<div dir="auto">Carl Tollander once told me that he saw an article about automated programming with the title, "Do What I Meant Not What I Said. No Not That!"<div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">Did I get that right, Carl?<br><br><div data-smartmail="gmail_signature" dir="auto">---<br>Frank C. Wimberly<br>140 Calle Ojo Feliz, <br>Santa Fe, NM 87505<br><br>505 670-9918<br>Santa Fe, NM</div></div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Mon, Apr 4, 2022, 11:57 AM Prof David West <<a href="mailto:profwest@fastmail.fm">profwest@fastmail.fm</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><u></u><div><div style="font-family:Arial"><i>"I want to see a full round-trip"</i><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial"><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">The claim was made, and "proof of claim" was demonstrated, that Rationale's (Now IBM's) Rose provided exactly that. You could start with undocumented code and Rose would produce accurate and complete UML diagrams and templates. The Diagrams could be altered and Rose would then generate 'correct' and executable code that incorporated the changes. Or you could create a complete UML specification (models and templates) and Rose would generate 'correct' and executable code. You could make changes to the code, and Rose would generate the UML so you could verify the 'correctness' of the altered code.<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial"><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">Problem was it only worked on a certain kind of program—one directed at a formally describable system, like a device driver or low level OS component. And even within this category of program, it did not scale beyond programs of tens to a few hundred lines of code.<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial"><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">It was totally parallel to the massive efforts expended on formal proof of programs. This effort could not scale beyond programs of 100 LOC, or so.<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial"><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">Roughly the same time frame, massive effort was invested in AI assisted natural language translation. It was deemed extremely difficult to translate from NL to NL, because a computer could not understand or deal with NL of any kind—too much ambiguity, context sensitivity, and metaphor.So an effort was made to find a "perfect language" that could be implemented in a computer and then translate from NL1 to PL to NL2.<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial"><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">Two candidate PLs were proposed: Sanskrit and Aymaran. This effort broke down because it proved impossible to map any NL to either candidate PL beyond some very specific, somewhat formally defined, NL subsets— a business letter for example, or a technical paper.<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial"><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">[I have no clue how Google Translate does such a good job at translation. Nor have I tried Google on things like poetry that is extremely difficult for humans to translate.]<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial"><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">In the realm of software development the ropund-trip is not just from UML-->code-->UML, it is Domain Experts model to Business Analyst's model, to Architects model, to UML model, to code, to "limbo." Limbo, because no effort exists to close the loop back to the Domain Expert's model. Models, and language employed, at each step of this round-trip is idiosyncratic to that step and, although similar in some minor ways concerning definition and syntax, requires some fairly sophisticated translation. This translation is never made specific and the result is massive miscommunication (total absence of communication) across the silos.<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial"><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">One more complication, the idiosyncratic variation among human individuals within a 'silo'—glen's example of senior and junior programmer, for example.<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial"><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">There is a reason that the multi-billion dollar CASE effort failed. The problem is too complex and too reliant on human abilities to deal with ambiguity, incompleteness, and metaphor—abilities that a computer and AI will, IMO, never be able to duplicate. My elementary-level understanding of current AI efforts has yet to reveal an idea that seems novel or promising enough to merit a full blown investigation of the technology and my opinion about the possibility of significant automation of the software development effort remains pretty much intact.<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial"><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">While I have focused on the narrow domain of software and the round-trip, there is a general argument to be made. Beginning with glen's restatement of my question,<i> "how far can our formal structures go *toward* that ambiguity?"</i> I would not deny that significant progress is possible, but I would assert that it will always parallel the efforts to apply perfect circles and spheres to planetary orbits—a never ending recursive application of more and more sophisticated epicycles.<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial"><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">There will <b><u>always</u></b> be a loss of 'information' when reality is filtered by any formalism. Formalists of every stripe address this fact with nothing more than "whistling while passing the graveyard," i.e., self-comforting hand-waving while ignoring the issue.<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial"><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">davew<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial"><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial"><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial"><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">On Mon, Apr 4, 2022, at 9:41 AM, glen wrote:<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">> I think what we're seeing there is simply that we're getting close <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">> enough with big data to constraining the space of concretization an <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">> automated system can arrive at. To see the context I'm trying to lay <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">> out, consider one junior programmer telling another junior programmer <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">> what to implement, declaratively. Then consider a junior programmer <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">> telling a senior programmer what to implement. Then consider, say, a <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">> literature or history buff explaining to a senior programmer what to <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">> implement.