[FRIAM] RADICAL embodied cognitive science

[Eric Charles]

Nick,
Have you ever seen 4 people playing a game of bridge? I saw that once,
snapped my fingers to freeze time, and moved them each to be in rooms
identical to the one they started in, but each in a different state.
Weirdly enough, the game did not continue. It turns out that while the game
of bridge has parts, it is not decomposable. The people did not continue to
function at all as they did when in the room together.

I had a related experience where I saw 4 people sitting around a table,
each playing tetris on their own cell phone. I once again snapped my
fingers to freeze time, and moved them each to be in rooms identical to the
one they started in, but each in a different state. This time, as expected,
the play continued, at least for a bit before they noticed the change. It
turns out that a group of 4 people playing tetris on their cell phone IS
decomposable.

Or, are we just quibbling over whether the 4 bridge prayers in the first
scenario count as "components"?
<echarles at american.edu>


On Mon, Nov 8, 2021 at 2:34 PM <thompnickson2 at gmail.com> wrote:

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