the possible vs the actual [Archive]

apeiron

Oct24-09, 11:47 PM

Definitions:

Actual things := things that exist. Examples are tables, cars, plants etc.

Possible things := Things that are logically possible: Examples are "golden mountain", tables, chairs, plants etc.
Observations:

Note that actual things actually form a subset of all possible things.

So possible > actual according to this view.

And possibility then seems to be aligned with the idea of generality. The familiar dichotomy of particulars and universals. The universal harbours more possibility.

Agreed this feels the right way to go. But then we get into the difficulty of what is the set of all possible *general things*? Or Plato's realm of form in which there is one perfect example of every possible thing.

So is a particular table a subset of the general notion of tableness? And is tableness really a "general entity" or instead a "general organisation"? Is it in fact really a particular example of the even more abstract category of "furniture". And if we can keep on generalising our generals to move ever further up this chain, where will we arrive? Some single all encompassing form? If not, why not?

So your attempts here to define the question in terms of a process of generalisation, and being about thingness, are already running into serious problems.

You need now to define what you mean by things and by the process of generalisation.

Classical debate( you can read at link provided below):

Non-actualist: The claim is that there are non-actual, possible things.

actualist : The claim is that there are only actual things. There are no possible things.
David Lewis:

Any many others( robert nozick, tagmark, lewis) say the following: All possible things are actual.

read: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/actualism/

Thanks for the link but was there some particular position you want to draw attention to here? Which variety of actualism for a start?

Anyway, the general actualist position would be possible = actual. And it founded on the (mis)assumption that the actual is all about substance. Only that which is concrete and material can claim existence. So aliens in other possible worlds are non-concrete particulars and so not actually possible. The immaterial idea does not qualify as being part of what gets counted.

Again this raises the status of forms and generalisations. Aliens are a generalisation (a generalised notion of lifeforms). So why would we not keep generalising further? How can we resolve this debate using aliens in other worlds as our substantive argument?

In fact, even "possible worlds" is smuggling in a substance based ontology. It appeals to material existence rather than formal.

The actualist camp is attempting to define possibilia in terms of particular objects (or lightly generalised objects). But have we yet ruled out form - organisation, relationships, pattern, purpose, meanings - as what is at least also potential, also a content of possibilia.

This connects with the INUS approach and others that stress the role of context in causality. Could Winston Churchill have been a german? Well, his parents could have moved there and given birth. But would he really have been "Winston Churchill"? Clearly, much of what we think of as the human that exists is really the locus of a particular historical context, a context with particular constraints.

So we do then have to be able to generalise the notion of context to answer questions about what is part of the possible. Is the space of possible contexts > or = to the space of actual contexts?

Difficulties proliferate. And the actualist vs non-actualist reference frame of discussion does not properly define the process of generalisation (how it is done, where it leads), nor does it pay enough attention to the issue of contexts (global constraints) or the putative actual existence of form.

apeiron

Oct25-09, 12:44 AM

1) you are asking if lewis ` s thesis is right( see post 2). Lewis gave the reason that it is more fruthful to accept his thesis becuase of the reduction of modal notions( necessities, and possibilities).

If your choice is to defend Lewis, then you will have to supply arguments about how contexts and forms can also be reduced.

And are you thinking that reduction = generalisation? Do you view the terms synonymously?

vectorcube

Oct25-09, 02:40 AM

So possible > actual according to this view.

what is > mean?

And possibility then seems to be aligned with the idea of generality. The familiar dichotomy of particulars and universals. The universal harbours more possibility.

I will not comment about universals, because this outside the topic.

Agreed this feels the right way to go. But then we get into the difficulty of what is the set of all possible *general things*? Or Plato's realm of form in which there is one perfect example of every possible thing.

No comment( outside topic).

So is a particular table a subset of the general notion of tableness? And is tableness really a "general entity" or instead a "general organisation"? Is it in fact really a particular example of the even more abstract category of "furniture". And if we can keep on generalising our generals to move ever further up this chain, where will we arrive? Some single all encompassing form? If not, why not?

So your attempts here to define the question in terms of a process of generalisation, and being about thingness, are already running into serious problems.

You need now to define what you mean by things and by the process of generalisation.

Nothing i said said here are controversial. They are a list of definitions you can find at the stanford link. I have no idea why you start talking about universal, particular, and "general things". You need to focus, or i cannot talk to you.

Thanks for the link but was there some particular position you want to draw attention to here? Which variety of actualism for a start?

No. They are just a list of definitions & classical positions from the stanford link.

Anyway, the general actualist position would be possible = actual. And it founded on the (mis)assumption that the actual is all about substance. Only that which is concrete and material can claim existence. So aliens in other possible worlds are non-concrete particulars and so not actually possible. The immaterial idea does not qualify as being part of what gets counted.

How is aliens in other possible world not concrete if those are concrete possible worlds?

Again this raises the status of forms and generalisations. Aliens are a generalisation (a generalised notion of lifeforms). So why would we not keep generalising further? How can we resolve this debate using aliens in other worlds as our substantive argument?

Why is aliens a generalization? If tomorrow, people found life on mars, then we would say these life-form are aliens. Why would we called them generalization?

In fact, even "possible worlds" is smuggling in a substance based ontology. It appeals to material existence rather than formal.

What is your definition of possible worlds? Are they concrete, or abstract?

The actualist camp is attempting to define possibilia in terms of particular objects (or lightly generalised objects). But have we yet ruled out form - organisation, relationships, pattern, purpose, meanings - as what is at least also potential, also a content of possibilia.

Give me an example for "meaning".

This connects with the INUS approach and others that stress the role of context in causality. Could Winston Churchill have been a german? Well, his parents could have moved there and given birth. But would he really have been "Winston Churchill"? Clearly, much of what we think of as the human that exists is really the locus of a particular historical context, a context with particular constraints.

What is this "INUS approach"?

So we do then have to be able to generalise the notion of context to answer questions about what is part of the possible. Is the space of possible contexts > or = to the space of actual contexts?

I have no idea what you mean by " space of possible contexts".

I will say that what is actual is a subset of what is possible, where possible and actual is defined in post 2.

Difficulties proliferate. And the actualist vs non-actualist reference frame of discussion does not properly define the process of generalisation (how it is done, where it leads), nor does it pay enough attention to the issue of contexts (global constraints) or the putative actual existence of form.

What do you mean by "process of generalization", and "putative actual existence of form"?

vectorcube

Oct25-09, 02:43 AM

If your choice is to defend Lewis, then you will have to supply arguments about how contexts and forms can also be reduced.

And are you thinking that reduction = generalisation? Do you view the terms synonymously?

Lewis say that by accepting concrete possible worlds in to are ontology, we can explain "possiblities", and "necessities" in terms of quantifications over possible worlds.

Do you know anything about modal logic?

Reduction, or reductive is just a fancy way of saying " explain away"

apeiron

Oct25-09, 04:56 AM

Vectorcube, clearly you have no interest in serious discussion so perhaps just leave it to others.

vectorcube

Oct25-09, 05:33 AM

Vectorcube, clearly you have no interest in serious discussion so perhaps just leave it to others.

In fact i am serious all along. I keep technical language to a minimum just so that i can have a decent discussion with a non-specialist.

As you can see. In all my replies to you, I have only asked for you to be clear, focus, and give examples. I am not used to unfocus discussions. Think of how you would write a book in analytic philosophy, or math. That is the amount of rigor i expect from you, or else, you cannot benefit me in anyway.

If i wrong you in anyway, then i apologize.

apeiron

Oct25-09, 06:02 AM

Fra

Oct25-09, 06:19 AM

Many of the debates on this forum boil down to the relation between the possible and the actual. Are they the same size or is the realm of the possible larger than the realm of the actual?

I agree with this characteriztion of most discussions so far. I'll back later with my personal views on this, I have a particular view to this, that introduces a notion of "actual possibility" and this is the tools that should have shave off non-physical possibilities from physical models.

I'll try to explain later.

Like you mention already with string theory, there seems to be something pathological about the situation when we basically drown in the set of possibilities. This also connects to computability, inferrability and representation capacity.

The thing that isn't distinguished between in physics, in particular string theory to take an example is that what's possible is RELATIVE. What possible to imagine for a human is quite different that what's physically inferrable between say two subatomic systems. Once this is acknowledged, I think alot of the mathematical redundancy we have can be reduced, and this makes our navigation in hypothesis space far more rational.

/Fredrik

vectorcube

Oct25-09, 06:21 AM

I forgot to mention the superstring landscape as another possible vs actual issue in physics. So this is a very live problem.

People are polarised as to whether to expect the space of the possible to be immensely larger than the space of the actual, or whether to think all that is possible will actually, somewhere, have to happen.

In QM, this leads to rival interpretations like decoherence vs many worlds. In cosmology. it becomes multiverses vs the big bang as a single creation event.

Modal logic was a recent rather narrow discourse on the dichotomy of possibility~necessity and instructive mainly in its failures.

There are many errors here that i would not want to comment. Just want to say that the string landscape, QM worlds are not at all non-actual possible worlds. If they are true, then they are part of the actual world.

So, again, does the space of the possible = that of the actual, or is it >? Arguments rather than links please.

Well, that is lewis ` s thesis, and i gave you one of his reason. Namely, you can have a reductive explanation for primitive modality.

If don` t know, then you merely need to ask.

(Note the mysterious symbol > stands for "greater than" - as any handy eight-year-old math scholar will be able to tell you).

Are you sure it does not mean material implication? :surprised

Fra

Oct25-09, 06:33 AM

Great to know, but what is the relevance?

Mmm... I wonder if we are misunderstanding each other here. We are in the philosophy forum, but the philosophy forum in the physicsfourms - so at least I am under the impression that we aren't discussing some pure philosophy or history of philosohpy in general, I thought we were discussing how this can be constructive specifically in the philosophy of science, and physics in particular.

