""" The problem for me with this view is that I don't understand how seeing pheromone as 'organizing itself in space' is intuitively useful. """
I suppose that even if I didn't find this view *useful*, which I do and will attempt to explain momentarily, I continue to find that it offers a theoretical completeness that I find aesthetically compelling. Much like magnetism and electricity can appear as distinct phenomena or as two aspects of an integrated whole, stigmergy points to a similar duality between agent and environment, another integrated whole. Lifting to such a perspective offers insights into a class of possible implementations, all preserving the underlying dynamics. For instance, when attempting to reason about the ant-pheromone system, I find it useful to view the ants as inefficient *raster-like* update to the state, but of course one could also choose a less brownian, less resource-limited or less discrete approach. For instance, I believe it makes the analysis more clear if we instead picture a continuum of ants acting on the space and begin with pheromone of very little effect. Then slowly turning up the potency, we begin to see the pheromone organize and as a side-effect (and as an epiphenomenon from my view) the ants follow suit. To view the ants as an implementation detail, for me, yields clarity into the problem, while the pheromone takes the role of first class citizens in the ABM. """ Toward the end, you wrote, "I only meant to emphasize that stigmergy appears to me as a local concept." I'm not sure what that means. """ By local, I mean local as it often manifests in mathematics, but I gather that you would prefer a different tack. Here I am referring to a pair of related concepts for me: 1. Excision of glider's from Conway's game. 2. Characterization of subjectivities (one's subjective experience, say) relative to objectivity. When one watches Conway's game unfold, it is challenging to maintain the view that gliders are not agents but simply a local patch of board state in the process of updating itself as a whole. The ease with which we perceive gliders as agents facilitated the discovery of "glider guns", and ultimately the construction of assemblages of "glider guns" to make logic gates. Further, there is a smallest possible toroidal board such that one can have a glider (and only a glider) walk along the surface forever. The relation of this smallest board to any other board state is (in my view) an analogy, an inclusion relation. Localization, here for me, is a way of bracketing the baby from the bathwater while continuing to acknowledge that the meaning of both is in relation to a whole. There have been a number of discussions on this forum (and quite a few papers by its participants) where work is done to emphasize the complications associated with non-trivial mereological systems, systems of parts with non-trivial structural constraints. Two recent papers that come to mind are: 1. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.02.09.430402v1.full 2. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1811.00420.pdf
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