[FRIAM] Morphogenisis

Sun May 9 14:19:51 EDT 2021

Jon, 

Yours is a fascinating note and I hope it gets the attention it deserves.  It is because I really have never been able to hold in my head any stable idea of what "computation" is that I keep asking questions about computation.  I think of it as something like, "the creation of a sequence of instructions such that, in a certain defined context, a particular predetermined result is guaranteed."  I guess I have to admit that RNA-DNA-RNA is such a set of instructions, but I get a bit hazy on who or what is doing the computing.  So, the metaphor of computation invites one to invent a computer, just as the metaphor of natural selection, invites one to invent a "selector".   The question for formal metaphor analysis then becomes, Can we disclaim that feature of the metaphor, in the way that we disclaim "selector" in the Darwin metaphor; and if we CAN disclaim it, do we choose to?  

You inquiry about generality is easier.  From a pragmatCIst point of view, generality, truth, realness, are all forms of the same aspiration.  We keep referring to that aspiration in every day speech, as when the lost hikers ask one another, "Where will we sleep this night?"  There certainly is a place where they will sleep, so one cannot claim that there is nothing to which the question refers.  And every step they take narrows the probabilities of where that place might be.  Assignment to a general is abduction; the fruit of abduction is all the deductions that the abduction affords if it is true.   The "speed of light" is just where all the light-speed measurers will sleep when they have done with their wandering.  And as we watch their wandering, and because we believe they are wandering in a Poisson distribution, we can guess where they are going to sleep and that number is what we call the speed of light. 

To be "about to move" is for me to have an explosion of thoughts in my head because moving house (or being bereaved or divorced) is of course the only kind of death any of us actually knows, and it's as if I have to get every thought "out" before I move, because I cannot imagine thought beyond the move.   In any case, I am starting to get on people's nerves.

I like that scorpion metaphor.  My colleagues here are like frogs trying to swim across the river.  If all they want is to get to the other side of the river, they shouldn't befriend a scorpion.  But perhaps I am obligated not to accept the offer of lift?

By the way, knowing what we know about the habitats of scorpions and frogs, how on earth could a frog ever befriend a scorpion in the first place?

n

Nick Thompson

ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of jon zingale
Sent: Sunday, May 9, 2021 4:03 AM
To: friam at redfish.com
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Morphogenisis

"""

Is carrying out an algorithm more like “computation” or is “building a limb”? Is a salamander’s limb “computed”?  If so, who computes it, or is that a violation of the language of computation.

"""

>From the summary of Chemero's "Radical Embodied Cognitive Science":

"""

Radical embodied cognitive science is a direct descendant of the American naturalist psychology of William James and John Dewey, and follows them in viewing perception and cognition to be understandable only in terms of action in the environment. Chemero argues that cognition should be described in terms of agent-environment dynamics rather than in terms of computation and representation. After outlining this orientation to cognition, Chemero proposes a methodology: dynamical systems theory, which would explain things dynamically and without reference to representation. He also advances a background theory: Gibsonian ecological psychology, “shored up” and clarified.

"""

Which I find helpful to juxtapose against Valiant's "Probably Approximately

Correct":

"""

The assertion that the Halting Problem was not computable by any Turing machine was identified with the claim that it was not computable by any conceivable mechanical procedure...Extensive efforts at finding models that have greater power than Turing machines, but still correspond to what one would instinctively regard as mechanical processes, have all failed.

Therefore there is now overwhelming historical evidence that Turing's notion of computability is highly robust to variation in definition. This has placed Turing computability among the most securely established theories known to science.

"""

Two steps in Turing's process I find worth highlighting are:

1. Abstraction of features of particular machines to the general.

2. Discovery of a limiting set of robust properties of generalized machines such that these properties could be identified universally in any sufficiently capable mechanical process.

In part, I mention the question of universality because (here in the still hours of a sleepless night) I cannot help but feel that metaphors often attempt to point to universals[1].

While I am never really sure that I get non-computation in the sense of Chemero, chatting with EricC about Gibson makes me feel like I can almost see it. Where Valiant emphasizes in computation that which is universal to anything we can sensibly call mechanics, Chemero and others place the universality squarely on the side of representation, or in some extreme cases of nominalism, rejecting the universality altogether.

>From another perspective, a difference between these two points of view relates to the question of agency. In Valiant's description, one doesn't seem to care *what is doing the computation* as much as that a mechanical procedure is executed at all. Alternatively, Chemero is concerned with subjectivity. For him, there are well-defined agents and they have environments. As far as I can read, each disagrees terminologically on whether agent-based models compute. While Valiant is comfortable calling what these agents do in their environment a computation, Chemero is not.

[1] Nick, regarding universals, while I have heard you denounce the stability of a universal, like beauty, what is your bet on computation?

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