Ie. the fundamental problem is that of learning about our world, a strategy for finding the best predictive engine for inferring the future based on the present, etc.

There are open questions here, this is why to a certain extent the discussion unavoidably are somewhat fuzzy. Different research programs can often be characterized by somewhat different positions on the questions we are discussing here. The string landscape is a good, relevant example IMHO.

/Fredrik

vectorcube

Oct25-09, 06:41 AM

Mmm... I wonder if we are misunderstanding each other here. We are in the philosophy forum, but the philosophy forum in the physicsfourms - so at least I am under the impression that we aren't discussing some pure philosophy or history of philosohpy in general, I thought we were discussing how this can be constructive specifically in the philosophy of science, and physics in particular.

Ie. the fundamental problem is that of learning about our world, a strategy for finding the best predictive engine for inferring the future based on the present, etc.

There are open questions here, this is why to a certain extent the discussion unavoidably are somewhat fuzzy. Different research programs can often be characterized by somewhat different positions on the questions we are discussing here. The string landscape is a good, relevant example IMHO.

/Fredrik

Well, i made comments for that. The multiverse if true are not possible, non-actual things, but an actual thing.

apeiron

Oct25-09, 06:57 AM

Well, i made comments for that. The multiverse if true are not possible, non-actual things, but an actual thing.

Statements are not arguments.

vectorcube

Oct25-09, 07:25 AM

Statements are not arguments.

Ok.

1) If multiverse is real, then the multiverse is actual( by definition).

2) If multiverse is real, then it is logically possible, thus Possible( definition).

3) By 1 & 2, if the multiverse is real, then it is possible, and actual.

4) But anything is both actual and possible are part of the actual world.

5) 3 and 4 suggest that the multiverse is part of the actual world.

apeiron

Oct25-09, 07:41 AM

Ok.

1) If multiverse is real, then the multiverse is actual( by definition).

2) If multiverse is real, then it is logically possible, thus Possible( definition).

3) By 1 & 2, if the multiverse is real, then it is possible, and actual.

4) But anything is both actual and possible are part of the actual world.

5) 3 and 4 suggest that the multiverse is part of the actual world.

Now what happens when you run string landscapes in this argument?

vectorcube

Oct25-09, 11:30 AM

Now what happens when you run string landscapes in this argument?

The string landscapes is a multiverse if it is real. It would also part of the actual world. Many people that do not know **** about the matter often confuse multiverse in physics with the possible worlds in modal realism. They think it is the same thing. It is interesting, because if the string landscape is true, then it would only be part of the actual world. Modal realism is a much more general thesis than the multiverse think up by physicists.

ConradDJ

Oct25-09, 12:35 PM

Definitions: Actual things := things that exist. Examples are tables, cars, plants etc.

Possible things := Things that are logically possible: Examples are golden mountain , tables, chairs, plants etc.

Observations: Note that actual things actually form a subset of all possible things.

Anyway, the general actualist position ... is founded on the (mis)assumption that the actual is all about substance. Only that which is concrete and material can claim existence...

In fact, even possible worlds is smuggling in a substance based ontology. It appeals to material existence rather than formal.

The actualist camp is attempting to define possibilia in terms of particular objects (or lightly generalised objects). But have we yet ruled out form - organisation, relationships, pattern, purpose, meanings...

Apeiron – I don’t think you’ve gotten to the basic ontological issue here. The problem here isn’t form vs substance – it’s whether possibility should be conceived from the beginning in terms of what’s actual.

“Actual” essentially means, what’s given – i.e. what we can take for granted in the world. And from this we can develop various notions of possibility, i.e. what’s not actually given, in reality, but might in some sense be given... logically, or in the future, or in a realm of pure mathematical form, or an alternative cosmos, etc.

There’s nothing wrong with that, but I don’t think we’ll find much that’s interesting to explore down this well-trodden path... because the key issue is not being considered. It’s already been implicitly resolved in favor of what’s given... whether "givenness" is conceived as form or material substance, etc.

We only get to the real issue of possibility when we ask how things are “given” – where does “what’s actual” come from? As you know, the traditional idea – “causality” in its many forms – is that what’s given comes from something that was given previously (“initial conditions”), and on what’s ultimately given (e.g. “laws of physics” or “principles of logic”). The given actuality is taken as fundamental, and possibility as merely a derivative notion.

Now it’s easy to assume that something must just be “given” at the bottom of things – i.e. there must be something we just have to take for granted. Back to the earliest philosophers, the goal of philosophy and science has always been to identify this ultimately given reality. But going almost as far back, in our tradition, is the sense that there’s something else going on, in the dynamics of how things come into being, that shouldn’t be taken for granted.

I know you are very alive to this undercurrent in the intellectual tradition – at least, that’s how I understand your going back to Anaximander’s apeiron and your description of what’s ultimately given as “vagueness” or “pure potentiality”, in other threads. To me, this kind of language points to a deep challenge that philosophy has yet to meet. Essentially, we want to describe a world in which how things become possible is at least as fundamental as what they actually are, as given fact.

Now we already have, in evolutionary biology, a well-established science that works in these terms. Practically speaking, in biology “causation” has been entirely replaced by the notion of the conditions under which random accident can give rise to complex structure. And there are many indications that a similar approach is needed in physics and cosmology. But IMHO, philosophy has lagged behind. Heidegger made a strong beginning in Being and Time, but since then there’s been little or no progress toward an ontology in which the structure of possibility plays a fundamental role.

You’ve been eloquent in other threads on the “anticipatory” nature of conscious awareness – which was also a central theme in Being and Time. We can be conscious of “what’s actually there” in the world around us, because our brains are constantly projecting “what might be there” in advance. So in a sense, our deepest layer of experience is “made of” possibility – as opposed to the traditional data-processing model of awareness.

I think of existence as a dialectic between possibility and actuality, each with their own distinct structures. Things can only become actual in a context of relationships that makes that actuality possible; and then what they actually become makes new relationship-contexts possible. “Possibility” in this sense is very different from “logical” possibility – it’s a fundamental aspect of the complex concreteness of what happens in this world as it evolves.

vectorcube

Oct25-09, 04:38 PM

We only get to the real issue of possibility when we ask how things are “given” – where does “what’s actual” come from? As you know, the traditional idea – “causality” in its many forms – is that what’s given comes from something that was given previously (“initial conditions”), and on what’s ultimately given (e.g. “laws of physics” or “principles of logic”). The given actuality is taken as fundamental, and possibility as merely a derivative notion.

What has this to do with logical possibilities?

You’ve been eloquent in other threads on the “anticipatory” nature of conscious awareness – which was also a central theme in Being and Time. We can be conscious of “what’s actually there” in the world around us, because our brains are constantly projecting “what might be there” in advance. So in a sense, our deepest layer of experience is “made of” possibility – as opposed to the traditional data-processing model of awareness.

Not ture. Something might be a priori, but false, because it is a posteriori necessary true.
If you don` t understand, then you merely need to ask.

apeiron

Oct25-09, 05:49 PM

Apeiron – I don’t think you’ve gotten to the basic ontological issue here. The problem here isn’t form vs substance – it’s whether possibility should be conceived from the beginning in terms of what’s actual.
.

I agree with pretty much everything you say. I would indeed redefine the possible (usually taken to mean logically crisp variety) in terms of a vagueness, a pure potential.

But substance and form are useful to focus on here as they are both generalisations - in complementary directions - which emerge together out of vagueness. As you say, we want to look at what comes out, what is real around us, then infer something about the initial conditions of reality. And if we find a world sharply divided by the dichotomy, the asymmetry of substance and form, then working backwards to the vague beginnings, substance and form will eventually blur back into the same foggy state of nothingness/everythingness that is just a simple potential.

So this is the modern reductionist story vs the vagueness-based alternative.

1) crisp local variety (a collection of atomistic microstates) => emergent macrostates

2) vagueness (a symmetric mix of micro and macro potential) => the dichotomised reality of local substance~global form.

Modal logic would be an example of a discourse which adopts the first formula and so cannot "see" the second.

So how does 2) fit with the question I originally posed?

Is the space of the possible larger than, or equal to, the space of the actual?

You can see that with 1), we are trying to answer things by counting microstates (even if in many worlds and multiverses and stringscapes, we seem to be treating whole worlds as microstates). Which is where things really start to get illogical. In what way can worlds be countable microstates? The premise basic to the modal logic argument is philosophically flawed.

But with 2), the space of the possible is both unbounded (limiteless) and also smaller in some useful sense. The vague is just one kind of thing (so less than the two kinds of things - like substance and form which can separate off from it). Yet it is still larger in the sense that all is still possible (which is no longer true once some dichotomised state becomes crisply actual).

In biology, a seed could grow into a tree with an infinite variety of branching patterns. But once a tree has grown, it is stuck with its history of branching. So were those microstates actually "in" the seed as countable variety. Or were they just a smear of vague potential?

These are frontier questions in philosophy - for philosophers who are responding to the advances in physics, biology and branches of math like chaos theory and dissipative systems.

Anyway, you are very correct in saying this is an anthropic and observer-including approach to possibility and initial conditions thinking.

We have to look at what exists/persists around us - deal with what seems actual - and then project back, generalise, to gain some model of reality's causal origins. This is actually a constraint on our philosophising.

We should imagine no more possibility than what is required to generate our perceptible reality!

So we want to make the actual = the possible. We want a conservation of what exists. A first law of causality. Yet we also need to leave room for the fact of development, a second law of causality in which there is an arrow of time, a direction things go.

So we also want fundamentally to be able to say that possible > actual. That there is an "entropic" slope down which things can run so that change is also natural to the world.

This is the kind of subtlety of thought that is quite beyond academic philosophers still stuck in Newtonian modes of modelling. They have yet to catch up with the second law of thermodynamics. But it has been an issue for decades among my friends who are theoretical biologists for example.

