[FRIAM] On old question

[Nick Thompson]

Thanks, Marcus, 

 

I ordered the book.  Time I revived old memory traces.  

 

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 Marcus Daniels
Sent: Wednesday, October 24, 2018 12:56 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <Friam at redfish.com>; Roger Critchlow <rec at elf.org>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] On old question

 

Nick,

 

It sounds like you are describing mutual information.  This is ancient, but a nice overview of related topics:

 

https://www.amazon.com/Information-Theory-Qualitative-Quantitative-Applications/dp/0803921322

 

Marcus

 

From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com <mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com> > on behalf of Nick Thompson <nickthompson at earthlink.net <mailto:nickthompson at earthlink.net> >
Reply-To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <Friam at redfish.com <mailto:Friam at redfish.com> >
Date: Wednesday, October 24, 2018 at 12:22 AM
To: Roger Critchlow <rec at elf.org <mailto:rec at elf.org> >, Friam <Friam at redfish.com <mailto:Friam at redfish.com> >
Subject: [FRIAM] On old question

 

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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