I agree for the most part. But what M&V and Rosen (and to some extent Shrödinger, Turing, von Neumann, etc.) were trying to do is suss out the difference between living and inanimate systems. And that's worthy. You don't really need the "agent" concept for that work, though. I tend to prefer the word "actor". But that's polluted, too.
And you can't really write it off merely as a crude computational convenience, either. The core idea (taken up by Penrose and the proofs-as-programs people, too!) is to settle the question of whether biology is doing something super-mechanical or non-mechanical ... at least non-algorithmic, if not non-computational. It's not _all_ nonsense, though a lot of it is. On 05/25/2017 04:40 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote: > I am surprised by the suggestion that a crude computational convenience > (agents) would really have any one-to-one mapping with real things. Since > we are not talking about biological neural systems nor artifacts from them, > what sort of physical system would need to decouple symbols from their > physical implementation? It seems like nonsense by construction and a > violation of parsimony. -- ☣ glen ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