Anyway, we now have a more complex view emerging.

We want the actual to equal the possible in the sense that whatever emerges must be quantitatively a match for what was originally there. If our theory of existence exhibits a principle of conservation, then we know that it is "good". There is a deep reason for requiring our notions of causal origination to show a conservation in some fashion.

But we also must require that our fundamental model has the possibility for change, for development, for qualitative difference. So there must also be some version of a second law, and entropic slope, wired into the causal model, the logic that we think underpins reality as a whole.

The space of the possible is then neither really large nor smaller than the space of the actual. It is larger in having more that is potential. And smaller in being undiffentiated and so not yet separated in at least two directions. Which is where we can see that neither > nor < are symbols that really serve our purpose here. Instead, we may begin to see more deeply what a vagueness actually is. A realm where both larger and smaller have lost their difference, lost their distinction. A realm which is both, and thus neither.

I think of existence as a dialectic between possibility and actuality, each with their own distinct structures. Things can only become actual in a context of relationships that makes that actuality possible; and then what they actually become makes new relationship-contexts possible. “Possibility” in this sense is very different from “logical” possibility – it’s a fundamental aspect of the complex concreteness of what happens in this world as it evolves.

Logical possibility is about the atomisation of form. Seeing reality reduced to information or microstates. This is a useful way to model things because it is simpler. But it relies on us humans filling in the background with our own understandings about observers, contexts, histories, anticipations, etc. The equally crucial stuff that gets left out of the formal model based on crisp local variety - atoms, information, events, possibilities, trajectories.

So ultimately, what gets left out of the conventional modelling becomes mysterious to people.

We have to go back and fix things by including both the local and the global, the substance and the form, the stasis and the change, in the modelling - even the modelling of logic or causality. Or rather, especially in our logic/causal models.

Fra

Oct26-09, 02:26 AM

To the original topic here is my personal take on it.

After some thought I decided to skip writing a lenghty lineout of my own general reasoning and instead do a simplified comment and just jump right at the point and project my own thinking onto the terms you are discussing, although it might not be my own choice of terms.

This is how I see it:

- To me, both actuals and possibilities are observer dependent.
- The distinguishable actuals for one observer is the things this observer thinks are facts, or limiting cases of distinguishable possibilities where a highly probable possibility is simly indisitinguishable from a fact (note that this doesn't mean the it's universally or eternally true)
- The observers action follows from a rational action conjecture, from the observers facts and possibilities. So the facts and possibilities then get predictable consequences, it's not only metaphysical notions, the physical action is constructed from this fact/possibilitie system (I call this system the observers system of microstructures).

So in my view, in a certain sense all possibilities are actual, BUT the key points are:

Both actuals and possibilities are constrained by the observers complexity, this is why there is no such thing as a mathematical infinity of possibilities. Or rather THIS "mathematical possibility" is not something that influences the ACTION. Only the distinguishable actual possibilities influence a systems action. This is the way I envision that this idea is going to make a difference to real modelling.

There is always and observer, and it's environment. The observers own structure are the actuals, and the unknown environment are only "possibilities" in the observers microstructure. This is what I mean with "actual possibilities". The difference between a possibility and an actuality, is like the difference (in my view) between a possibility and a fact. And when the uncertainty of a possibility is indistinguishable, it's indistinguishable from a fact, form the inside view. But even a fact can later need to be revised, because there are no timeless facts for the reason that there is no physical infernece system, that can make a certain timeless 100% inference (deduction).

This is why "logical possibilities" to me doesn't refer to deductive logic, the refer to a more geneeral inference, the closes choice is inductive inference/logic.

So the notion of ACTION is what connects actuality and possibility in my view.

/Fredrik

vectorcube

Oct26-09, 02:44 AM

I agree with pretty much everything you say. I would indeed redefine the possible (usually taken to mean logically crisp variety) in terms of a vagueness, a pure potential.

That is confusing for me, because "possible" means "logically possible". I have no what "vagueness, a pure potential" mean.

To me, both actuals and possibilities are observer dependent

How about some examples?

Fra

Oct26-09, 03:46 AM

To me, both actuals and possibilities are observer dependent
How about some examples?

To take a human example, the actuals are the facts that this human has inferred from interaction with it's own environment throughout it's history. Ie. it is from experience we have come to the conclusion that there are regularities and not yet questionable facts about nature. For example one could think that knowledge of the laws of nature are such actuals. But konwledge of this law is implicitly encoded in the state of this human.

Thus the actuals for a human is what this human has inferred to be pretty much correct. It's somehow part of this humans rational beleifs.

It's not hard to imagine that two humans that have totally different experience, that has grown up/evolved in different environments, would come to completely different sets of actuals.

So the actuals are dependent.

However, these actuals insufficient to deduce the future perfectly, they only provide a basis for guessing the future, and acting as a guide. So the possibilities are induced from the encoded actuals, inductively determines the observers actions.

Also another prediction is that when two observers that are in disagreement upon actuals are put in contact, an interaction force appears that forces them to negotiate and equilibrate. This conceptually explains why the world is coherent and everyone (effectively) agrees upon actuals at some level (physical law), although at the more basal level there is not consistency hardcoded. It's an emergent consistency simply because the non-consistent version is not stable, it would self-decompose into consistency, and it's just a matter of timescales.

To take anothre simplified human example, consider a poker game. The rational player conjecture assumes that each player makes his moves (action) as per his own optimal inference. So the action of the othre players depend on what they know, or what they think they know about what the othre players know. Part of the game becomes not only to choose your own cards, rather an important part of the game is to try to guess what you think the actions of all other players are. This gets predictable consqeuences for such a game. Similar idea are used to mode economical systems.

Of course, it's not possible to tell exactly what the optimal inference to the inside observer is, but it's enough to CONSTRAIN the probable options, and to place your own bets more wisely.

A physical example would be two subatomic systems interaction. When you evaluation the feymann path integral for the action, the choice of the structure of paths to be summed are quite important. By simply postulating the structure of possibilities at will, you can pretty much get any result you like. It's also the common problem in physics that these integrals leads to absurdities, like infinites. Apparently this is a sign of the fact that the space of possibilities used in the evaluation of the action contains non-physical redundancies, and this is the core of the problem.

This is work in progress so don't expect me to solve all the open problems of physics in this thread but the idea is that once you acknowledge tht the action is relative, this constrains the set of PHYSICAL paths in the feymann integral. My idea is that these constrains come from the complexity of the observing system (realising the action), and this is expected to loosely related to it's mass. This means tha the proper "normalisation" must be implemented properly from start. Once you let the redundancies in, you loose track of how to remove them since there is a large ambigouity in renormalisation. There are different mathematical ways to renormalize away infinites but they all give different reuslts. The question is of course, which results that correspond to reality.

So the phsyical example still says that the actuals are system dependent, because it is subject to inferrability or observability, and the context - the inference system / the observer - obviously matters here. Moreover a given set of information, yields different distinguishable set of possibilities, also constrained by the observers complexity.

In particle physics the action, is usually formulated relative to a very specific context. It's the laboratory frame, where the particle accelerator etc are all included. Basically the entire environment of the collision domain, including preparation phases.

What I'm suggesting that we should look for, is the inside view of these things. This will I think lead to new insights of the makeup and hierarchies of interactions and particles.

I don't have all the answers but this suggest a direction for further research. A direction that is previously neglected. There are some various new ideas coming up. Smolin is tangenting this, this is why I think some things he says should be taken seriously. But there are also others, working on inside views (Olaf Dreyer) and also physics from inference (Ariel Caticha).

I am working on a combination of physics from inference + evolving law + inside views

/Fredrik

Fra

Oct26-09, 04:22 AM

That is confusing for me, because "possible" means "logically possible".

I can buy this phrasing.

But then what I mean with them beeing observer-dependent or relative. Ie. the possibilities are RELATIVE to the choice of logical inference system. Moreover do I suggest that the logical system iteself evolves.

I think you think of logic as some external universally valid mathematics, that can always be applied. This is where we differ I think. I think this eternal reference is the root of several problems.

The alternative is evolving logic systems. and nature then consists of several interacting logical systems, and the question of physical law then becomes that of the population of inference systems in nature. The common DNA of these inference systems then correspond to an effective laws. The variation of the inference systems implies a specific set of interactions.

/Fredrik

apeiron

Oct26-09, 06:00 AM

Also another prediction is that when two observers that are in disagreement upon actuals are put in contact, an interaction force appears that forces them to negotiate and equilibrate.
/Fredrik

But when has this ever happened on physics forums? :rofl:

Anyway, I think it is right to generalise the idea of observation with that of constraint. Observers impose constraints on a situation. So with a wavefunction, it represents a range of possibilities. Then observation collapses the wavefunction. Constraints are imposed which reduce the degrees of freedom. And the same is happening in a poker game. The space of what is possibly going to happen becomes constrained during play.

Though that still leaves the possibility of local constructive actions. By definition, the remaining avenues of action that cannot be observed are then left free to happen. It is like inertia. If nothing is stopping the motion, then it keeps going. This is the element of chance or indeterminism in QM, poker, etc. Possibility gets constrained. Then the unobserved becomes the free actions which can be expressed locally.

But I think this then conflicts with your view as it puts the observer always outside, always more global. From the outside, you can exert constraint. And then by definition, there is an unobserved interior which acts freely and unconstrained. It constructs some further action out of that interior potential.

Fra

Oct26-09, 06:47 AM

But when has this ever happened on physics forums? :rofl:

Good point :) Anyway, to take that objection seriously, there are cases where the equilibration doesn't take place, but then usually a consensus of the disagreement should take place - ie we agree to disagree, resulting in a "stable inconsistency". And this level of agreement then corresponds to the symmetry that restores objectivity in despite of the subjective views.