<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">> With each case, the space of possible programs the implementer might <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">> implement will change. Requirements flow and satisfaction is <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">> concretization. And with examples like these, we're showing vast <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">> improvement on such automation.<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">> But the preemptive nature is still there. The difference between a <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">> junior and senior programmer (as implementors) should be obvious. It'll <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">> carry things like "Well, I've been the Singleton Pattern for years. So <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">> there will be a Singleton in there somewhere!" And "Well, the only <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">> framework I know is NetLogo. So I guess I'll use NetLogo."<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">> A more interesting problem, I think, is abstraction. Automatic <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">> *reading* of programs. We've seen a lot of progress there, too, of <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">> course, perhaps the kerfuffle between xML and iML being fairly tightly <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">> focused. But what I want to see is a full round-trip. I don't <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">> particularly care which side it starts on, whether abstracting a <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">> concrete thing, then reconcretizing the abstraction or vice versa. But <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">> comparing and contrasting the initial thing with the iterated thing is <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">> the interesting part ... and targets, say, EricS' conception of <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">> identity as temporal inter-subjectivity (or "diachronicity" or <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">> "narrativity").<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">> On 4/4/22 08:54, Marcus Daniels wrote:<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>> Is that natural language that is more contextualized? When I look at, say, Open AI Codex, I start see the beginnings of systematic mappings between vague languages and precise ones.<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>> <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>> <a href="https://youtu.be/Zm9B-DvwOgw" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer">https://youtu.be/Zm9B-DvwOgw</a><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>> -----Original Message-----<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>> From: Friam <<a href="mailto:friam-bounces@redfish.com" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer">friam-bounces@redfish.com</a>> On Behalf Of glen<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>> Sent: Monday, April 4, 2022 7:53 AM<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>> To: <a href="mailto:friam@redfish.com" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer">friam@redfish.com</a><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] To repeat is rational, but to wander is transcendent<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>> <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>> But this is the point, right? That cultural language retains its power at least in part *because* of its ambiguity, it's facilitating role in [re]abstracting and [re]concretizing. Jon's pointing out that we can design formal structures that *approach* such ambiguity (wandering vs periodic domains - or here with programming language design) targets that ambiguity. Nick's targeted it by questioning intelim rules in natural deduction. I guess we've all targeted it at some point.<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>> <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>> Under the paradigm that cultural language follows/reflects something about the human animal, which follows/reflects something about the world, then the question Dave asks, I think, is how far can our formal structures go *toward* that ambiguity? Can our ideal/formal/rigorous structures follow the world and "jump over" the cultural language and human animal connection ... i.e. follow the world *better*? Or do our formal structures need the animal for a high fidelity following?<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>> <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>> We've seen this same question in many other forms (e.g. Penrose's suggestion that human mathematicians do something computer mathematicians can't do, Rosen's suggestion that math/logic/algorithms can't realize a "largest model", Chalmer's "hard problem", etc.). So, perhaps its old hat. But in the spirit of parallax, rewording it helps those of us who (think they) have solved it in their pet domain communicate their solution to those of us struggling in other domains.<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>> <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>> On 4/2/22 13:50, David Eric Smith wrote:<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>> It’s nice having Marcus's answer and Frank’s juxtaposed.<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>> Conflating essences and attributes is logically and structurally incoherent in software design.<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>> Whatever process of ratification leads to human language conventions, these assignments get made and may even seem rigid within languages (do not confuse j'ai finis and j’suis finis in French, though the ambiguity in English is important to Daniel Day Lewis’s line in the bowling alley in There Will be Blood), the semantic field is ambiguous enough to the process of language generation that the verb scopes get drawn differently in different lineages.<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>> Hmm.