[FRIAM] On old question

Thu Oct 25 17:55:14 EDT 2018

Hi, David, 

Serendipity!  Your letter struck me like a thunderbolt, because I had dedicated the morning to carefully rereading Rosen's first chapter.  And for the first time, I think I got it! Rosen doesn't put it that way, but I think I want to say that his chapter is all about the distinction between “materialism” -- the belief that all that is consists of matter ==> and its relations <== and “mechanism”, the belief that the nature of parts tells you everything you need to know about the wholes those parts compose.  We need a science of biology that is materialistic but NOT mechanistic.  

Now, if ever there was an idea that would fit with you, I would think this would be it.  CS, it seems to me, is all about cutting loose the program … the relations … from the machine.  That is explains why Rosen and others are so hard on the Turing MACHINE metaphor.  They think that metaphor traps us in a focus on parts, rather than relations.  A program need not be faithful to the machine on which it runs if it encodes the relations that need to be achieved.  

To answer the question What is Life? we have so many more tools than we did when Rosen wrote.  The evo-devo literature is full of examples of what I guess I would call organizational serendipity.  The most inspiring example, to me, is the current explanation for the origin of life.  The way the question has always been posed to me before is how did life arise spontaneously from parts. But if life is an organization of things from another organization, the question becomes, “What kind of an organization could scaffold the organization we call life.  Enter the white smokers with their rich source of energetic chemicals and their intricate cellular structure.  So, life is the inadvertent consequence of one kind of organization coming into contact with another kind of parts in such a way that the native possibilities for the parts to work together are scaffolded by the organization.  

I am not at all sure where this leaves us with “natural programming.”  As you point out, my concept of natural may be complete at odds with yours.  Mine grows out of the following analogy:  Artificial selection : natural selection : : artificial design  : natural design.  If artificial design – the appropriateness of a domestic species to the needs of the breeder -- is what is explained by artificial selection, what is explained by natural selection?  What precisely is natural design?  In the absence of a God to tell us what s/he wants, how do we read off of nature itself the demands to which her/his  creatures are adapted?  

But serendipity by definition is a violation of design.  The serendipitous structure  is one that makes something happen without being designed to do so.  Translating that into the CP domain, your problem is to write a program that somehow promotes serendipity given that the serendipity involves, inherently, a discontinuity between what you seek and what are likely to find.  

If I, in my enthusiasm, have run all over your nice clean though with my muddy feet, please forgive me.  

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 Prof David West
Sent: Thursday, October 25, 2018 12:10 PM
To: friam at redfish.com
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] On old question

I would like to introduce a bit of a zig or zag into the conversation by bringing up something a bit far afield and then relating it back to the thread.

In a direct message to Nick I mentioned that I was doing a workshop (January, in Amsterdam, at Domain-Driven Design Europe) on ‘Natural System Design’. Being the prolific author he is, he directed me to several papers of his on the same subject. Of course we are using the same phrase in quite different ways.

My use derives from software development and the first business computer LEO, (Lyons Electronic Office), was built by J. Lyons and Company in 1951. The same team built the hardware, programmed system software, and programmed a set of applications that included: payroll, order entry, inventory control, production scheduling, etc.

A number of assumptions made at that time have shaped Comp Sci and Soft Eng ever since: e.g., programming is all about the machine – taking a complete, consistent, and unambiguous set of requirements and then programming to satisfy them — totally isolating the programmer from the domain: and second, assuming that there is no difference between ‘application’ programming and ‘system’ programming; which is to deny any qualitative or substantive difference between a ‘natural’ domain like a business or business process and an ‘artificial’ domain like a network router and protocol.

Carnegie-Mellon had a contract a while back from DoD to study Ultra-Large Scale systems – which coincidently are also Complex Adaptive systems. That study quite firmly said that the precepts, principles, tools, and models of Software Engineering would not be applicable to this type of system.

The premise of my workshop is to provide an alternative approach, and set of concepts and techniques, for designing and deploying software/information artifacts that enhance naturally occurring systems like businesses, cities, ecologies, etc.

What Nick wrote and referred me to could provide a lot of interesting and important ideas about “design-in-nature” that I can use in a biomimetic fashion to enhance my work on “design-with-nature.”

Which brings us back into the thread and a comment I made previously about the ‘alchemical’ or ‘alchemical wanna be’ status of most of what we know about biological and cultural ‘living systems’. And, why I, and it seems others on the list, are tantalized but disappointed by folk like Rosen.

davew

On Thu, Oct 25, 2018, at 12:03 AM, glen wrote:

> On the contrary, the question can ONLY be answered by pointing at 

> something. Your abstracted, essentialist, linguistic tendencies will 

> fail us every time. I think I've mentioned Luc Steels' language games 

> before. And you seem to be fond of semiotics. So why isn't the 

> question best answered by pointing?

> 

> Playing along though, if the experience evoked by a model is good 

> enough to trigger a similar enough physiological response to that 

> evoked by reality, then the model passes for reality. I.e. if the 

> effect is the same, then the cause is equivalent.

> 

> 

> On October 24, 2018 8:08:01 PM PDT, Nick Thompson 

> < <mailto:nickthompson at earthlink.net> nickthompson at earthlink.net> wrote:

> >Glen,

> >

> >Interesting website ... .  But the question can't be answered by 

> >pointing at something.  I meant to ask the question, "What are the

> >properties of something you would call real?"   

> >

> >Nick

> --

> glen

> 

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