This is how I envision the explanation of the interactions of the standard model. They arise due to the systems interacting have different views (broken symmetry).

What I think we need to work on understanding is why certain symmetries are maintained as "locally" broken in nature. Somehow symmetries are only interesting to the exten that are in fact broken, otherwise they become "trivial". I think this framework suggest possible interesting ways to attack that problem.

/Fredrik

Fra

Oct26-09, 07:00 AM

I think some of our disagreements here are because this is only brief discussions. It's extremely tedious to write in detail everything. Also this is still in progress so bare with me.

But I think this then conflicts with your view as it puts the observer always outside, always more global. From the outside, you can exert constraint. And then by definition, there is an unobserved interior which acts freely and unconstrained. It constructs some further action out of that interior potential.

I claim there is no real conflict, my exposition here is unavoidably limited. But you have a poitn that there is no stable fixed deductive logical system here. But this observation is not a flaw, it defines the flow of the evolving inference system in my view. It's where time comes in.

The constraints I talk about are not external constraints, they are constraints attached to a particular inside view (an observer). This observer does not konw any external constraints, however it would respond to them, but evolving his own inference system. But this evolution is not something the inside observer can predict. So here are a source of "randomness".

/Fredirk

Fra

Oct26-09, 07:04 AM

Apeiron, if it's jsut between me and you, I think we concluded before that we are reasonably tuned. The remaining lack of clarity is I think because we have have to take this to the next level and suggest a new mathematical framework for physics and see that it is superior that the old one.

Exactly how it will look we will see, but I *think* that we both more or less seek something similar.

My main arguments here aren't against you. It's to try to motivate the evolutionary reasoning to others and show that there is a coherent line of thought behind it, it's not just a "anything goes" attitude.

/Fredrik

apeiron

Oct26-09, 07:11 AM

Modal realism is a much more general thesis than the multiverse think up by physicists.

The question here is whether possibilities have constrained or unconstrained existence. Is everything that is possible also actual, or is reality a selection process that reduces the space of the possible to a smaller space of what is actual.

Examples of selection processes here would be Feynman integrals, Darwinian evolution, phase transitions. A self-organisation is imposed on prior freedoms.

Lewis's modal realism is one of those crank ideas that is impossible to refute in its own terms and dazzles impressionable kids. It is not a philosophically useful notion in this discussion.

An essential aspect of the multiverse hypothesis is that it posits a realm of universes which are all in causal connection - even if it is just the tiny initial branching instant of the big bang. Even the many worlds approach of QM has connection between the worlds, before they branch.

But Lewis just suggests an infinite collection of unconnected logically possible, so therefore separately actual, worlds.

There are no connections between worlds so constraint does not come into it. Though Lewis would be mute about why the same, or even similar, laws would prevail across his infinite collection.

The multiverse is a thesis. Even if tests of the thesis may be physically impractical for us.

Lewis's contrived version of modal logic is not a thesis as it explains nothing. It is untestable by definition.

apeiron

Oct26-09, 07:27 AM

My main arguments here aren't against you. It's to try to motivate the evolutionary reasoning to others and show that there is a coherent line of thought behind it, it's not just a "anything goes" attitude.
/Fredrik

You correctly argue the ideas rather than the person. That is obvious.

I still feel a flaw in your approach is this strong urge to locate observers.

It seems the natural thing to do as humans are supposed to be the cannonical observers and meaning makers. And we are pretty located as minds. We look outwards to the wide world.

But to generalise the notion of observation as a physical one, I think we have to expand the local in the direction of the maximally global.

This is the semiotic approach. Observation becomes something happening "everywhere" in the system, in the universe (and now only the most local, or the supra-global, can escape this constraining gaze).

Your approach is Peircean in moving from vague possibility to concrete dyadic interactions. But then there is the third step of a sum over a whole space of such dyads, such acts of information equilibration.

Fra

Oct26-09, 08:20 AM

I still feel a flaw in your approach is this strong urge to locate observers.

Ok I think I see what you mean, but I think you are assuming something that I don't do.

I have not really explained my position here in detail. Sometimes you have to use some words, like local. But in my view space is emergent relative to the observer. And to a given observer "local" pretty much conincides with what is "actual". Ie. the distance measure we are talking about here is rather defined in terms of deviation from what's known. The space construction in my view by construction puts the priors of one observers at the center in the sense that any observers sees himself as "the center of the universe". The possibilities defines a kind of hypothesis space, where the distances are defined by means of information divergence, a bit like information geometry, but not quite.

So the localisation of OTHER observers relative to the self, is sort of a measure of the expected disagreement. The distance between two observer, is a measure of the amount of information that needs to be changed to bring them in agreement.

I am not assuming the existence of a 4D spacetime. So the entire notion of locality and location is of course much more complex. I didn't attempt to explain any of this in this thread. It's probably a topic on it's own.

The fact that different observers, sees their own spacetime, can also be reformulated by a third observer so that they exist in a common spacetime, but where forcing their views relative to a common spacetime, instead implies physical interactions like distorsions of spacetime.

/Fredrik

ConradDJ

Oct26-09, 08:36 AM

As to “logical possibility” – I’m not sure what to make of that. Does it just refer to what a certain person is capable of imagining? – like “golden mountain”. You take certain aspects of your actual experience and rearrange them to produce something counterfactual? Anyhow that’s what I meant by calling it “derivative”. Usually, I think, to say something is “logically possible” implies that it is not in fact possible, at least not here and now.

In any case, to me the significant issue is what’s really possible, in some given situation. In this sense, possibility is something that changes, as the actual situation changes. What is possible at one moment may not be remotely possible in the next.

We’re used to thinking about the world as a set of facts, and thinking about how the facts change, over time – in classical physics, for example. We don’t have well-developed concepts for describing possibility-structures or understanding how they change. But quantum physics gives us at least an example of a description that includes both possibility (wave-function) and actuality (preparation, measurement) as distinct components.

I think the basic picture is – in a given situation, there is a certain structure of possibilities; and then, through some sort of interaction, a subset of these possibilities gets selected as “actually happening”. That narrows down the scope of possibility – many events that might have happened, may now have become forever impossible. At the same time, the narrowing of possibility makes what can happen in the future more specific – new information has been added, new facts have been established, once and for all. On the basis of these facts, this new situation, new possibilities can arise that may never have been possible before.

So I agree –
The space of the possible is then neither really large nor smaller than the space of the actual. It is larger in having more that is potential. And smaller in being undiffentiated...

And as to this question –
In biology, a seed could grow into a tree with an infinite variety of branching patterns. But once a tree has grown, it is stuck with its history of branching. So were those microstates actually "in" the seed as countable variety. Or were they just a smear of vague potential?

I don’t necessarily think of possibility-structures as consisting of well-defined “microstates” – but in any case, counting alternative states is generally not sufficient to describe how the possibilities relate to each other. Depending on the situation, some may be more probable than others, and some may be more or less compatible with others. In QM, for example, the wave function describes a complex mathematical “shape” of possibilities that changes over time in predictable ways. And when a measurement “collapses” the wave function, it never produces a single, factual state, but rather changes the shape of the possibility-structure. If you measure the position of a particle, you narrow down the range of possible positions, at a certain moment, and at the same time broaden the range of its possible momentum-states.

Likewise in evolutionary biology, gene frequency is a significant measure, but certainly not a complete description of the possibility-structure represented by a species' gene-pool in a specific environment.

ConradDJ

Oct26-09, 09:39 AM

I still feel a flaw in your approach is this strong urge to locate observers.

It seems the natural thing to do as humans are supposed to be the cannonical observers and meaning makers. And we are pretty located as minds. We look outwards to the wide world.

But to generalise the notion of observation as a physical one, I think we have to expand the local in the direction of the maximally global.

This is the semiotic approach. Observation becomes something happening "everywhere" in the system, in the universe (and now only the most local, or the supra-global, can escape this constraining gaze).

Your approach is Peircean in moving from vague possibility to concrete dyadic interactions. But then there is the third step of a sum over a whole space of such dyads, such acts of information equilibration.

I think I'm more on Fredrik's side in this respect. I’m not yet clear about what his scenario of “inference” and “action” might eventually look like in connection with physics... but I think he’s very much on the right track in trying to conceptualize physics from a local standpoint, inside the web of ongoing real-time relationships.

It’s true that another perspective is also needed. Even though the only world anyone or anything can actually “experience” is its own local world, from its own point of view in the moment, what “experience” does is to connect us with other beings, in interaction that goes both ways. So in some sense we do need to “transcend” our own perspective, to conceptualize the world beyond the here and now of our experience.

But I think the traditional way of doing this – leaping to a “global” perspective, “seeing” the world from no point of view – fails to illuminate what’s really going on. On the contrary, I think it has a built-in tendency to objectify the world, to treat it as something that exists in itself over time. Not that this “objective” view is wrong, but I don’t think it gets to what’s fundamental in the relationship-structure of the world.

I tend to think of the“Peircean” approach you describe as neo-Hegelian – in that it interprets the world in terms of dynamic relationships between ideas (e.g. “form” / “substance”). I’m trying to find the right language to understand what happens in dynamic relationships between individual things, between people, or between atoms... physical and communicative relationships, rather than what seem to me metaphysical ones. So I trust your philosophical intuition, and I think you have a very clear notion of the conceptual challenges we face, at this point -- and you’re developing this kind of language to respond to it. But I’m having a hard time buying into the language itself.

I think the way to go here is maybe not from the “local” to the “supra-global”... maybe instead, from the standpoint of an isolated observer looking out at the universe, to the concept of one point of view participating in communicative relationships with other points of view. Moving from “subjective” to “inter-subjective”, rather than to a viewpoint that stands outside the world altogether.

apeiron

Oct26-09, 03:25 PM

So the localisation of OTHER observers relative to the self, is sort of a measure of the expected disagreement. The distance between two observer, is a measure of the amount of information that needs to be changed to bring them in agreement. /Fredrik

OK, sounds more like my kind of thinking again. We could say the world, following the second law, wants to be "flat" - equilibrating its information, its differences, its geometric wrinkles through cooling/expansion.