<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>> Eric<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>>> On Apr 3, 2022, at 12:31 AM, Marcus Daniels <<a href="mailto:marcus@snoutfarm.com" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer">marcus@snoutfarm.com</a> <mailto:<a href="mailto:marcus@snoutfarm.com" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer">marcus@snoutfarm.com</a>>> wrote:<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>>><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>>> Mixing-up is-a and has-a is a fundamental software design error. It<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>>> is so consequential that some languages don’t even allow subtyping of<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>>> concrete types. Now it seems essential, but just wait…<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>>><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>>>> On Apr 1, 2022, at 9:42 PM, David Eric Smith <<a href="mailto:desmith@santafe.edu" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer">desmith@santafe.edu</a> <mailto:<a href="mailto:desmith@santafe.edu" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer">desmith@santafe.edu</a>>> wrote:<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>>>><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>>>> <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>>>>> On Mar 31, 2022, at 3:24 AM, Roger Critchlow <<a href="mailto:rec@elf.org" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer">rec@elf.org</a> <mailto:<a href="mailto:rec@elf.org" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer">rec@elf.org</a>>> wrote:<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>>>>><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>>>>> And I suppose the back side of the trap is that we have an innate essentialist heuristic which we use for organizing essentially everything we encounter in the world.<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>>>><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>>>> You know, in reading this now, I am suddenly put back in mind of<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>>>> Vygotsky’s Thought and Language, and a category distinction he makes<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>>>> between “family resemblances” and “predicates”. (Not that there is<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>>>> any privilege to this reference; only that I have seen so few things<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>>>> that I often come back to it.)<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>>>><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>>>> If “family resemblance” and “predicate” are even categories, maybe one should add to them “essences” as a third category.<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>>>><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>>>> What would any of those categories be? Postures toward perceiving? Or “experiencing”?<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>>>><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>>>> The language that philosophers seem to like that “it is like” something “to be alive” (or whatever; to be a bat) — I have sympathy for their need to have some verbal locution, though I have no impulse to follow them in using that one — seems to have an origin something like the origin of terms like “quailia”. Or to be off somehow in the same general quadrant. So okay, we can do a lot, and we want verbal conventions for signals to put each other into various states of mind or frames of reference. The language isn’t analytic in any sense, but if people think they mostly agree on it, maybe it does whatever we put weight on language to do, to some degree. Cues to coordinate states of mind.<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>>>><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>>>> When Vygotsky uses the term “predicate”, he doesn’t mean it only (or maybe at all) in the logician’s sense of existence of a partition of a collection into non-overlapping classes. He is referring to something somehow perceptual, so that from an early “family resemblance”, where maybe most of the blocks in a set are the red ones, or maybe most of them are the triangles, etc., we settle on taking “red” as a “property” on the basis of which to assign set membership. Somehow it is that investing of things with properties or aspects, as a cognitive-developmental horizon, that he means as the shift to assigning them predicates.<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>>>><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>>>> Is it a mode of perception? A cast of mind, among many in which<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>>>> perceptions might take place or be enacted? Is “experiencing something” as “being of some essence” then, in any similar sense, a mode of perception or an orientation, disposition, or posture toward things that partly forms what we take from the interaction with them? That is my attempt to re-say REC’s “innate essentialist heuristic”. Is perceiving-in-essences a distinct disposition from perceiving-as-having-properties? Or are they two names for the same thing? Linguistically, we seem to use them differently. At least in English, one is strongly attached to the verb “is” and the other to the verb “has”, and there seem to be few instances in which we would regard the two as substitutes. (Though I can think of constructions involving deictics and existential where apparently the same usage can shift which verb carries it across languages.) Would the linguistic form strongly prejudice the semantic domain, or does it entrain on a semantic domain that is mostly language- and culture-invariant?<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>>>><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>>>> I guess the psychologists and the philosophers have all this worked out. Or maybe the contemplatives have systems for it. But those are literatures I don’t cover.<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>>>><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>>>> Eric<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>>>><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>>>><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>>>><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>>>><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>>>><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>>>>> So in certain contexts -- mechanics, chemistry, thermodynamics, electronics, computation -- we have refined our naive essentialism into categories and operations which essentially solve or are in the process of solving the context. And in other contexts, we have lots of enthusiastic application of naive essentialist theories, lots of ritualistic imitations of the procedures employed in the contexts which are succeeding, and lots of proposals of ways that the unresolved contexts might be reduced to instances of the solved.<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>>>>><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>>>>> EricS's dimensional analysis in a nutshell, which is an essential description of a successful essential analysis of a context, leaves a lot of problems for the reader to work out if taken as a recipe for action. How do you identify the units of aggregation? What are the rules for forming larger aggregates from smaller and vice versa? What is entropy, anyway, and what is the correct entropy (*dynamic potential) in this context?