Excellent typology, Eric. 1) Memory, 2) doorways, 3) autonomous, 4) model, 5) control system, and 6) agency.
It seems 1-2 are about the boundary. 3 is the closure. 4-5 are proto-semantic, separating what a thing is from what it means. And 6 is the mechanism for ambiguity (symbols, switches, where a thing can mean more than one thing). re: "a natural sense of a system's own delimitation." I think you describe it well enough when talking about reflectivity. Such a natural boundary must be natural to a given sense/perspective. A pre-reflective system's boundary is determined in part by its context (since you cited Ashby, H_c >= H_s). But it's a much stronger statement to suggest that a boundary can be determined from/by the perspective of the bounded. On June 3, 2017 8:53:18 AM PDT, Eric Smith <desm...@santafe.edu> wrote: >1. Protected degrees of freedom are a precondition to even the >possibility of MEMORY. If you are a mere physical degree of freedom, >and you are always coupled to your environment, you are nothing >different than an instant-by-instant reflection of the immediate local >state of your environment. All of the later concepts in the list >require various forms of internal state that have enough insulation to >be protected from constant harassment. So where in the physical world >are suitably decoupled degrees of freedom available to be found? (Much >later, to be built, but not yet.) > >2. Some kind of dynamical variables need to be capable of being >couplers that can become DOORWAYS, so that the other DOF are sometimes >coupled and sometimes not. A DOF that is always behind a wall (a >chemical reaction behind such a high energy barrier that it is never >achieved) can’t remember anything because, although it can certianly >hold a state, it is never in contact with the environment that would >imprint anything on that state. This doesn’t yet talk about how the >open/close states of the doorway happen, which will determine when and >what it allows the environment to imprint on the memory variable, and >for how long that imprint can be held. Here one can be quite precese >with examples without invoking biology. Organic chemistry at low >energy in water is largely non-active. Metal centers, particular >d-block elements, are the major doorways that govern the sectors of >organic chemistry available to early ocean-rock worlds. Many enzymes >still use them in something not too far from a mineral or soluble >metal-ligand complex state, with a little tuning. In this case, the >doorway works just through physical drift. Molecules free in solution >are inert; those that bump into a metal can potentially become active; >when they dissolve and drift on, they become inert again. This leads >to a very different set of relations between thermal energy and >information in reactions, than simple thermally-activated reactions >among the same species. Probably one can invoke many other examples. > >3. Some of the internal variables need to be capable of carrying on an >AUTONOMOUS dynamics or internal process. I guess a memory variable can >sit there passively and still, at some level, categorize the way a >system (set of DOF) responds to an environmental event, but for most of >the later levels, there needs to be actual internal dynamics. This in >itself is not so hard; the world is far from equilibrium in any number >of dimensions, and for something to be moving in a direction is not >rare. > >4. Internal dynamics can be autonomous, but it isn’t really “about” >anything unless something about the configuration constitutes a MODEL >in the sense of Conant and Ashby from old 1950s control theory. How >the model is registered, and how reflexive or self-referential the >internal dynamics needs to be for a meaningful model to be imprinted, >probably ramify to many differenent questions. I would of course be >happy to produce an interesting case of the emergence of any of them. > >5. At some stage, a protected internal process of which the state of >the model is part needs to act back on the doorway, if we are to be >justified in saying the basic relation of a CONTROL SYSTEM has come >into existence. Here again I intend a Conant and Ashby line of >thought: that “Every good controller “contains? entails?” a model of >the system controlled. There has to be some internal state that is >capable of being in different relations to the state of the world, and >then the internal dynamics has to take an input from a comparison of >those two states. Only if the resulting action feeds back on the >state, does the system start controlling its own interaction with the >world (for instance, what gets remembered). > >6. The next one is hard for me to say, even at the very low standards >of the previous five: I can be a control system with a model of my >world, even if I have only modest machinery. A membrane-bound protein >that lets in some molecules and ignores others, and which is preserved >in a population through some kind of filtering, is a perfectly good >control-theoretic model in the C&A sense. But it only implicitly >models its environment. I have not yet added the assumption that there >is some kind of REFLEXIVITY or REFLECTION (in the sense of Quines) so >that the model includes representations of possible counterfactual >states of the internal variables themselves. If there is a physical >process that drives a system’s parts into a configuration where that >happens, then one of the things an internal process _could_ do is use >the modeled futures to internally select among many responses to a >situation of which it is capable. Only at that stage would I feel >compelled to introduce a concept of AGENCY, where for my practical >purposes, I am happy to use the word as game theorists use it. An >agent is a kind of thing that fills one of the slots that games have >for “players”, which must be provided for the mechanics of the game to >execute, and where the agents have some way to convert specification of >the game into a sequence of moves that are not individually dictated by >the game itself. I am sure there are lots of other notions of agency >(ABM has a much more permissive notion, which can be as little as a >dynamical Monte Carlo, or can be full-blown game-theoretic player), but >for the purpose of trying to draw levels from the foregoing, this one >seemed enough to me to propose a concrete problem. ... >So I would argue that, with respect to the accumulation of hierarchy, >there is a natural sense of a system’s own delimitation, to the extent >that the parts that are sufficiently stable and sufficiently >consequential to build something on top of by reinforcement become the >foundation that holds other parts together. -- ⛧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