So particles, which are hot to various degrees, are observers. When they "catch sight of each other", there is a change of energy exchange/deflection/attraction. On average, the differences are constrained or smoothed away.

The vacuum itself becomes the unobserved. It is too flat, too cool, for interactions. There is virtual activity of course. But this is sub-threshold, inside the planckian limit for an approach to thermal and geometric flatness.

It is a way of thinking that seems to remove the need for inflation - the universe through mutual constraint becomes self-flattening.

It also seems to lead to dark energy. Inside the planckian limit, there is still a residual free (because unobserved) action, a cosmological creep.

Is this part of your scheme too?

Fra

Oct26-09, 05:43 PM

OK, sounds more like my kind of thinking again. We could say the world, following the second law, wants to be "flat" - equilibrating its information, its differences, its geometric wrinkles through cooling/expansion.

So particles, which are hot to various degrees, are observers. When they "catch sight of each other", there is a change of energy exchange/deflection/attraction. On average, the differences are constrained or smoothed away.

The vacuum itself becomes the unobserved. It is too flat, too cool, for interactions. There is virtual activity of course. But this is sub-threshold, inside the planckian limit for an approach to thermal and geometric flatness.

It is a way of thinking that seems to remove the need for inflation - the universe through mutual constraint becomes self-flattening.

It also seems to lead to dark energy. Inside the planckian limit, there is still a residual free (because unobserved) action, a cosmological creep.

Is this part of your scheme too?

I can tell that we share some traits in the reasoning, but it's also clear that it's easy to misunderstand any attempt of description given that the state of the ideas are currently immature.

I do not fully follow your arguments, but to just acknowledge a fuzzy connection without again diverging from each other(which I find unnneccessary at this point), my scheme certainly leads to an interpretation/connection of the cosmological constant, and a very simply intuitive idea explains why it's close to zero, but not entirely zero.

I tried to see if anyone else connected to this last year in this thread
http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=239414, it at least briefly elaborates on the conceptual connection.

But this is all very brief. In that thread I was trying to convey a conceptual connection, rather than explain in detail the mathematics (which I will keep for maturation until it can fly).

/Fredrik

apeiron

Oct26-09, 06:57 PM

As to “logical possibility” – I’m not sure what to make of that. Does it just refer to what a certain person is capable of imagining? – like “golden mountain”. You take certain aspects of your actual experience and rearrange them to produce something counterfactual? Anyhow that’s what I meant by calling it “derivative”. Usually, I think, to say something is “logically possible” implies that it is not in fact possible, at least not here and now.

I think this makes it clear that possibility~actuality is being treated as being about the constructible, and so lacks this second aspect many of us are also concerned to model - the constraints.

So I can construct a golden mountain by adding together the components of gold and mountain. That seems perfectly plausible as a possible construction.

But realities are also constrained by the need to be self-consistent as causal wholes. There are reasons why some possible constructions don't get constructed. So a golden mountain becomes implausible as a possibility in a world that is constrained by the wider facts of planetary geophysics.

In fact, we can perhaps say that only that which perfectly balances the two opposed and complementary causal "forces" - bottom up construction and top down constraint - gets to exist, gets to become actual.

Too much construction is unbalanced (which is where golden moutains fall down). And too much constraint would also lack balance. But where geophysics equilibrates with stellar atomic debris, what was generally possible can equilibrate with what is locally available and then mountains of rock are what become the actual.

Modal logic would be an example of an unbalanced language for making statements about reality as it is all loaded with construction (and runs into insane contortions to avoid facing up to the lack of a matching theory of constraints).

In QM, for example, the wave function describes a complex mathematical “shape” of possibilities that changes over time in predictable ways. And when a measurement “collapses” the wave function, it never produces a single, factual state, but rather changes the shape of the possibility-structure.

Another important point. The old photon passing through a succession of polarising filters story. This is a very constraints-based view. You can confine - narrow down the options - yet not completely control.

Again, reality has two aspects. The observer bearing down to create local measurements. The locally-measured exploiting any freedoms still left unconstrained. Like a wriggling bag of eels.

apeiron

Oct26-09, 07:44 PM

But I think the traditional way of doing this – leaping to a “global” perspective, “seeing” the world from no point of view – fails to illuminate what’s really going on. On the contrary, I think it has a built-in tendency to objectify the world, to treat it as something that exists in itself over time. Not that this “objective” view is wrong, but I don’t think it gets to what’s fundamental in the relationship-structure of the world.

I agree that we need to move from the god's eye externalist view to what is being called "Internalism".

So for example, here is a statement by Matsuno on what he understands by this...

"Internalism has some antecedents in phenomenology, the thinking of J. J. von
Uexküll, and the autopoiesis model of Maturana and Varela. Current major thinkers include
Koichiro Matsuno, and Yukio-Pegio Gunji, Otto Rössler, and Stanley N. Salthe. Salthe’s
helpful overview of internalism1 states that internalism becomes necessary if we try to make a science which begins with the fact that we are inside, as participants in, the universe that we are studying. Internalism applies to such advanced technological situations as cosmological knowledge in the face of the finite speed of light (we cannot get outside the universe, or see it whole) and operationalism, as well as to the situation of a newborn infant trying to manage in the world."
http://stl.recherche.univ-lille3.fr/sitespersonnels/rahman/geneticspreface3.pdf

Stanley Salthe's scalar hierarchy is worth studying as it spells out the link between observer scale and event-horizon like effects.

http://www.harmeny.com/twiki/pub/Main/SaltheResearchOnline/HT_principles.pdf

Basically, to an observer at a scale that is in the middle of things, looking upwards to events of larger scale, they would eventually become so big as to fill the whole field of view and so become the unchanging static backdrop (kind of like how our universe is so big, we cannot see its curvature, or its other domains, if these exist).

Likewise, looking down in scale, things may be very dynamic and fast changing, a sea of events, but to us it becomes just a generalised blur. So again, it becomes a static constant. An event horizon. The QM realm may seethe with activity, but it looks like just a flat limit state from sufficient distance.

So this is what a fully dynamic reality looks like to an observer of intermediate scale. Even if the extremes of scale are also dynamic, they come to look static for complementary reasons.

This is a powerful metaphysical insight. But not sufficiently general I believe. I want to extend the idea to observers over all possible scales. A scalefree version of semiosis.

But it perhaps helps explain that I am taking an internalist approach. I just don't want to be stuck with observers of some particular scale. The truths of the model have to be more general than how things look from the middle of the "observer created" system.

I tend to think of the“Peircean” approach you describe as neo-Hegelian – in that it interprets the world in terms of dynamic relationships between ideas (e.g. “form” / “substance”).

Agreed. And I use substance~form, and other traditional metaphysical dichotomies like chance~necessity, stasis~change, because they are familiar arguments. But they are not very mathematical. So they are really just a crutch along the way to the final correct language.

The mathematical terms I would use are based on the dichotomisation of scale (so local~global). And then a second one based on the dichotomisation of development (which is vague~crisp).

Scale is a mathematical notion - spatiotemporal scale would just an example of the geometric idea.

And to make the idea of vague~crisp properly mathematical, I have suggested instead we invoke symmetry. So the vague is absolute symmetry and the crisp is absolute asymmetry. We go from the wholly unbroken via some symmetry-breaking (some dichotomisation) to the wholly broken (the crisply dichotomised).

The two things then link as the crisply dichotomised is in fact dichotomised in the "directions" of the most local and the most global. Connecting us neatly to hierarchy theory - another mathematical notion.

So yes. Peirce was a metaphysician and I too find it useful to talk publicly in terms of familiar metaphysical language. Stuff we can look back 2600 years and trace the threads of thought.

But the aim is to be thoroughly modern and mathematical. The maths of scale - fractals, renormalisation group, criticality, etc - is actually all very recent stuff. Symmetry too is recent maths. But I believe that ultimately a scale dichotomy and a symmetry dichotomy will be able to capture everything we need to do systems modelling. One axis (symmetry-breaking) to measure a system's development, a second to measure its broken equilibrium (its broken scale). The synchronic and diachronic views.

This would be a huge simplification you realise. All those many metaphysical dichotomies reduced to just two properly mathematical ones - symmetry and scale.

The complication then is that this is an account of fundamental reality. The baseline description of what exists. But then we also have to be able to model complexity - things like life and mind. We build on the ground of what is fundamental, but now we are going in yet another direction.

This is why Salthe introduced a second hierarchy, the specification hierarchy. (Though he has recently attempted to mainstream his jargon by calling them the compositional and subsumptive hierarchies - a wrong move I feel).

Anyway, once you have a new systems model of simplicity, then you also have the separate exercise of extending it to be able to model stuff like the human mind. Actual intermediate scale observers. The extensions are commonsensical though - already worked out pretty much. The foundations are where the hard work has to take place.

ConradDJ

Oct27-09, 09:35 AM

... I want to extend the idea to observers over all possible scales. A scalefree version of semiosis...

The mathematical terms I would use are based on the dichotomisation of scale (so local~global). And then a second one based on the dichotomisation of development (which is vague~crisp)... The two things then link as the crisply dichotomised is in fact dichotomised in the "directions" of the most local and the most global.

I believe that ultimately a scale dichotomy and a symmetry dichotomy will be able to capture everything we need to do systems modelling. One axis (symmetry-breaking) to measure a system's development, a second to measure its broken equilibrium (its broken scale). The synchronic and diachronic views.

This would be a huge simplification you realise. All those many metaphysical dichotomies reduced to just two properly mathematical ones - symmetry and scale.

Apeiron – thank you... I’m starting to get a clearer picture of where you think all this is headed.