<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>>>>><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>>>>> Thermodynamic state functions as derivatives with respect to entropy are all over JW Gibb's On the Equilibrium of Heterogeneous Substances. It is the point. PW Bridgman's Dimensional Analysis essentially summarizes all of physics up to 1922 as a problem of combining and factoring units of measurement, one of my favorite library discoveries as an undergraduate. Both available in the internet archive.<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>>>>><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>>>>> -- rec --<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>>>>><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>>>>><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>>>>> On Wed, Mar 30, 2022 at 12:12 PM Marcus Daniels <<a href="mailto:marcus@snoutfarm.com" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer">marcus@snoutfarm.com</a> <mailto:<a href="mailto:marcus@snoutfarm.com" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer">marcus@snoutfarm.com</a>>> wrote:<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>>>>><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>>>>> Here is a situation I frequently experience with software development where I try to adopt some code, even my own. I stare at the code and..<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>>>>><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>>>>> 1) It becomes clear how to assemble it into to what I want<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>>>>><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>>>>> 2) I become confused or frustrated. As a ritual, I remove it from my sight and open a blank editor window to start over. Sometimes I must walk away from the screen to think, until I want to type.<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>>>>><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>>>>> I think the reason I dwell in #2 space is because I believe in #1. That is, when I have just the right combinator library things just snap into place. I seem to spend a lot of time trying to convince myself of why it can't work, and whether it is a bad fit or something that needs to be fixed in the platform. What is important, in this value system, is that platforms are good, not that this or that problem gets solved. I think it is basically the Computer Science value system in contrast to the Computational Science value system.<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>>>>><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>>>>> To [re]abstract and [re]concretize can be expensive and those who don't do it have a productivity advantage, as well as the benefit of having particulars to work from. I don’t think it is a case of confusing the sign for the object. It is a question of what kind of problem one wants to solve.<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>>>>><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>>>>> In contrast, I have met several very good computational people that hate abstraction and indirection. They want code to be greppable even if it that means it is baroque and good for nothing else.<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>>>>><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>>>>> -----Original Message-----<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>>>>> From: Friam <<a href="mailto:friam-bounces@redfish.com" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer">friam-bounces@redfish.com</a> <mailto:<a href="mailto:friam-bounces@redfish.com" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer">friam-bounces@redfish.com</a>>> On Behalf Of glen<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>>>>> Sent: Wednesday, March 30, 2022 8:40 AM<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>>>>> To: <a href="mailto:friam@redfish.com" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer">friam@redfish.com</a> <mailto:<a href="mailto:friam@redfish.com" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer">friam@redfish.com</a>><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>>>>> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] To repeat is rational, but to wander is<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>>>>> transcendent<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>>>>><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>>>>> Of all the words being bandied about (quality, property, composition, domain, continuity, intensity, general, special, iteration, etc.) EricC's "contextless" stands out and reflects EricS' initial target of dimension analysis. The conversation seems to be about essentialism. Maybe that's a nice reflection that we're sticking to the OG topic "analytic idealism". But maybe it's Yet-Another example of our pareidolia to see patterns in noise and then to *reify* those patterns. [Re]Abstracting and [re]concretizing heuristics across contexts may well be what separates us from other life forms. But attributions of the "unreasonable effectiveness" of any body of heuristics is the most dangerous form of reification. The superhero ability to [re]abstract and [re]concretize your pet heuristics convinces you they are "properties" or "qualities" of the world, rather than of your anatomy and physiology. Arguing with myself, perhaps Dave's accusation is right. Maybe this is an<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>>>>> example of swapping the sign for the object, or reworded prioritizing for the description over the referent, confusing the structure of the observer with the structure of the observed.<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>>>>><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>>>>> Those of us with less ability tend to attribute (whatever haphazard heuristics they've landed on) to the world *early*. Those of us with more ability continue the hunt for Truth, delaying attribution to the world until we get too old to play that infinite game any more.<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>>>>><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>>>>> I think Possible Worlds helps, here, too: <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/possible-worlds/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer">https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/possible-worlds/</a> <<a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/possible-worlds/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer">https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/possible-worlds/</a>> Patterns are simply (non-degenerate) quantifiers over possible worlds.