[FRIAM] Formalizing the concept of design

Wed Nov 7 13:57:20 EST 2018

I am WAY out of my depth here.  In fact, you guys have dragged my original thought out beyond its depth and are in danger of drowning it.  My point is a descriptive one: however we come to explain it, there is (or perhaps isn’t) a holistic property of natural systems called design which, if we are to play the science game honest, has to be identified before the explanations begin.  People like Rosen and Sommerhoff are trying to identify that holistic property.  (By the way, having introduced you to Sommerhoff I now find that he was a thoroughly vile human being, a serial child molester of the worst sort.  I don’t know what to do about that.)

But since you have drowned my thread (note mixed metaphor) let me comment on yours:  Haven’t you both agreed to give up on emergence?  Why cannot one principle work at one level of organization while the other works at another?  

Nick 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

 <http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

From: Friam [mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com] On Behalf Of Stephen Guerin
Sent: Tuesday, November 06, 2018 10:03 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Formalizing the concept of design

Thanks, Eric!

Eric writes:

I think of the two (principle of least action (PoLA) and natural selection (NS)) in completely decoupled thoughts. 

Yes, but can they both be understood as "selection" principles?   

with PoLA as a "selection principle" in this sense:

The principle of least action is the basic variational principle of particle and continuum systems. In Hamilton's formulation, a true dynamical trajectory of a system between an initial and final configuration in a specified time is found by imagining all possible trajectories that the system could conceivably take, computing the action (a functional of the trajectory) for each of these trajectories, and selecting one that makes the action locally stationary (traditionally called "least"). True trajectories are those that have least action.
 Scholarpedia <http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Principle_of_least_action>  (http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Principle_of_least_action)

For now, not wanting to get hung up on technical use of principle vs law or theory nor that NS has more mechanism/algorithm defined in its principle than PoLA.

If you're cool with PoLA as a selection principle, I have a follow up email question. 

-Stephen

On Tue, Nov 6, 2018 at 12:58 PM Eric Smith <desmith at santafe.edu <mailto:desmith at santafe.edu> > wrote:

Steve, hi,

> As we've discussed over the last few years, The Action Principle (energy * time) and least (stationary) action may provide a more fundamental selection principle in biology than natural selection and could be a mathematical formulation you're asking for. Many applied problems in complexity like ant algorithms using dual pheromone fields, level-set methods, and route search on a road network using simultaneous floodflill from both origins and destinations might be considered least action path selection. I make the claim on intuition - I expect Eric Smith would reject or accept this based on more formal understanding.

I don’t want to just drop this, but I don’t know how to respond to it usefully.  I think of the two (principle of least action (PoLA) and natural selection (NS)) in completely decoupled thoughts.  For me, PoLA in the classical form is equivalent in content to dynamical equations, but because it formulates them as an extremization principle it more readily exposes consequences of symmetry.  In quantum mechanics, I can find the same thing as a stationary-path consequence of interference of phase advances over many paths.  In statistical mechanics I can find a “stochastic effective action” that captures stationarity through a similar kind of interference, but no longer among quantum phases, rather in some interaction of distributions with the shadows of late-time questions we might ask about them.  (Sorry that formulation is so cryptic; for those who prefer that one just show what one means by calculating, there is this:
https://arxiv.org/abs/1102.3938
)

For me, NS comes up in response to a completely different collection of questions (which may or may not be about the same phenomena).  I think of NS as being about whatever it is that makes time different from just another dimension of space, so that there is always something falling apart that can only be maintained by being passed through a filter.  I would prefer to use NS (or maybe, better, “Darwinian selection”) as a subset of the previous general sentence, to refer to phenomena that are organized in architectures of individuals and populations, as distinct from simple kinetic phenomena in general.  Of course one does not have to draw the boundary there, but I find it a good way to use a new word to distinguish individual/population-based phenomena from general kinetic organization, for which we have other terms already.  Also NS is about information in the same sense (exactly) as Bayesian filtering is about information.  Sometimes effects of any of these, as they act in populations, can be expressed in terms of actions, but I don’t think of the service that action gives in displaying the nature of a calculation as being the same thing as NS does in declaring what kinds of phenomena we are talking about.