I see that with “construction” you have in mind what I was calling the given actuality – what we have in hand to work with, what we can count on at any point, the set of more or less definite facts. And by “constraint” you have in mind what I was calling the possibility-structure, the “shape” of what can happen in a given situation.

I appreciate it that you’re not trying to absorb the one concept into the other, but describing some sort of dynamic relationship between them, that must pertain to any kind of system that actually manages to exist in the world. It seems that you’re trying to work out the basic “logic” – in Hegel’s historical/dialectical sense – through which all this operates.

And I hope you understand that by comparing this with Hegel, I’m not meaning to be derogatory! – it’s just that he was the first to project the task of philosophy in this way... imagining that the fundamental, timeless principles of logic – rightly understood as oppositional, dialectical and creative, rather than static – could ultimately account for all the particularities of the world’s history, at every stage. There never was a grander intellectual ambition.

What I like most about this is the sense that “existence” isn’t just a matter of “A exists” vs. “A doesn’t exist” – like an on-off switch. “To exist” – physically, biologically, or in the way human beings exist – always involves a complex functionality. And what makes the work of conceptualizing it so difficult is that it’s impossible for us not to take this functionality for granted, to begin with. It’s so much a part of everything we see and do and depend on for our own existence. So where science is an exploration into unknown territory, I think of philosophy as an exploration of the all-too-well known, a quest to discover the obvious, by learning how not to take for granted what’s most basic.

My own sense of where this quest leads is a little different – I tend to imagine an accidental, historical emergence of distinct functionalities, rather than in terms of an overall dynamic logic. But we do need some sort of conceptual structure as a guide.

apeiron

Oct27-09, 05:47 PM

What I like most about this is the sense that “existence” isn’t just a matter of “A exists” vs. “A doesn’t exist” – like an on-off switch. “To exist” – physically, biologically, or in the way human beings exist – always involves a complex functionality. And what makes the work of conceptualizing it so difficult is that it’s impossible for us not to take this functionality for granted, to begin with. It’s so much a part of everything we see and do and depend on for our own existence.

Yes this would be Hegelian. Though I never really took to Hegel as there are a number of clumsinesses in his articulation of the ideas. As well as the unhelpful entanglement with Christian theology.

But in talking of antecendents, I will normally say Anaximander, Hegel, then Peirce.

And yes, the liberating change is to be released from the strait-jacket of binary either/or.

We drive ourselves mad thinking everything must be this (thesis) only to find it is now equally plausible that everything is that (antithesis). We have created a philosophical game that apparently can't be won (but can endlessly swing like a pendulum - so good from an academic career point of view as there are always two sides to every argument).

But once we instead move on to synthesis, the realisation that this duality is fundamental, then we enter a new intellectual realm. A new door opens. The issue then becomes to understand how dualities are related. What is the logic of synthesis - the logic of systems in themselves?

My own sense of where this quest leads is a little different – I tend to imagine an accidental, historical emergence of distinct functionalities, rather than in terms of an overall dynamic logic. But we do need some sort of conceptual structure as a guide.

This stiil sounds roughly Peircean to me. The dynamic logic - the synthesis of complementaries - is something that only develops or emerges from the "accidental". What clearly and crisply exists at the end was only something that was vaguely or potentially possible at the beginning.

So the difference between us here I believe is that you are seeing local substance - what you call the given actuality - as a pre-existent crisp variety. There is a bunch of stuff that just is, like Epicurus's rain of atoms. Then some accident - like one atom deviating from its path - sets off a chain reaction of self-organisation. There is a seed event that sparks the phase transition to some more globally ordered state.

Now where I switch things around is to put the local and the global, your given actuality and your possibility-structure, as the jointly emergent outcomes of the whole process of development. I am removing the implied "before and after" temporal distinction (which is also an issue in Hegel's thesis and antithesis). The small and the large, the substances and the form, actually appear at the same time, the same rate.

Which is why a second new kind of axis is needed to chart the developmental aspects of what is going on. This is where the vague~crisp distinction fits.

The given-actuality and the possibility-structure would be both originally unexpressed potentials. They would (hidden) aspects of the one symmetry. Then a symmetry breaking would release them into crisp thesis~antithesis being. The flower bud would unfold.

We need to disentangle the notion of what exists from how it develops. It just does not make sense to start with the "something that does exist", even if we try to make it as small as imaginably possible (the quantum fluctuation - in what? - that started the big bang), or alternatively, as large as possible (the god that made the world, constrained it to be).

Existence (or persistence) implies a creation, it implies a process. Some can accept existence as a brute fact perhaps. But generally we try as hard as possible to push the question to the edge of what we can see. So reduce it to smallness, or largeness. Barely there fluctuations or omnipotent gods.

But this is not the way to get beyond "existence". Changing observational scale will only emphasise different aspects of what we see concretely exists. It is an act that keeps us in the "time slice" of our world, and is not taking us backwards to its deeper origins.

Instead, to erase existence, we have to learn to fold back together what has been broken. We have to seek out the two complementaries that we see have emerged and so restore in our minds the symmetry that their existence correctly implies. This is what it means to move back from the crisp towards the vague.

Bouncing from large to small keeps us within the crisply developed system. We can of course make such a motion - going from the small to the large via construction, and from the large to the small via constraint. These are legitimate paths observers can take to model their worlds.

But there is then a "fourth dimension" - yet another orthogonal space. And it is the dimension of development. The one where we instead oscillate between the vague and the crisp. We are no longer moving about inside a realm of scale but witnessing the birth of scale itself.

vectorcube

Oct31-09, 06:17 AM

The question here is whether possibilities have constrained or unconstrained existence. Is everything that is possible also actual, or is reality a selection process that reduces the space of the possible to a smaller space of what is actual.

So what is the matter. Lewis thesis is that all logically possible worlds actually exist.
So if true, then it answers your question.

Examples of selection processes here would be Feynman integrals, Darwinian evolution, phase transitions. A self-organisation is imposed on prior freedoms.

So? For any selection process P, you can always ask "why P?". Best way to avoid the question is modal realism!

Lewis's modal realism is one of those crank ideas that is impossible to refute in its own terms and dazzles impressionable kids. It is not a philosophically useful notion in this discussion.

It is pretty useful. First, it offers a reductive explanation of modality. Second, it offers to answer all questions related to the choices, and design for the universe. No more "why this equation?" etc.

Best thing about kids is that they don` t have any common sense. They can judge an idea based on it merits. This is good for learning modern physics. Every old guy seen to think nature need to align with their common sense, and that is why they never make any useful discovery, because thing that is common sense don` t need to be questioned.

An essential aspect of the multiverse hypothesis is that it posits a realm of universes which are all in causal connection - even if it is just the tiny initial branching instant of the big bang. Even the many worlds approach of QM has connection between the worlds, before they branch.

So? I can ask why all these universes are governed by the rules of QM, and not CM.

But Lewis just suggests an infinite collection of unconnected logically possible, so therefore separately actual, worlds.

So?

There are no connections between worlds so constraint does not come into it. Though Lewis would be mute about why the same, or even similar, laws would prevail across his infinite collection.

Not at all. Two laws that are the same in two possible world is possible, because it is logically possible!

Lewis's contrived version of modal logic is not a thesis as it explains nothing. It is untestable by definition.

Untestability does not at all mean lewis ` s possible world is not real. A thesis that is not testable could also be true.

apeiron

Oct31-09, 06:49 AM

Untestability does not at all mean lewis ` s possible world is not real. A thesis that is not testable could also be true.

On those grounds I may as well be a Catholic. Let's stick to what can be falsified.

vectorcube

Oct31-09, 07:28 AM

On those grounds I may as well be a Catholic. Let's stick to what can be falsified.

1+1=2 is not falsifiable, but it is still true. In fact, there are planty of instances that are not falsifiable, but true. Metaphysics by it` s very nature is unfalsifiable, so you think it is all falses? Rediculous!

Modal realism, or some from of it may very well be true, if you don t believe in design.

ConradDJ

Oct31-09, 08:18 AM

Just to stick my oar in again... This way of interpreting “possibility” in terms of alternative actualities just bypasses what’s ontologically meaningful – and to me fundamental – in the concept.

I suppose “modal realism” means that if I say, “I might have gone to China last year” – that’s equivalent to saying “I went to China in a different universe”...? Whether this is falsifiable or not, it’s completely uninteresting to me. A basic fact about my existence, from my point of view, is that I only live in this universe.

Another basic fact is that every second I’m alive, there’s possibility all around me. My physical environment consists just as much of real, live possibilities for what can happen next, as actual facts. In the only sense that’s important to me, possibility is about the moment – this world “in real time.”

Our intellectual tradition has – with very few exceptions – built its conceptual framework on the ability to imagine the world as if we weren’t in it... as if it were an object we could see from apoint of view “outside” of space and time.

When we look at the world from that “objective” standpoint, all we see is the actuality of things (and perhaps, limits to that actuality... “indeterminacy” / “vagueness”). The world looks like a body of given fact, laid out along a time-line. Some of which is “back there” in time, in the past, and some of which is still “ahead of us” in the future. The future facts we call “possible” and we can’t know about them yet... but we still imagine them as actualities, future facts -- "what's really going to happen."

From that point of view, we can just as easily think about alternative facts in other universes.

But the world we actually live in, moment to moment, is not just a body of fact. Physically, it seems to be some kind of system that creates facts in the present moment – anyhow that’s what I believe, and there’s certainly a lot of evidence for that point of view. The only world any of us actually experiences is the world of this ongoing moment, of creating new facts – any other point of view is derivative from this.

So my point is that from an “existential” viewpoint, which is all any of us really has, the concept of “possibility” means something very different from a set of “alternative actualities”. What happens in the moment not only “selects” certain alternatives as the ones that actually happen – that become the basis for all future happening – but constantly updates (and sometimes revolutionizes) the structure of what can happen in the world.

