[FRIAM] the role of metaphor in scientific thought

[Vladimyr]

Just how many of these Glens are out there...
I guess they just keep sprouting up like dandelions.

The use of any Word requires a little cooperation from a group.
If I were a solipsist why would I ever need the fiction that you understood my
grunts. Why does each Glen seem to stand in different places as I prepare to hurl
an assault... All Glen's come to some end either willingly or not, same is equally true for all
the Vladimyr's however people do choose to spell it out. My name is for me only
a symbolic token, hiding the skills and scars I have accumulated . When I enter a bar and ask for dark rum
I do not have any interest in how bartender's solve problems.

He is just a man made out of many parts even many minds, not so dissimilar all told.
There is no clear consensus of many minds just the tacit agreement that we will wait
for more insight.

So a Complex Creature wishes to snare a complex cosmos with words before it recognizes 
that it is a child of the entire landscape. 

I still keep my old Suunto sighting compass on my bookshelf. A little floating circle in a cage of aluminium
illuminated with Thorium. It has a red sash to snare my neck, an old friend. Indeed I keep the GPS on a lower shelf
I used to store maps to locate mushroom colonies , a very clever device.
I guess the new circles adorn the earth in silent orbits. I perform actions very long before
the text is ever perfected. We are driven by someone's will not just editors.

Did we evolve to use/construct  perfect circles, since most of us can detect minute eccentricity.
Maybe the perfection is likened to a god and normal people detest those minds that find fault
 in the heavens as did  Galileo, Copernicus and Kepler. Perfection as a delusion has acquired many
foolish defenders. Though well guarded,  it,  delusion/metaphor,  still is useful. 

You guys are marvellous, i wish we could meet. But reality does not always provide convenient  stage trap doors.

Vladimyr

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam [mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com] On Behalf Of ?glen?
Sent: June-23-17 10:13 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] the role of metaphor in scientific thought

Ha!  I struggled to come up with "single" as an alternative name and you had 4 waiting in the wings.

I'm going to skip ahead a bit and state that my entire line of rhetoric about circularity goes back to the complexity jargon discussion we were having and whether or not, as Nick put it, a system has a say in its own boundary.  It's all about _closure_.  This particular tangent targets closure from the functional programming perspective (or maybe from the procedural one, depending on how you look at it).  When you execute a loop in a "systems" language like C, you have a good chance that whatever you do in there could have side effects.  But when you do something like that in a purely functional language, you're very unlikely (never) going to leave side effects laying around.

If the unmarried person in the just-so story were somehow "closed", then there would be no side effects left lying around as a result of walking _any_ path from the name "unmarried" to/from any other name like "widow".  But people aren't ever "closed" in any vernacular sense (never mind Rosen's or Kauffman's parsing of agency for a while).  That's why I asserted that the existence of _any_ other name (bachelor, single, widow, whatever) opens up an entirely new world of side effects (including what Peirce should call practical) to the unmarried patient.  The fact that the condition even has _names_ opens it up to nomothetic generality.  An entirely unique condition, showing up nowhere else in space or time will not have a name and is not generalizable, by definition.

FWIW, in his introduction, Nick does distinguish 3 types of implication important to analogical reasoning: "basic", "surplus-intentional", and "surplus-unintentional".  And the latter 2 types are, I think, directly related to computational side effects, where type 3 would be a bug, type 2 might be considered sloppy, and type 1 is the ideal.  This is a fantastic way to talk about this sort of thing.  But it would be easier to discuss if we either avoided discussion of circularity _or_ gave it the full analytic context it needs (starting from a relatively complete definition of closure).

You may be asking: If Nick's talking about analogs and implications, how does that relate to a computational procedure?  Well, simulation has several meanings, the 2 main ones being: mimicry vs. implementation.  I'd say 90% of simulation is about implementation.  E.g. an ODE solver numerically implements (simulates) an ideal/platonic mathematical declaration.  So, when you write a program, the computer that executes it (only during the execution) is an analog to whatever other (physical or platonic) construct might also be described by such a mathematical declaration.  Either of these two analogs can leave (surplus) side effects lying about as they reify their analogous (basic) behaviors.

I hope that's not tl;dr. 8^)


On 06/23/2017 06:52 AM, Frank Wimberly wrote:
> Has anybody mentioned that there are lot of unmarried men that you 
> usually wouldn't call bachelors?  There are widowers, priests, and 
> nineteen year-olds, for example.  I learned the word because my 
> father's brother was a thirty-five year old Major in the Air Force 
> with no wife. He eventually got married and had children. Late bloomer?

--
␦glen?

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