[FRIAM] Any non-biological complex systems?

[gepr ⛧]

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 <desmith at 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⛧