[FRIAM] the role of metaphor in scientific thought

[glen ☣]

These are nice videos.  Your requirement that we respond with video is difficult for me because I don't normally produce video...  I could provide, say, an "in silico liver visualization".  But the extra content would obscure any message, I think.  But this video by other people is relevant to both emergence and the type of rhetorical circularity we've been talking about:

  You Can't See This (MIND TRICKS)
  https://youtu.be/0NPH_udOOek

Your videos show, I think, a typical sense of emergence that is often conflated with the perspective of the observer.  They are essentially numerical solutions (numbers at the generator level) to perceptual/perspectival questions/predicates (patterns at some phenomenal level).  Whether we have a coherent formulation of the phenomenon we're trying to generate (the flower) or not, a priori, is largely irrelevant.  The pixels generate the wiggly lines generate the larger patterns, etc.  Our inability to *predict* those larger patterns from the smaller patterns is a type of emergence ... but many might claim it's a weak form of emergence.

The video of the blind spot, illusions, and our tendency to see only what we expect to see, demonstrates (I think) a stronger (though not the strongest) form of emergence.  Therein, our *expectations* of the phenomenon bias, eliminate, or create components of the phenomenon so that what obtains (the concepts in our heads/bodies after experiencing the phenomenon) has different properties that cannot be derived solely (objectively) from the generators.  Our expectations give the experience properties the phenomenon doesn't have.

This sort of medium-strength emergence (or perhaps illusory emergence) depends fundamentally on the rhetorical circularity of expectation/anticipation.  And I can't help but think your flowers-from-numbers narrative has a bit of it, too.  But I don't think it has any "still yet stronger" emergence.  For that to happen, we'd need to fully decouple the end result (the flower pattern) from its generators ... perhaps with a 3D printer or growing/breeding real flowers to meet the predicate(s) set by the videos of (perspectives on) the virtual flower[*].  Once the flowers are decoupled from their in silico analogs, then they can be participants in a larger system, where other members of that system can find/exploit unintended properties of the decoupled flowers, not immediately/obviously resident in the orginal numbers/matrices that constructed the in silico flowers.

I hope what I'm saying here is at least somewhat coherent.


[*] Another method of decoupling might be to parallelize the "world" in which the digital flowers grow/live and distribute it across multiple computers that allow interfering manipulation/interaction with other processors or meat space.  I.e. approach a co-evolutionary set of populations that can find/exploit unintended properties of any given in silico flower (or closure of the flower).  Also, I regard this discussion as largely apathetic to the metaphysical *stances* of [anti]reductionism.  The key to my point lies in the extent to which scope, perspective, context, or membership in a collective allows a pluralism of "properties" or salient property sets for any given component.


On 07/17/2017 08:22 PM, Vladimyr wrote:
> To Nick Thompson,
> 
>  
> 
> I may have made an error when trying to reply with my Outlook email software not 
> 
> so unusual in this heat and with my condition. I apologize for confusion.
> 
> I have been wrestling with your questions. Honestly.
> 
>  
> 
> I asked myself essentially the same some time ago so I seem to have struck off on my own.
> 
> Not my first time in the wilderness feeling naked.
> 
>  
> 
> The  congregation ruckus has rekindled the fire under my arse. So here is my unholy
> 
> mixture of math and hidden philosophy
> 
> https://1drv.ms/v/s!AjdC7pqwzaUUkybexnPVUncB5kt8
> 
>  
> 
> you may have to wait for a moment to download . I would like to volunteer to help you
> 
> with your efforts but can no longer travel. Glen Ropella most assuredly plays a major role in asking 
> 
> difficult questions which act as pivot points to redirect lines of inquiry. My own efforts are seemingly 
> 
> at some distance but when forced to think philosophically. I see we have much in common, I have even
> 
> provided some evidence of layers or levels in another guise. Name as of yet unknown… You both appear to have been
> 
> correct in some ways.
> 
>  
> 
> The object I work with is convenient but in no way obligated/entitled to importance. I could just as easily work with
> 
> a section of a millipede or a wind turbine. 
> 
> This thread should be maintained even though it seems to be rather dormant.
> 
> I am well aware that my offer also hides self interest but we can discuss that after this heat passes.


-- 
☣ glen