Eric Smith, channeling Doug Roberts wrote (approximately): "What's the point of calling something an emergent? Then what?"
Whereupon, Nick Thompson replied, channeling Winsatt: "It directs your attention to the configurations and timings of things and away to their compositions." Thus it was concluded. -----Original Message----- From: friam-boun...@redfish.com [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of Eric Smith Sent: Monday, September 06, 2010 3:07 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] FRIAMer /. alert Hi Jochen, Thank you. I was actually a little surprised, because Ligand Field Theory has been around for a very long time. An important early worker in this area was none other than Leslie Orgel, who seems to have largely dropped interest in metal-organic interactions and gone over to RNA chemistry with applications to early life, for which he is much better known. But Harold has a talent for allowing people to see new opportunities in areas where they haven't been looking. Doug's question about the point of calling something emergent is a good one. And then what? This is an area where there is a good discussion to be had between thermodynamics people, control theorists, and evolutionists. I tend to be pretty conservative in my use of the term "emergence" -- moreso than Harold, because I think we have built up a good body of both technical results and intuition around the equilibrium phase transitions. This makes them a good place to start (Nick and I have a years-old ongoing conversation about this). The math we know about equilibrium phase transitions, large-deviation behavior, and so forth, will not do everything everybody wants, but my own opinion is that we learn more that is precise by seeing where it falls short, and then looking from there, than we can from many investigations that don't make use of that backlog of results and intuition. The interesting discussion, having to do with the question "and then what" concerns the directions in which constraints act, and in which information could be said to "flow", when there are hierarchies of ordering transitions, as we find in the biosphere. Much of the intuition from equilibrium is that constraints formed at small scales are enormously important for whole-system stability. They can be altered by collective interactions at higher levels, but often those alterations come in the form of deformations, not as replacements for the deeper stabilizing mechanisms. Thus, nuclear stability makes atoms possible. The atomic orbitals, with modest deformations to form molecular orbitals, make molecular stability possible. In many cases (though not all; the best counter-example being mineral crystals), molecular form constrains molecular aggregates from crystallized proteins to biological complexes. And so on. Herb Simon used to write about this, emphasizing that Alexander the Great could only take over other empires; he could not have built his empire up from single individuals. But if one looks at the ways people think about both evolutionary dynamics, and many problems in optimal control, they have a paradigm that seems (to me) to be strongly shaped by the notion of information flow from large-scale, aggregate layers, down onto the underlying substrate. Harold's (and my) interest in small-molecules and other catalytic systems comes from an attempt to understand where order can be produced in relatively "flat" systems, such that it might serve as a foundation for the stability of more hierarchical organization, instead of relying on hierarchical control in order to exist in ordered form at all. I don't think that the fact that evolving and control-systems are non- equilibrium really leads to as severe a change in the basic requirements for whole system stability as the disconnect between the physical, engineering, and evolutionary points of view, because most of the large-numbers counting that is responsible for the behavior of equilibrium hierarchies maps fairly comfortably through to entropies of dynamical systems. (These are variously Kolmogorov-Sinai or Metric Entropies, or simpler versions such as the entropy rates of simple stochastic processes, used also by Jaynes and more recently in articles by Ken Dill that I think Nick posted here some months ago). So the value, I think, that one should want from calling something emergent (in my narrow usage) is a kind of guideline for how the math might fit together, in areas where we don't have many worked examples or the structural complexity makes them hard to produce. The question of the direction of constraints (small -> large vs. large -> small), and in what mixtures and roles, is one where smart and thoughtful people nonetheless disagree strongly because we don't have good ways to resolve the question. Many thanks, Eric On Sep 6, 2010, at 12:31 PM, Jochen Fromm wrote: > Eric Smith is one of the authors, he is on this list as well, right? > Congratulations, Eric ;-) > > -J. > > ----- Original Message ----- From: "Marcus G. Daniels" > <mar...@snoutfarm.com > > > To: "The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group" > <friam@redfish.com > > > Sent: Monday, September 06, 2010 3:24 AM > Subject: [FRIAM] FRIAMer /. alert > > >> http://science.slashdot.org/story/10/09/05/2118241/Transition-Metal-C >> atalysts-Could-be-Key-To-Origin-of-Life >> http://www.biolbull.org/cgi/reprint/219/1/1 >> >> ============================================================ >> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at >> cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at >> http://www.friam.org > > > ============================================================ > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe > at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at > http://www.friam.org ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
