Re: meanings of model

[Howard Pattee <***>]

Judith,

Many of your postings I find are excellent statements of Rosen's views
and your own views with which I agree. So to keep discussions as concise
as possible, I'll usually pick on points where I think our disagreement
is interesting. The first instance of such disagreement is probably what
we each find interesting! What I think is interesting are  the
disagreements that remain apparently irresolvable by empirical evidence,
logic, and rational (and even emotional) arguments. The reason is that
this situation suggests that there exist two or more irreducible or
complementary models and that all are valuable or necessary. (I include
basic assumptions and definitions as parts of every
model.)    

Judith: Obviously, my father was a scientist and he was not trying to
make living organisms fit into the model of a machine. So I believe
there's hope for science, but not if it remains an inbred, closed
orthodoxy built on machine-metaphor-based physics.

HP: My interpretation of the machine metaphor is that it is equivalent
logically to strong reductionism. So there is hope, because I don't know
any physicist today who believes in or subscribes to such an 
"inbred, closed orthodoxy," i.e., that every model of a system
can be obtained from the largest model by formal means (LI, p. 103). I
think that is a straw man. (Consequently, as I have mentioned before,
physicists find this one of Rosen's most irritating claims.)

On the other hand, I don't know any physicist that does not believe that
there exists completely general physical laws that every living system
must follow in detail at all levels of complexity. In other words, life
requires more than one model, one of which is the detailed universal
general physical model that Rosen criticizes LI, p.12. In fact, as Rosen
used to emphasize (pre-1980s) that full understanding of life requires a
hierarchy of complementary models. Which model you focus on at any time
depends on the questions you want answered. 

> HP: 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: How is it not clear? 

HP: I mean that Rosen's ideas, as far as I know, do not appear in
empirically testable models except as timeless epistemological principles
or beliefs at a high level of abstraction. It is not clear that these
ideas themselves admit empirical verifiability. That does not mean they
are not useful. Most epistemic principles are not empirically verifiable,
like the modeling relation itself.

Judith: However, what needs to happen is that the paradigm of
"science" itself must expand because physics still states that
all relations are figments of human imagination. 

HP: All models are figments of a brain's imagery or imagination.
Scientific models are only those figments of the imagination that satisfy
the modeling relation. This relation is a powerful restriction on
scientific models.
 
> Judith: My concern about
> Biosemiotics and about bio-informatics and about various other types of
> "complexity" is all due to the fact that none of these
> "newer" disciplines question the underlying assumptions in
> Physics/Science... They ignore them.

HP: That is not a fair assessment of
biosemiotics. I believe my statement below is a more accurate
consensus:
"The concept of Biosemiotics requires making a distinction between
two categories, the material or physical world and the symbolic or
semantic world. The problem is that there is no obvious way to connect
the two categories.  .  . In fact, how material structures
serve as signals, instructions, and controls is inseparable from the
problem of the origin and evolution of life. Biosemiotics was established
as a necessary complement to the physical-chemical reductionist approach
to life that cannot make this crucial categorical distinction necessary
for describing semantic information. Matter as described by physics and
chemistry has no intrinsic function or semantics. By contrast,
biosemiotics recognizes that life begins with function and
semantics." (Pattee, J. Biosemiotics 1, in press)

Howard

So those assumptions are allowed to stand-- and I think that's both foolish and dangerous. Medical research is a biological pursuit and yet is modeled on Physics. Ecology is also modeled on Physics. Physics sets the standard of what is "scientific", even in Biology, therefore the assumptions of physics (that every system is a machine, is fractionable, and can be learned about reductionistically, etc) must be questioned. The alternative is an assumption that the universe is relational and that relational constraints determine both matter and causality.
 
Judith
 

----- Original Message -----

From: Howard Pattee

To: ***

Sent: Monday, December 13, 2004 8:02 PM

Subject: Re: [ROSEN] meanings of model

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