Sorry I could not offer better, or more likely I am not understanding where the conversation is.

Best,

Eric

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> On Sun, Oct 28, 2018 at 12:32 PM Eric Charles <eric.phillip.charles at gmail.com <mailto:eric.phillip.charles at gmail.com> > wrote:
> Bob Shaw has spend a good chunk of his career trying to do this at what I would call a "lower level of analysis" even though that might not be the right term. His "intentional dynamics" are about trying to use dynamic-systems math to try to say what "intentionality" looks like in the topology of an action. Thus, when I say "lower level" I mean that he is interested in how one moves through the room to accomplish a goal, rather than that one is doing a move-through-the-room option, which is what Nick tends to focus on. That said, both approaches connect strongly, I believe, with E.B. Holt's assertion that a central task of psychology is to determine what aspects of the world our behavior is a function of, i.e., the assertion that one is "trying to leave the room" is a description about how one is acting, contextualized by an array of actions that would result in an array of various outcomes. 
> 
> https://commons.trincoll.edu/robertshaw/
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=om0HV5TQkXw
> 
> Bob's work might really appeal to some on the list, which is why I have linked both to his webpage and a talk from a few years ago. Differential geometry, Feynman path integral, system dynamics, etc. If you want to skip the less contextualized technical stuff and get to the big picture of his effort, regarding the relation between the math he is using and psychology, you could start at minute 50 and watch for about 10 minutes. 
> 
> For a touch more context: Bob was a crucial player in the second generation of "ecological psychologists", those who kept James J. Gibson's work alive after his death. Gibson's work is now extremely influential in the emerging fields of "embodied cognition" (often called "enactivisim" in European contexts). That said, most researchers in the field aren't mathematically sophisticated enough to connect with Bob's work, and it is technically challenging to implement in experiments, as such, few are working on the project besides Bob, which is unfortunate.
> 
> 
> -----------
> Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
> Supervisory Survey Statistician
> U.S. Marine Corps
> 
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> On Sun, Oct 28, 2018 at 6:53 AM ∄ uǝʃƃ <gepropella at gmail.com <mailto:gepropella at gmail.com> > wrote:
> This description suffers from the same criticism I made before: you're assuming a *strict* hierarchy, where the higher order can only operate over whole components from the lower order.  I.e. the gun's algorithm 1st chooses the type/medium of target (ballistic, air, water), then uses that type to select the specific tracking sub-algorithm.
> 
> And while this is mostly how it's done in artificial systems, I suspect biology does NOT use strict hierarchies.  A higher order function can operate over a mixture of operands, some complex wholes in that higher order and some from the lower orders.  E.g. if the gun's higher order selection is based not only on the 3 types (ballistic, air, water), but also on a lower order measure like *speed*, then it may well use he same sub-algorithm for both air and water.  So, it takes both high order constructs and low order constructs as its operands.
> 
> You see your assumption of a strict hierarchy peeking through when you say sex is the only motive that is ESSENTIALLY social.  What do you mean by "essentially"?  Couldn't we say that *all* the behavior of all the social animals is, in part, social?  ... including following others to the water hole?  So, these functions would be mixed ... do not obey a strict hierarchy.
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> On 10/27/18 11:32 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:
> > But the function that connects the two arrays will be different in the two kinds of gun because a surface target is capable of different sorts of motion from an aerial target.
> > [...]
> > So, the gun would display two levels of design, the lower level that relates trajectory to firing and the higher level that relates the lower level design to target type.
> > [...]
> > This conception of multiple hierarchical layers of design is a useful way to describe many of the phenomena that ethologists and socio-biologists are required to explain. …
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> 
> -- 
> ∄ uǝʃƃ
> 
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