[FRIAM] Can a robot have a soul?

[thompnickson2 at gmail.com]

Stephen, 

 

Please see larding below.  Your attempt to escape our agreement was deft, but unsuccessful.  I think you would agree (reluctantly, perhaps) that there is, sometimes, a reason to think of nodes in a system as individuals. And I agree, enthusiastically, that very often, one learns more by focusing on relations among  the nodes.   But we are, at the moment, not talking about that.  We are talking about where we locate something like consciousness, and we absolutely agree (no escaping it; I cling to you like a leach) that conscious is located in the relation between the nodes, not in some hypothetical, exploded, set of relations within the node.  

 

I am, as you predicted, very excited about this.  I watched a bit of the videos to whet my appetite, but here in the Last Mile I am very limited in what I can download and am very leery of anything that moves.  Perhaps, when I get my “device”, I can spend time up at the Town Hall looking at those videos.  

 

Clouds are like patterns in a cloud chamber, not usefully thought of as things in themselves, but more about the state of the atmosphere that they reveal.  I have long felt that cloud Atlasses really stink because they focus on the cloud as a thing not the atmospheric structure that is revealed by it.  Now, before I get in trouble with you I must quickly retreat and admit that a cloud, like a smoke plume, can also be seen as a thing, as when it shades the ground and diminishes convective potential or when it precipitates and puts out the fire.  This is an example of the phenomenon/epiphenomenon.  For most purposes the shape of the cloud – whether it looks like micky mouse or a llama – epiphenomenal.  It has nothing to do with the causal history of the cloud.  But for other purposes, it might be useful to know.  Whether something is epiphenomenal or not is in the eye of the beholder.  Glen thinks I disagree with that, but I don’t.  Where we genuinely disagree, I think, is in the relative value of a life spent looking for frames that encompass other frames.  What might be an entertainment for him is kind of obsession for me.  

 

Nick  

 

Nick Thompson

 <mailto:ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com> ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com

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

 

From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of Stephen Guerin
Sent: Sunday, September 19, 2021 12:53 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Can a robot have a soul?

 

 

On Sat, Sep 18, 2021 at 9:42 PM <thompnickson2 at gmail.com <mailto:thompnickson2 at gmail.com> > wrote:

If you mean by what you wrote, could consciousness, etc., be properties of the organism’s (or the robot’s) relation to other objects, my answer is emphatically  YES.  I hate to smear you before the rest of the group by agreeing with you, but you’ll just have to fight to get your reputation back.


<tugging up at fingers of white glove, removing and slapping Nick's cheek to defend my complexity honor:>

[NST===>As I say, you honor was defended, but unsucessfully<===nst] 



I have in mind a more decentralized notion of the living system. Your "organism" in your statement above appears more discrete and separate from the "environment". 

[NST===>NO NO NO and NO!  Stop trying to re-invent me as one of your Darwinist Nuns.  {I am sorry, that’s a reference to a letter to EricS I haven’t even sent yet]  I was not among those who took a ruler to you in your youth.  I am going to go all pluralistic on you now.  Full bore Glen.  These are all points of view that reveal different truths (patterns that endure the vicissitudes of experience) about the scenes they reveal. Now where I differ with glen is in my fascination with finding points of view that integrate the others, frames that include other frames and make frame shifting as easy as gear shifting by a very good automatic transmission.   <===nst] 

Let's agree on decentralized living processes before moving onto consciousness (which might later turn out to be more primary than matter)



But the way,  as you know, I have always shared your fascination with Benard cells.  It seems to me that the atmosphere, at least at the regional scale,  has two ideal ways of being, depending on whether there are vertical entropic (?) differences between the surface and the tropopause: a quiescent regime, in which it settles out into quiescent, non-interacting layers, and a active regimen in which it is organized in columns of rising and falling air.  All actual atmospheres are combinations of these two regimes.  Critchlow’s Maxim applies not only to layers but to columns, since they the upward moving columns are composed of much different air from the downward moving ones. 

 

After 15 years of discussing weather dynamics with you, we finally have an applied need to model clouds. Please check out this video and associated paper that was a top Siggraph paper. We are translating this to Netlogo and AgentScript this month with students in the Supercomputing Challenge and for use for matching camera observations of wildfire plume dynamics:

      http://computationalsciences.org/publications/haedrich-2020-stormscapes.html
      T. Hädrich, M. Makowski, W. Pałubicki, D. T. Banuti, S. Pirk, and D. L. Michels Stormscapes: Simulating Cloud Dynamics in the Now ACM Transactions on Graphics (SIGGRAPH Asia 2020), Vol. 39, No. 6, Article 175.

 

  sort themselves out into layers and reside easily with one another,  the layers slipping by like other as if grease.    Anytime you get confection in any layer, it’s top and its bottom become bumpy and create turbulence in the layers above and below.  

[NST===>Sorry about that!  Typos distract.  My eyes increasingly suck, so I can’t promise there won’t be more of those.   I would recast the sentence as follows.  Anytime you get convection in a layer, it’s top and bottom become bumpy, friction between layers increases, and turbulence  is created in the layers above and below.  If either the layer above or the layer below is critical with respect to duepoint or potential temperature, dramatic events can occur rapidly across a wide area.   I once watched two fronts meeting at on oblique angle in CT, one a sea breeze front pressing northward from the coast, the other a standard cold front pressing in from the NW.  It was watching two wavelets meet on a flat beach.  Together they tore open an inverted chasm in the atmosphere that was tens of thousands of feet deep and  dozens of miles long in about 15 minutes.  During a time in which no convective cell moved more than a few miles, the interaction point between the two fronts (and therefore the opening of the chasm) moved a hundred miles. 

Now one interesting difference between a smoke plume and a cloud is that the smoke ceases to burn once it’s airborne but the cloud, if it’s a healthy cloud, continues to “burn” until all the potential energy in its watervapor has been rung out by upward forcing.   <===nst] 


Confection can be tricky with convective ovens.  ;-p

 

While convection ovens are very versatile and can handle both yeasted doughs and deposited batters, these are not as beneficial for products baked inside high-sided pans that do not allow for full contact between air currents and the product’s external surfaces. Ideally, they would be used for free-standing products baked on sheet pans or perforated racks. Hot air is circulated by a fan at an airflow/velocity of 2–22 mph (1–10 m/s). This rate must be carefully set depending on the product and baking conditions. The convective heat transfer coefficient (h) developed during baking depends on the air velocity and temperature inside the baking chamber. It can range from 20–120 W/m2 K.4. Fast air currents can distort the shape of delicate products such as sponge cakes, batters, and soft doughs such as pastry. They can also dry out the products, negatively impacting their texture, shelf-life, and overall quality. Rapid surface drying of dough pieces may form a hard skin which can prevent dough piece expansion during oven spring. On the other hand, too slow air currents can reduce the rate of heat transfer and increase the baking time. This hinders convection. from: https://bakerpedia.com/processes/convection-oven/

[NST===>I can’t tell if you are just pulling my leg here so I won/t comment.  <===nst] 

 

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