So to me “possibility” refers to a basic aspect of the living, physical presence of the world in the moment, in that it’s always opening up something new, and often unexpectable.

“Logical possibility” is not meaningless, but it misses the point of something actually being possible and becoming possible in the here and now.

Apeiron – I don’t mean to ignore your notes on “dynamic logic” above, but there’s a lot there to digest, and it takes my slow brain a long time to work out anything like an adequate response. But I assume when you talk about the “dimension of development” you have in mind something like this ontological concept of becoming-possible. "Live" possibility as opposed to facts sitting out there in the future.

vectorcube

Oct31-09, 08:34 AM

ConradDJ

Oct31-09, 10:08 AM

Well, you can feel "uninterested" about what goes on in other possible worlds. It is by the way a metaphysical claim. This means, these possible worlds cannot tell you how to live, or what gets you up in the morning.

Just so. At least we're on the same page here.

ConradDJ

Oct31-09, 10:22 AM

Apeiron – now I am going to attempt a response to your long post above.
We have created a philosophical game that apparently can't be won (but can endlessly swing like a pendulum - so good from an academic career point of view as there are always two sides to every argument).

I’m with you there!
But once we instead move on to synthesis, the realisation that this duality is fundamental, then we enter a new intellectual realm. A new door opens. The issue then becomes to understand how dualities are related. What is the logic of synthesis - the logic of systems in themselves?

Yes... this is the basic question. But though it’s a word I also use a lot, the problem with discussing “systems” is the tendency to conceive them as objects “in themselves” – i.e. to envision them “from outside”.

Systems theory from this point of view works well when it comes to biology (or, of course, computer science). Biological organisms are in fact “objects” we can put on our desks or under our microscopes and observe “from outside”... and biological species and ecologies are essentially made out of organisms. So although there are very complex relationships involved, we can go a long way toward understanding this sort of system without making a fundamental shift in intellectual perspective. There are still profound challenges, because we need to develop much better tools for analyzing systems of relationships that operate at biological levels of complexity.

But when it comes to physics, or to understanding human beings, there is an even deeper issue, which is that the “systems” involved exist only “from inside”. What we call human “consciousness”, for example, or the physical world. As soon as we try to describe “consciousness” as if it were the attribute of an object, i.e. of the brain or the human organism, we’re way off track. The nature of the human mind can only be conceptualized within a system of communicative relationships, and I believe the same is true in physics.

That is, biology is about systems of things, “objects” – whereas to understand the rest of our world at the same depth that we understand biology, we need a way to think about systems of relationships. These operate with profoundly different principles, I believe.

When we say “system”, it’s easy to assume we’re talking about both the things and their relationships. But this is a conceptual illusion – because our intellectual tradition has given us a marvelous array of sophisticated tools for describing and analyzing things, and has had almost nothing to say about their relationships. A thing is something that exists “from outside”, but relationships – in the fundamental sense – exist only “from inside” – for the things that are in the relationship.
So the difference between us here I believe is that you are seeing local substance - what you call the given actuality - as a pre-existent crisp variety. There is a bunch of stuff that just is, like Epicurus's rain of atoms. Then some accident - like one atom deviating from its path - sets off a chain reaction of self-organisation. There is a seed event that sparks the phase transition to some more globally ordered state.

Now where I switch things around is to put the local and the global, your given actuality and your possibility-structure, as the jointly emergent outcomes of the whole process of development. I am removing the implied before and after temporal distinction (which is also an issue in Hegel's thesis and antithesis). The small and the large, the substances and the form, actually appear at the same time, the same rate.

This is a very interesting point of view – to me this kind of stretch of conceptual imagination is what philosophy is really about. However I’m not going along with you yet. I think the issue is that I have a deep distrust of this local/global dichotomy.

If you look at the physical world “from inside”, there is no “global” dimension – the same is true of human existence. There are certain kinds of “wholeness” to our experience of the world, and to the physical world itself that we experience. But our philosophical tradition began with a mental leap beyond any possible experience, to a vision of the world as a whole – “to pan” already with Thales, Anaximander’s “apeiron”, Heraclitus’ “logos” and “cosmos”, Parmenides’ “on” and Plato’s “ontos on”.

This is what I believe you mean by “global” – and you take confidence in your schema from the fact that this dichotomy of particular vs. universal does go all the way back to the origins of philosophy, as the ever-present theme of the whole tradition.

I distrust it for the same reason. Not that I think it’s wrong to see the world in terms of this dichotomy – everything we’ve been able to learn about the world is built on it. But I don’t trust it, because I believe there’s a side of the world that can’t be seen or understood at all from the viewpoint of this mental leap “outside the world”... i.e. how the relationships work, what happens between things that opens up new possibilities for what can happen. Something is "vague" or "crisp" from the standpoint of something else -- so what kind of structure is it that makes these two things matter to each other?

As “logical intellects” we may be able to operate in terms of the particular / universal dichotomy, but as human beings, the basic dichotomy has to do with being ourselves in a world of relationships with others. This was Kierkegaard’s “existential” critique of Hegel. Leaping beyond our “local” existence to an abstract universal reality was an evolutionary breakthrough for human thought. But another breakthrough is needed.

Anyhow, the dichotomy that matters most to me is that between things and their relationships with each other, some of which are local, some long-distance, but none “global”. The aspects of “wholeness” in our experience have to do with the way our relationships make a real-time context for each other – it’s the wholeness in the notion of the local “environment”, or the wholeness of a human life. But there is nothing here that’s “universal” except in our imagination.

Again, it’s obviously not wrong to imagine the whole “cosmos”, the “universe” and its basic principles. It’s amazing how far we’ve come with that kind of thinking, since the days of the pre-Socratics. But to the extent we objectify the world, we lose sight of what I think is most fundamental in how things relate to each other – the real creative process that we experience “from inside” the system “in real time.” As to that, it seems to me we’re still essentially at a pre-Socratic stage of intellectual development, struggling to find the right concepts just to get going.
Existence (or persistence) implies a creation, it implies a process. Some can accept existence as a brute fact perhaps. But generally we try as hard as possible to push the question to the edge of what we can see...

We have to seek out the two complementaries that we see have emerged and so restore in our minds the symmetry that their existence correctly implies. This is what it means to move back from the crisp towards the vague.

To give you the last word – You’re working toward an idea of where possibility comes from in the world – for me also this is the basic question. Your “dimension of development” – a way of describing the creative nature of time.

tauon

Oct31-09, 02:31 PM

Are they the same size or is the realm of the possible larger than the realm of the actual?

to say is that there is no way of saying which one is "larger": that you cannot form an order operation between possible and actual. that seems a bit counter-intuitive as the actual is also possible.

but this also depends on what meaning does "size" in this context have...

the most intuitive thing to say it that there are more possible realities than actual ones, so if P is the set of possible realities, and A the set of actual realities than we can safely say(?) that A⊆P.

We see this in arguments over whether maths (taken as a map of all possible worlds) is larger than all actual worlds. So does math = reality or is math > reality?

well, this one is (imo) easier: math is not a map of all possible worlds- there are possible worlds not mappable by math (maybe we exist in one as it is). furthermore, maybe there are worlds that math describes, and they're not actual. all in all, if M is the set of all worlds mathematics describes and R the set of all "real/actual" worlds, it seems evidently true to say that:

¬(M⊆R) && ¬(R⊆M)

The same fundamental question arises with the many world interpretations of quantum theory, with multiverse approaches to cosmology, and with information theoretic approaches generally (as in Turing and Tegmark).

1) So is anything that is possible, also going to be actual?

2) Or is there always going to be more that is possible than can be actual? Why.

maybe, maybe not... trivial answers, but (imo) intellectually honest answers... I'd really love to see anyone successfully justify a definite yes or no to either of the questions.

Possible things := Things that are logically possible

how did you arrive at the "possible = logically possible" equivalence?
to clarify: what arguments do you have that the rules of logic are in fact the rules that "determine" the possible?

actually, it seems the general trend in this thread was to restrict possible to logically possible:to say that the only possible possible is the logically possible... why?

vectorcube

Oct31-09, 02:57 PM

Just so. At least we're on the same page here.

...and i hope you are not suggesting that the only use of philosophy has to motivate the human condition in some way, becaue otherwise, you can pretty much subtract the whole of science, math becaue they can neither motivate the human condition, or help you attract the oppose sex.

....And just so we are in the same page, there are theoritical reasons for thinking that some sort of modal realism is true.

apeiron

Oct31-09, 04:29 PM

But I assume when you talk about the “dimension of development” you have in mind something like this ontological concept of becoming-possible. "Live" possibility as opposed to facts sitting out there in the future.

First, it is good to be reminded of "how it seems" to us as human observers. Creativity, purpose, meaning, an unchangeable past and an indefinite future, are all part of that experience. So have to be explained as part of any Theory of Everything. Science has produced some very useful partial models - simple views made simple because of what they could manage to leave out - but people can't think it is job done.

And on possibility, it is the sense that the future is in some ways predicted by its own present state - there will be more of the same - but that there is also an irreducible element of material creativity or surprise.

This too can be viewed as a local~global distinction. Globally, reality is a network of constraints. So generally, what will happens is predictable. But this is constraints not a strait-jacket of deterministic control.

Then locally, what exists is the product of constraints. Locally, we would say there potentially exist an infinity of degrees of freedom. Locally, things are vague. But global constraints suppress most of those degrees of freedom and so shape up the local grain of scale. Events form. In the manner we know from QM. So locally, there is an irreducible material creativity. Events are decohered but they express that local indeterminancy.

