[FRIAM] RADICAL embodied cognitive science

[thompnickson2 at gmail.com]

Colleagues, 

 

Chemero's book contains a glossary of "Dynamical Systems" terms, words that
I have heard you wizards bandy about for years but never quite grasped.  I
am seeing this as a moment to get my hands firmly on them.   The ninth term
in the list is "decomposable".  Non-linear systems are not-decomposable,
i.e. "they cannot be modeled as collections of separable components."

 

But the tenth and last item in the list reads as follows:

 

10. Non-decomposable, nonlinear systems can only be characterized using
global collective variables and/or order parameters, variables or parameters
of the system that summarize the behavior of the system's components.

 

Neither "order parameters" nor "components" are defined in the list, so the
reader is cut loose at this point.  I have never quite understood what an
order parameter is, despite decades of looking up definitions.  I am
guessing that it roughly corresponds to the redundancy of a system, the
degree to which one can predict one part from another.  So crystals have a
higher order parameter than the solution from which they are precipitated.  

 

This relates to my utter confusion when people start talking about breaking
symmetry.  This, I gather, requires me to think of fog as symmetrical but
neatly arrayed rows of alto-cumulus as the result of "breaking symmetry."
This has always seemed like crazy talk to me.  

 

But what truly puzzles me most about this item, is the last word,
"components".  How can a non-decomposable system have components.  I am
guessing that practically what that means is that one postulates components
and then analyzes the system from the point of view of those postulations,
shifting from postulation to postulation until some seem more stable that
others.  Sounds a lot like perception to me.  

 

This problem, trivial as it might seem to you all, has always been a block
to my embracing of systems talk.  I want to know the formal process by which
we are empowered to talk about the components of non-decomposable systems. 

 

Nick 

 

Nick Thompson

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

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

 

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