[FRIAM] IS: Ruminations from the M.I. S. WAS: Any non-biological complex systems?

Sun May 28 15:17:20 EDT 2017

Dear Steve, 

I am taking a break from the black flies. Let's see if I can remember all the points in your excellent message. 

Summary:  Thanks for it.  that will help me a lot as I try to figure out what hell they are talking about. I am always baffled when so called hard scientists start to talk about systems.  The way they talk about them is so subjective and sloppy.  (};-)] 

Archiving Friam discussions: BUT you are completely wrong about what I am looking for in an email processor.  I am NOT looking for an editor.  What I am looking for is a processor that gets rid of all the redundancy, the headers, the inclusions of previous messages, etc., and simply presents the texts, in order of writing.  I know, you say, Nick, that's easy.  But try it for a few minutes.  Download the archive from Redfish and then try to arrange it in any readable fashion, as, say, one might read it in a book as a Famous Correspondence.  It's a LOT harder than you might suppose.   Well, it was a lot harder for me than I supposed it was going to be. 

It is a problem we inflict on ourselves by how these email forums are organized. Google had one that was chronologically organized; RG forums are chronologically organized, but not archived (!!!!).  If you archive a RG forum yourself, it comes out in the right order, and pretty clean, as well.  

Behaviorism.  Pending the edumication, I have attached an article which I think you might actually enjoy.  It contains a very succinct (for me, anyway) statement of the perils that go along with NOT being a behaviorist.  

Nick 

Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
Clark University
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam [mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com] On Behalf Of Steven A Smith
Sent: Sunday, May 28, 2017 12:31 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] IS: Ruminations from the M.I. S. WAS: Any non-biological complex systems?

> You all be glad to know that I have been in New England for the last three days and have yet to see the sun. The green is overpowering.
My father, who emigrated to the west from KY after WWII referred to this as "so green, it hurts your eyes!"
> Apparently, they had a record-breakingly warm February here followed by and equally record-breakingly cold March which has resulted in in an eruption of ticks.  Yes, folks, this year, even the ticks have ticks.
I hear it is this way in the upper midwest/great-lakes region as well.
>   
>
>    While I was traveling, you all suddenly had a burst of Complexity Talk, which I am now trying to recapture.
...
>   Many of my ilk have died for the lack of good, fresh, passionate argument to submit to a Journal.
I am sympathetic with your desire to capture/render some of these informal/semi-formal discussions in a more formal form, but believe that a good portion of the back and forth here is _mere_ collective 
brainstorming.   In this particular round-robin, I see Russ having had a 
very specific (but not completely exposed) idea about the boundary region between life and non-biological complex systems, which he posed as a challenge.

A number of us threw down in various forms, mostly trying to answer his specific question, or in my case asking him if he wasn't really noticing that there may be no clear boundary between life and non-biological complex systems... suggesting that it is our definition of "life itself" 
which deserves a constant expanding.   I think Glen's listing of 
precedents for this question, roughly from Rosen to Kauffman was another way of suggesting that, though I've been wrong about what Glen means before.

I am also a firm believer that what we often do (when we do it well) in this type of forum is to refine a question until it may (or may not) have a simple or obvious (but non-trivial?) answer.

I think the residue of the discussion, as refactored by Stephen Guerin is still a very much alive horse worth beating, or at least leading to water.

I am afraid that what is needed is not a better mechanical *threading* tool to preserve these discussions (I can easily sort my inbox by subject/date and recover the thread (and others could do the same on the 
archive)).   Merely capturing the discussion as it was 
generated/played-out does not achieve more than the baseline of what you 
want I think.   There may be automatic semantic processing tools which 
could help to tie all of this together into something more structured 
than a series of "he said/he said" arcs.   There are complex references 
within this corpus and much richer references to the larger corpus of writing on the topic(s) (complexity science, life, etc.)

