[FRIAM] Any non-biological complex systems?

[glen ☣]

Excellent!  Thanks for the clarification.  This seems (to me) to follow along with Kauffman's "agents", at least up to the working paper version of Investigations I have.  There, he suggests that a galaxy might be a collection of agents.  I prefer what (I think) Smolin suggests in The Life of the Cosmos, where the galaxies are the basic structural unit.  So, it makes more sense to me to think of galaxies as the agents.  But it's reasonable to think that the galaxies (what we think of when we use the term) are epiphenomenal and the underlying agency is more minimally defined by something else (black holes? or whatever constitutes dark matter/energy? gravitation itself?).  To satisfy your symbolic requirement, we'd have to identify the boundary.  To me, gravitation is inadequate (perhaps necessary but not sufficient).  But perhaps if we included inflation and the idea that inflation occurs all the time in various parts of the (unobservable) universe, then that light-cone type boundary would work?  Could inflationary bubbles ever interact in any way so that we could say they communicate with symbols?  I have no idea what I'm talking about, obviously. 8^)

Also, if you disambiguate "biology", it might help.  Would silicon analogs of organic compounds still be biology?  Would proto-biological processes count (perhaps we can build agents in RNAWorld)?


Ultimately, though, I think I'd answer your question with: No, I can't think of any agents that satisfy all your criteria, the most important of which is "non-biological".  Despite my persnickety objections to his works, I land with Rosen in his tight coupling of biology (life) with closure to efficient cause (aka "agency").


On 05/25/2017 01:25 PM, Russ Abbott wrote:
> Thank you all for your interest and replies. I regret that I asked this
> question just before leaving for vacation. I'll be away for a week.
> 
> Here are my thoughts, which I didn't want to impose before hearing other
> answers.
> 
> A complex system involves agents with the following properties.
> 
>    - They can accumulate (and store) free energy.
>    - They have means to release that energy.
>    - They respond to (symbolic) information, i.e., symbols. By that I mean
>    that they respond to things on the basis of their internal rules rather
>    than as a consequence of physics or chemistry. (In other words they are
>    autonomous in the sense that they are governed by internal rules and not
>    just pushed around by external forces.) I'm not saying that the internal
>    rules are not themselves run by physics and chemistry, only that the
>    response of an agent to some information/symbol is minimally if at all
>    connected to the physical nature of the symbol.  (A bit is a symbol. Bit
>    representations don't matter when software looks at bit values. Similarly
>    when you see a red traffic light you respond to the symbol
>    red-traffic-light, not to the physical effects of the photons -- other than
>    to translate those photons into the symbol. Software is a set of rules no
>    matter what mechanism executes it.) Of course one of the things agents can
>    do is to employ some of its stored energy as part of its response to a
>    symbol.
> 
> The result of all this is that agents operate in two worlds:
> physics/chemistry and information. A system cannot be considered complex
> unless it includes such agents.

-- 
☣ glen