[FRIAM] On old question

[Nick Thompson]

Dear Roger, and anybody else who wants to play, 

 

While waiting for my paper, Signs and Designs, to be rejected, I have gone
back to thinking about an old project, whose working title has been "A Sign
Language."  And this has led me back to Robert Rosen, whose Life Itself I
bought almost 9 years ago and it has remained almost pristine, ever since.
In the chapter I am now looking at, Rosen is talking about "organization."
Now, I have been thinking about organization ever since I read C. Ray
Carpenter's early work on primate groups back in the late 50's.  It seemed
to me at the time, and it seems to me reasonable now, to define the
organization of a set of entities as related in some way to the degree to
which one can predict the behavior of one entity from knowledge about
another.  Now the relationship is not straightforward, because neither total
unpredictability (every monkey behaves exactly the same as every other
monkey in every situation) nor total unpredictability (no monkey behaves
like any other monkey in ANY situation) smacks of great organization.  The
highest levels organization, speaking inexpertly and intuitively, seem to
correspond to intermediate levels of predictability, where there were
several classes of individuals within a group and within class
predictability was strong but cross-class predictability was weak.  On my
account, the highest levels of organization involve hierarchies of
predictability.  Thus honey bees and ants are more organized than starling
flocks, say.  

 

This is where the matter stood at the point that I came to Santa Fe and
started interacting with you guys 14 years ago.  You-all introduced me to a
totally different notion of organization based - shudder - on the second
law.  But I have never been able to deploy your concept with any assurance.
So, for instance, when I shake the salad dressing, I feel like I am
disorganizing it, and when it reasserts itself into layers, I feel like it
ought to be called more organized.  But I have a feeling that you are going
to tell me that the reverse is true.  That, given the molecules of fat and
water/acid, that the layered state is the less organized state.  

 

Now this confusion of mine takes on importance when I try to read Rosen.  He
defines a function as the difference that occurs when one removes a
component of a system.  I can see no reason why the oil or the water in my
salad dressing cannot be thought of components of a system and if, for
instance, I were to siphon out the water from the bottom of my layered salad
dressing, I could claim that the function of the water had been to hold the
water up.  This seems a rather lame notion of function.  

 

Some of you who have been on this list forever will remember that I raised
the same kind of worry almost a decade back when I noticed the drainage of
water from a basin was actually slowed by the formation of a vortex.  This
seemed to dispel any notion that vortices are structures whose function is
to efficiently dispel a gradient.  It also violated my intuition from
traffic flows, where I imagine that rigid rules of priority would facilitate
the flow of people crossing bridges to escape Zozobra.  

 

It's quite possible that my confusions in this matter are of no great
general applicability, in which case, I look forward to being ignored.  

 

Nick 

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

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

 

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