It feels as if what you are wishing for is an automated "editor" in the broadest sense, including the role of curator and summarizer. Or maybe 
just the tools to aid a human in that process.   I know you have talked 
this up many times and it often falls dead or gets you a round of razzing, so I don't want to instigate that.  I don't know how often your role has been as an editor of others' technical work, but is it fair to say that is where you are looking for leverage?
>   
>
> Also, while I am in a reflective mood, it is probably time for me to apologize to Steve S. for my rhetorical snark.  Actually, his use of in form is normative.
I didn't mind your snark at all, it was a good excuse to engage with 
you, if only in a simple riposte.   I do think that the use of language 
is important and our current (ab)uses at the highest levels of government and politics(for example) which play off the most base (mis)uses by the populist populace (aka unwashed masses) makes it feel ever more urgent.
>   (I have seen dictionaries that make his usage the FIRST usage.)  So actually, I have NO normative leg to stand on.  To bulk up my critique of his use of the word, I have to build a much bigger argument concerning the use of words that have two meanings in place of words that have but one in the hope of avoiding two-close scrutiny of the meaning being conveyed.  But even that argument is shaky, because SS could say, I meant EXACTLY what I said.  I MEANT to say that something ... some speech, some idea, some event ... shaped the inside of something.
I WILL cop to a propensity of deliberate use of slightly unfamiliar words or familiar words in unfamiliar contexts... I don't like to think I do it for simple effect, I like to think I *usually* do it to draw attention to the specificity of the usage.  In this case, I felt there were nuances suggested by "inform" over "shape" (as I've already argued... not arguing here... just illustrating).
>    And now, those of you who know me well, will see the actual source 
> of my disgruttlement with his usage:  my behaviorism.  [OH GAWD, 
> THOMPSON, DO YOU HAVE TO DO THIS?]  For a behaviorist, the metaphor 
> implied by "information" itself is profoundly dangerous because it 
> appeals to the shape of something which we cannot see.  Even when we 
> speak of informing somebody in the normative, everyday usage, we are 
> obfuscating.  Speech influences behavior at least in some long-term 
> global sense, or it does nothing at all.  (Yes, Frank, it's true! 
> (};-)]  )
I do hope we can sit for many hours some day and for me to let you edjumicate me a little more on the broader implications of being a behaviorist.  I"d like to understand better how that informs (gak!) your worldview and the things you find it easier to discuss in a particular mode and the things you find more difficult to think around.
> Lord knows, I miss you all!  If anybody has the energy to summarize your recent complexity debate, I would be in your debt.
I doubt my summary is of the kind you want, more of a blow-by-blow than anything, but I do hope the discussion proceeds in a way that is useful to you.  Your own tradition of scholarship and un) questions of the rest of us.

I think Glen Biohazard's comment "without a secretary, there is no artifact"...  Are you therefore maybe asking for a "mechanical secretarial turk"?

Carry on!
  - Steve
>    
>
> Nick
>
> Nicholas S. Thompson
> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology Clark University 
> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Friam [mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com] On Behalf Of gepr
> Sent: Sunday, May 28, 2017 7:38 AM
> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group 
> <friam at redfish.com>; Stephen Guerin <stephen.guerin at simtable.com>
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Any non-biological complex systems?
>
> I've struggled to understand your point here. Are you saying that, eg, a phase diagram of a device like a refrigerator, with ice in the freezer part, jello in the fridge part, and coolant in the compressor:
>
> 1. violates a definition of 'space',
> 2. cannot exist,
> 3. reduces to a common, atomic, phase space, or 4. something else?
>
>
>
> On May 26, 2017 5:39:40 PM PDT, Stephen Guerin <stephen.guerin at simtable.com> wrote:
>> We disagree on the use of systems and subsystems in the context of 
>> phase space then. To me, there is one system and that system has a 
>> phase space - There are not multiple subsystems in the phase space.
> --
> ⛧glen⛧
>
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