Steve,
Comments interposed below.
SJ:
I think there is too much focus on impredicative
modelling in discussing Rosen's legacy to the
exclusion of more immediately useful areas of
exploration.
TG: What “more immediately useful areas of exploration” do you intend? And how does Rosennean complexity play a role?
SJ:
I see Rosen's legacy as falling into these broad categories:
1) importance of relational modelling 2) insufficiency of state-based Newtonian paradigm, 3) anticipation, 4) epistemology of modelling and measurement 5) the argument that life required impredicative models, closed causal loops etc.
I feel like only item (5) has to do with causal loops,
impredicativities and the line.
TG: I could not disagree more. Rosennean complexity is about systems which possess impredicativities. In causal terms, this means causal loops. 1) Relational models are important because they can model impredicative organization in complex systems. 2) The insufficiency of the Newtonian paradigm is in its inability to model impredicativities of complex systems. 3) Anticipatory systems with internal predictive models are complex because they possess impredicative organization. 4) Impredicativity is present within the epistemology of modelling and measurement, intimately tied to the subject-object boundary.
SJ:
So we can't model impredicativies on a computer. So
what? We can't model real numbers either. We just take
an approximation and in many cases it turns out good
enough.
TG: "Good enough" for what? If all someone wants to do is simulate behavior and create a computer program that will generate quantitative predictions, then they probably have little if any reason to hang around this discussion list. It depends what questions you want such an approximation to answer. If you want to ask "why?" questions of them, they will generally not provide useful answers.
SJ:
I think Rosen's anti-computer ire was mostly directed
against certain media lab types who make silly robots
with a camera attached to a neural net and then
pontificate whether or not it is conscious.
TG: Which way do you want to have it? Above you say approximations are good enough, but here you seem to say they are not. Why are the AI approximations - their "silly robots" - not good enough for discussing consciousness? Answering this kind of question leads to Rosennean complexity. This is not an "anti-computer ire". Rosennean complexity is simply a logical conclusion related to the kinds of inadequacies inherent in using such mimetic approaches.
SJ:
Who is to say that no kind emergence is possible when
highly complex software system reaches certain
threshold?
TG: What do you mean by "emergence"? Threshold....of what parameter or value, specifically? No amount of operating a clockwork will make it something other than a clockwork: no finite amount of computation produces anything that is not a computation, not an algorithmic result. Maybe your definition of 'emergence' falls within there somewhere; but for me, a symptom of 'emergence' is when a result is not entailed algorithmically from prior states (or more generally, as Rosen stated it, that emergent phenomena are not possible to describe using a single set of states [FM p. 91]). That means the system would be complex, which computer algorithms are not.
SJ:
Yes it will not be LIFE but that does not
mean it will not be INTERESTING. Just look at the
Internet. As a human/computer chimera it might well
lead to a meta-system transition of a novel kind.
TG: Well, you are talking apples and oranges here. A chimera of [complex systems (i.e., humans) + computer algorithms] will always be complex, because it already is thanks to the human component. This entails nothing about non-complex computer algorithms themselves being able to become complex. They can't.
Regards, Tim