Re: meanings of model

[Howard Pattee <***>]

At 08:27 AM 12/13/04 -0500, Judith wrote:
> Howard, could you enlarge on this
> statement, please:
>  
> HP: I am a Constructivist, so I would phrase your question conversely:
> when do the limits of physical laws impinge on the capacity of formal
> symbols to 
> have meaning? That is, when do the purely syntactic expressions of formal
> mathematics go beyond what can be measured or encoded by nature?
> [snip] 
> Judith: My main area of concern is your phrasing; "the limits of
> physical laws". Do you mean physics-based laws? Or do you mean what
> my father referred to as "Natural Law" (meaning whatever
> consistencies are involved in generating/constraining the universe,
> whether we know about these consistencies or not)?

HP: In addition my belief that the "strategy of constructivism"
is the safest for model-building, I am, along with Rosen, a metaphysical
realist. We both believe that the universe follows natural or physical
laws that we try to discover by any means we can imagine. If we haven't
discovered the exact laws or if we at present missed some laws, we still
believe there are real laws running the universe that would exist whether
we exist or not.
 
> Judith: Another area of concern is
> the phrasing; "what can be measured or encoded by nature". I
> doubt that even my father would say he could tell you the limits of what
> nature can or cannot do. He could only generalize and say that natural
> systems cannot behave in ways inconsistent with Natural Law.

HP: We agree

> Judith: Science in general is way
> behind; a small subset of all there is. 

HP: We agree

> Judith: Science has deliberately
> limited itself by adopting the machine metaphor which is the same as
> using a machine to model nature and forgetting that it's a
> model.

HP: I disagree with your blanket opinion of science. I know many
scientists. Most of them are well-aware of the modeling condition. They
consciously do not limit their thinking to any paradigm. They use every
conceptual trick or strategy to escape whatever abstraction is popular
because they know that is how novel discoveries are made. Rosen's ideas
are known to some of them, but as yet it is not clear how these ideas can
apply to empirical models. 

> Judith: So now they are trying to
> make nature into a system that "realizes" their model and only
> the evidence which seems to fit is allowed to be called
> "scientific".

HP: In my opinion, that is not a fair picture of how the scientists that
I know do their work. You may have individual scientists in mind, and I
might agree about these individuals, but not scientists
generally.

> Judith: On the other hand, just
> because WE are natural systems which measure and encode, that doesn't
> mean we do it well or accurately in any terms but our own. In other
> words, our choices of what to measure and how to measure (in terms of
> what and how other natural systems are measuring) may not reflect much
> useful reality according to those natural systems. Their modes of
> measurement and encoding may be beyond our ability to perceive, much less
> quantify or qualify. So how can we say what can be measured or
> encoded by nature? To do so would require that we measure their
> ability!

HP: We agree, as do many biologists, at least since Jakob von Uexkull
(Theoretical Biology, 1920) who recognized that what any organism can
measure or encode determines what that organism's model of the world
(Umwelt) will look like. We are no exception. The field of biosemiotics
is based on this recognition. Most of the money and time resources in
both physics and biology are spent trying to extend by instrumentation
what we can observe or encode about nature beyond our natural
senses.

Howard