<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>>>>><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>>>>> Regardless, I'd like to ask whether the formulation of intensive properties as derivatives of entropy w.r.t. extensive properties is formalized somewhere? If so, I'd be grateful for pointers. I'm used to the idea that the intensives divide out the extensives. But I haven't seen them formulated as higher order derivations from entropy.<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>>>>><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>>>>> Thanks.<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>>>>> -glen<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>>>>><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>>>>> On 3/29/22 14:37, David Eric Smith wrote:<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>>>>> > [snip]<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>>>>> > 1. One first has to have a notion of a macrostate; all these terms<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>>>>> > only come into existence with respect to it. (They are predicates of<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>>>>> > what are called “state variables” — the intensive ones and the<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>>>>> > extensive ones — and that is what the “state” refers to.)<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>>>>> ><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>>>>> > 2. One needs some criterion for what is likely, or stable, which in general terms is an entropy (extending considerably beyond the Gibbs equilibrium entropy, but still to be constructed from specific principles), and on the macrostates _only_, the entropy function (which may be defined on many other states besides macroststates as well) becomes a _state function_.<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>>>>> ><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>>>>> > 3. Then (actually, all along since the beginning of the construction)<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>>>>> > one needs to talk about what kind of aggregation operator we can apply<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>>>>> > to systems, and quantities that do accumulate under aggregation become<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>>>>> > the arguments of the state-function entropy, and the extensive state<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>>>>> > variables. (I say “accumulate” in favor of the more restrictive word<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>>>>> > “add”, because what we really require is that they are what are termed<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>>>>> > “scale factors” in large-deviation language, and we can admit a<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>>>>> > somewhat wider class of kinds of accumulation than just addition,<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>>>>> > though addition is the extremely common one.)<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>>>>> ><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>>>>> > 4. Once one has that, the derivatives of the entropy with respect to the extensive variables are the intensive state variables. It is precisely the duality — that one is the derivative of a function with respect to the other, which is the argument of that function — that makes it not bizarre that both exist and that they are different. But as EricC rightly says, if one just uses phenomenological descriptions, why any of this should exist, and why it should arrange itself into such dual systems, much less dual systems with always the same pair-wise relations, seems incomprehensible. For some of the analogistic applications, there may not be any notions of state, or of a function doing what the entropy does, or of aggregation, or an associated accumulation operation, or gradients, or any of it. Some of the phenomenology may seems to kinda-sorta go through, but whether one wants to pin oneself down to narrow terms, is less clear.<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>>>>> ><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>>>>> > [snip]<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>>>>> ><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>>>>> >> On Mar 30, 2022, at 5:04 AM, Eric Charles <<a href="mailto:eric.phillip.charles@gmail.com" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer">eric.phillip.charles@gmail.com</a> <mailto:<a href="mailto:eric.phillip.charles@gmail.com" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer">eric.phillip.charles@gmail.com</a>> <mailto:<a href="mailto:eric.phillip.charles@gmail.com" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer">eric.phillip.charles@gmail.com</a> <mailto:<a href="mailto:eric.phillip.charles@gmail.com" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer">eric.phillip.charles@gmail.com</a>>>> wrote:<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>>>>> >><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>>>>> >> That is a bizarre distinction, that can only be maintained within some sort of odd, contextless discussion. If you tell me the number of atoms of a particular substance that you have smushed within a given space, we can, with reasonable accuracy, tell you the density, and hence the "state of matter". When we change the quantity of matter within that space, we can also calculate the expected change in temperature.<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">>>>>>> >><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">> -- <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">> Mɥǝu ǝlǝdɥɐuʇs ɟᴉƃɥʇ' ʇɥǝ ƃɹɐss snɟɟǝɹs˙<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">> .-- .- -. - / .- -.-. - .. --- -. ..--.. / -.-. --- -. .--- ..- --. .- - .<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">> Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn UTC-6 <a href="http://bit.ly/virtualfriam" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer">bit.ly/virtualfriam</a><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">> un/subscribe <a href="http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer">http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com</a><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">> FRIAM-COMIC <a href="http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer">http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/</a><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">> archives:<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">> 5/2017 thru present <a href="https://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer">https://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/</a><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">> 1/2003 thru 6/2021 <a href="http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer">http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/</a><br></div></div><br>
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