[FRIAM] The epiphenomenality relation

Mon Nov 29 14:00:40 EST 2021

But that's not what Nick seems to be doing. By insisting that some effects are, by definition, secondary and others primary, he's asserting an intention/purpose to the assembly.

No.  I don’t think that’s what Nick is doing.  I think Nick is asserting that all causes have many effects and the sort of some into primary and secondary requires a frame of reference, a point of view external to the system itself.   Purpose, intention, etc. is one such frame.  Development is another.  

n

Nick Thompson

ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com

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

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of ? glen
Sent: Monday, November 29, 2021 8:14 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] The epiphenomenality relation

Right. Agnostic discovery of the artifacts resulting from an artificial machine comes much closer to what happens in natural systems, yes. Those artifacts would only be considered secondary or side-effects IF the exploration were NOT agnostic, motivated. You can only separate the artifacts into primary vs secondary IF you had a purpose in the assembly. No purpose, no distinction of primary vs secondary.

But what you can do is measure the impact of all the resulting artifacts, on some scale, and order them that way, a distribution of primacy. Outcome O1 might be Y times more impactful, downstream than outcome O2. If THAT were what we meant by "secondary" effect, then it would be less laden with intention.

But that's not what Nick seems to be doing. By insisting that some effects are, by definition, secondary and others primary, he's asserting an intention/purpose to the assembly. 

On November 28, 2021 9:40:42 PM PST, Marcus Daniels < <mailto:marcus at snoutfarm.com> marcus at snoutfarm.com> wrote:

>An ab initio simulation of a biochemical system would have a foundation of some human-engineered code and the atomic model simulated might have some simplifying assumptions.    The low energy configurations and dynamics are discovered, not engineered.  Yet it is all reproducible on a digital computer with precise causality and in some cases has shown fidelity with physical experiments.

> 

>> On Nov 28, 2021, at 9:14 PM, ⛧ glen < <mailto:gepropella at gmail.com> gepropella at gmail.com> wrote:

>> 

>> This sounds like impredicativity, which can be a problem in parallel computation (resulting in deadlock or race). Unimplemented math has no problem with it, though. And I'm guessing that some of the higher order proof assistants find ways around it. A definitional loop seems distinct from iteration. So, no; I don't see a problem with iteration in digital computation. I simply don't think the intelligent design we do when programming is analogous to biological evolution. The former clearly has side effects (epiphenomena). I argue the latter does not.

>> 

>>> On November 28, 2021 5:40:31 PM PST, Marcus Daniels < <mailto:marcus at snoutfarm.com> marcus at snoutfarm.com> wrote:

>>> Glen had said something a while ago implying that (that trivial meaning for) loops were somehow more challenging for digital computers.    I didn’t get it.

>>> 

-- 

glen ⛧

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