. I agree wilh you that the only start
people are technicians ... , in a way. They do not question anything outside
their well- defined space established based on so-called scientific research and
thus happily blind theselves to any repercussions beyond them, time and
space-wise. This is my interpretation of their smartness, as I also originally
come from that realm. Their concerns are heavily on the physical realm and
heavily involves mechanistic and materialistic concerns of which the
"Modernism" is an offsring.
My main point now is that I started to
question the validity of science in general as it is mostly operating
within the mechanistic and materialistic systems, relatively speaking simple
physical systems. We have been taken for granted that this provides us a sound
and reliable base to decide and act. A kind of submission. This is similar
to your leaving your reductionistic past behind , professionally speaking.
This suspicion is what makes me agnostic in all life
matters, as everything is blended with this earth including the Modernism
of which the people thinks authomatically as a good thing, an advanced stage in
evolution !! I do not want to kill everything scientific and modern, as they are
very deeply etched into the human mind, life and its environment. I want
to see a balance namely to make life, which is a complex matter, for that matter
to all complex systems have a heavy humanistic weight. Thus, the science
will be at the service of the humanity, not the other way around. If the
humanism enters heavily into the living-equation the reality will be
closer to us to be seen or even to be caught. We then be closer to the essence
of the universe. In this process the art is placed very well to dig out
into our insides and peel the onion layer by layer, as a meditation tool. As
Bethoven said once something like that: "if you listen to my music repeatedly
you will not be the same person again and will walk out all the
miseries the brings to you" . The pure art has this ability. It has no
message of its own, it does not tell you anything directly, but it stimulates
your inner strength to reflect and act wisely. Here the art and the
Universe have similar unexhaustable wealth and sources of ideas to be endlessly
churned and churned by us, human beings.
The final word is that the science, as it is defined now,
should be treated agnostically (if the word correctly applies here) not as
something certain and be rather enriched or circled around by theories and
philosophies. In effect,there is no single thing that we may call it a simple
sysytem, but all enters into the domain of complex systems. Here the effort for
general theory of complex systems will work freely as it will not be time and
space bound. To go with that modernism will loose its attraction (still
expanding unfortunately) and post-modernism will set in with its fluid, organic
and humanistic nature. This requires a substantial change in human mind-set.
I am now heavily working towards that target in the horizon.
I feel and think that we talk less and act more to deal effectively with
this complexity.
What can we do more than talking about it and refreshing our
minds etc.? Theories, ideas, philosophies need to be put in trial, ripe or
raw. In the process they sieve themselves out. This will certainly be never
ending process but the target in the horizon will be immutable: human happiness
on a healthy (with the words of Brian Greene) elegant universe.
My best,
Ayten
This doubt of mine calls automatically for
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Saturday, July 10, 2004 3:56
PM
Subject: Re: Ayten's question
Dear Ayten, welcome back.
If you want to become 'a little bit smarter',
cut me out. I can give you doubts, uncertainty and (what you call 'humble':)
my so called (cognitive) scientific agnosticism. I am a 'critic', not an
oracle. I don't even recall your "purpose and enquiry couple".
I like your onion-metaphor, although as
a former perfumer, I am afraid of some "odor" included in it. And it may sting
a bit, if someone cuts carelessly into it with open eyes.
Then again I would like to know your
take of "art in the onion",
what do you mean by art? The word is
ambiguous, from the "art-ificial" with the technical patent _expression_
"for those, skilled in the art" (technique!) through Mozart and Tintoretto to
E. Warhol's op-art and Altimira. And don't forget Paul Verlaine.
So what is the universe's art?
Certainly not 'us'. We are silly quirks in it pretending to understand
something.
Reality: I like the mximalistic
version, nature, with us in it. We can learn about the 'reality-outside-us'
only by impacts upon the mind and interpreted by it for our measly
understanding (if). About "nature-within-us" we really have no way to learn
any reasonable thing (inquiry by the target of the inquiry). However,
there is an ubiquitously used version
of 'reality' within the (reductionistic) sciences, the "observed facts" we
believe to be "real". Matches in measurements constructed to match.
Fitting
well together observations, explained
(maybe shaped) to fit.
'Objective truth' meaning the
subjective explanatory versions in the mind's interpretations. Or "truth"
itself, the 1st person belief we accept and carry (maybe from others' 1st
person output - we gleefully accept as 3rd person information).
The 9 blindfolded scientists in a dark
room chasing a (maybe not even existing, but imagined) cat. The smart one who
wants a Nobel cries: I got it!
The only smart people are the
'technicians' (engineers, etc.) who couldn't care less about (our type of
search for) "real" understanding, but made spaceships, deciphered the
DNAs, synthesized aspirin and teflon, built cars, microscopes, compas and
seismograph, the internet and the tax office. And some more, in holy
reductionism. I was part of it, but gave it up for our navel-gazing
speculations. Do you call THIS smarts?
To your 'science reflecting the
reality'? all do so within their (narrowly cut model i.e.) the topic and boundary-conditions into which the
appropriate "science" is identified as "reduced(!)" from the
totality - or broaded reality, if you wish.
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Friday, July 09, 2004 10:38
AM
Subject: Re: My Wrap-Up: RR-centric
"Process" Definition?
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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