Having said that, I have to add that this is a hierarchy theory approach based on spatiotemporal scale. So global means largest scale in space and time. Local means smallest in space and time. And because it is a relational view, a self-organising view, it is coherent interaction, action gone to equilibrium, which actually defines the scale. So a light cone view. The global scale for our universe is the visible universe. A view which spans about 14 billion years of time and 90 billion lightyears of space. And the local scale is defined by planck time and distance.

Which means that the global moment exists far to either side of any local moment, both in temporal and spatial extent.

So.....

global moment >______________________________________>

local moments . .. ... . . ... . . . .. . .. . . ... . . .. .

Again a view which is about events within a context. That context (which is the laws, the constraints) itself could be changing or developing. But it would look static and fixed in practice for observers within the system.

So you have local continual development from possibility nested within a global continual development of possibility. But we can understand why the global scale looks pretty static and eternal to us.

octelcogopod

Oct31-09, 08:18 PM

apeiron

Oct31-09, 11:01 PM

That is, biology is about systems of things, “objects” – whereas to understand the rest of our world at the same depth that we understand biology, we need a way to think about systems of relationships. These operate with profoundly different principles, I believe.

In fact the clearest thinking on systems issues that I came across was from theoretical biologists such as Rosen, Pattee, Salthe, Ulanowicz.

Rosen called it relational biology in fact...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Rosen

In neuroscience, or complexity theory, for example, the issues are still treated at a much more naive level. Biology has in fact always been at the cutting edge here.

When we say “system”, it’s easy to assume we’re talking about both the things and their relationships. But this is a conceptual illusion

Yet I think there is a reason why some kind of dichotomy must be the case. So if it is not objects~relations, then we just need to find better terminology.

However I’m not going along with you yet. I think the issue is that I have a deep distrust of this local/global dichotomy.

I have tried to explain why the global would look like a fixed static context from our view inside even if it is actually a creative and developing process. The global could still change, but it would be changing in ways outside our vision.

This is exactly like the visible universe. Over the event horizon, the universe is expanding supra-luminally (we would believe). But we cannot see that. Or really be sure of anything else at that over the horizon scale.

So global in this sense is not "everything" in some external, god-like view which would see what lies over horizons. Instead it is an active and process definition of globality. In fact, a more limited one. One that is limited by the nature of observation from within the system.

Yes, you would be correct to be suspicious of anything that smacks of a external view of what is. But this is why this hierarchy theory based approach (the classic text for me is Evolving Hierarchical Systems by Stan Salthe) is in fact an internalist ontology. The observers have horizons. And in fact, just two horizons. One in the direction of global spatiotemporal scale and one in the direction of local spatiotemporal scale.

This is now a fact of physics. GR defines the lightcone and QM the planck grain. We can actually quantify what would otherwise be a qualitative argument here. We are not just doing metaphysics but physics.

This is what I believe you mean by “global” – and you take confidence in your schema from the fact that this dichotomy of particular vs. universal does go all the way back to the origins of philosophy, as the ever-present theme of the whole tradition.

For me, it was the other way round. I learnt the science and then was surprised to find that it was also ancient metaphysics. So in referencing Peirce, Hegel, Anaximander and Tao, I would be just giving credit where credit is due. But as I say, the maths to do this properly is still being invented.

Anyhow, the dichotomy that matters most to me is that between things and their relationships with each other, some of which are local, some long-distance, but none “global”. The aspects of “wholeness” in our experience have to do with the way our relationships make a real-time context for each other – it’s the wholeness in the notion of the local “environment”, or the wholeness of a human life. But there is nothing here that’s “universal” except in our imagination.

This is tricky, I agree. But global in this sense means everywhere. It is like the notion of temperature. Locally, we see a lot of variety in molecular kinetics, but globally, there is a single macrostate, a single average, that prevails across the system. So we are talking about a global equilibrium state.

This is how the "same thing" can be everywhere within a system, and yet it exists at no particular scale in the usual sense. You could make a small sample, or a large sample, of an ideal gas and find the same pressure and temperature, the same "global" or ambient properties.

So this is global in a special technical sense. One more scientific than metaphysical I hope. And also an internalist definition too.

apeiron

Oct31-09, 11:19 PM

I think the answer is pretty simple.. There is a lot more that is possible than is actual.

There can be a blue, red, yellow version of me. There can be a version of me with a red hand and a blue finger, a blue hand and red finger, a yellow hand a blue finger etc, and so it goes on for eternity.

In essence, if there was as much actual stuff as possible, then it would mean every possible configuration of everything would exist, from all the way down on the smallest scales to the biggest scales.
I imagine what we see in the universe is a very small sample of what is actually possible.

Yes, it would seem that construction from local objects would make possible an infinite variety of configurations. But then, to be realistic, we have to ask also, well under what circumstances would such mixtures develop? For every colour combination, there would have to be some world that made you that way for its reasons. Now can we also just multiply these whole worlds endlessly as Lewis's modal realism, or Tegmark, or Everett, or whoever, so happily suggest? That is the further issue at the heart of these discussions.

Objects by their nature can be freely combined in many possible ways.

But can principles - physical laws, global constraints, whatever we prefer to call them - be invented with equal freedom? Well, probably not if self-consistency, for example, is one of the defining characteristics of world-level laws or principles.

This is already implicit in modal logic which wants to at least limit the ensemble of possible worlds to those which are "logical" - ie: self-consistent. Illogical worlds are not part of the ensemble.

The systems view is then about the nature of self-consistency across a whole ensemble. In some way - as vectorcube acknowledges with his algorithm seeking a fundamental law - we would expect and hope that just one law, one principle, in fact prevails across all possible worlds. So they are really in fact all part of the one actual world.

apeiron

Oct31-09, 11:48 PM

to say is that there is no way of saying which one is "larger": that you cannot form an order operation between possible and actual. that seems a bit counter-intuitive as the actual is also possible.

but this also depends on what meaning does "size" in this context have...

the most intuitive thing to say it that there are more possible realities than actual ones, so if P is the set of possible realities, and A the set of actual realities than we can safely say(?) that A⊆P.

The position I would actually want to argue towards is that indeed "size" cannot be measured in usual scale terms (larger or smaller). Instead the proper metric is degree of symmetry.

The relationship of the possible to the actual is as a process of development/selection. Choices are taken (and so many more choices are not taken). There is a reduction involved.

And it is about a phase transition rather than a motion from smaller to larger or vice versa. So go backwards in development, and you find your surroundings becoming increasingly symmetric - vague being a useful and historical word we can also use.

So the space of possibilities is neither larger nor smaller than the space of the actual, it is instead vaguer, it has a higher state of symmetry. If we want to measure it, that is how we must measure it.

well, this one is (imo) easier: math is not a map of all possible worlds- there are possible worlds not mappable by math (maybe we exist in one as it is). furthermore, maybe there are worlds that math describes, and they're not actual. all in all, if M is the set of all worlds mathematics describes and R the set of all "real/actual" worlds, it seems evidently true to say that:

¬(M⊆R) && ¬(R⊆M)

And now I have just supplied an argument about how large and small are not the correct ways of measuring the relative "size" here.

But what I would add (Rosen made good arguments here in his work on modelling relations) is that the relevant maths itself should only be crisp, never vague. You will probably be pleased to hear that!

So even if we want to also model the vague, the space of possibilities, we would have to do it using crisp concepts. Which again is why symmetry is good to use here. It is in fact a very crisp or black and white map. Not smudged and grey - as metaphysics is often accused of being.

how did you arrive at the "possible = logically possible" equivalence?
to clarify: what arguments do you have that the rules of logic are in fact the rules that "determine" the possible?

actually, it seems the general trend in this thread was to restrict possible to logically possible:to say that the only possible possible is the logically possible... why?

I don't think modal logic, for example, could define possibility in such a final fashion. But the systems approach, I argue, does.

I've sketched out the basis for the way it does - by modelling the space of the possible in broad and crisp terms, and then also the selection mechanism which acts upon that space.

But you may be right in the sense that part of this position would be that - via selection - there is now the possibly actual, and the impossibly actual.

So some things are somehow possibilities that could come to be (because they can pass through the filter of global self-consistency, the global or systems' level act of selection). While other things were merely possibly possible (in some vague way) and never likely (in hindsight) to have got through such an emerging self-filtering process of development.

Your head is probably spinning at this nesting of ideas but it seems like the idea of virtual particles. The vacuum is a condensate alive with fluctuating actions (the possibly actual). However only some actions can cross the threshold to become actually possible o:) - classical scale events, decohered actions.

So vagueness is like this kind of quantum ground state. It is full of every possible fluctuation. But it is generally all self-cancelling. Only a very limited number of fluctuations break through this planckscale filtering to become crisply actual events - happenings that are woven into the spatiotemporal fabric of the universe and so part of its actual progressive history.

octelcogopod

Nov1-09, 05:47 AM

Yes, it would seem that construction from local objects would make possible an infinite variety of configurations. But then, to be realistic, we have to ask also, well under what circumstances would such mixtures develop? For every colour combination, there would have to be some world that made you that way for its reasons. Now can we also just multiply these whole worlds endlessly as Lewis's modal realism, or Tegmark, or Everett, or whoever, so happily suggest? That is the further issue at the heart of these discussions.

Objects by their nature can be freely combined in many possible ways.

But can principles - physical laws, global constraints, whatever we prefer to call them - be invented with equal freedom? Well, probably not if self-consistency, for example, is one of the defining characteristics of world-level laws or principles.

This is already implicit in modal logic which wants to at least limit the ensemble of possible worlds to those which are "logical" - ie: self-consistent. Illogical worlds are not part of the ensemble.

The systems view is then about the nature of self-consistency across a whole ensemble. In some way - as vectorcube acknowledges with his algorithm seeking a fundamental law - we would expect and hope that just one law, one principle, in fact prevails across all possible worlds. So they are really in fact all part of the one actual world.

Yeah, which also brings the question, do we really know why everything is the way it is, and do we know what the smallest most fundamental law is and how flexible it is?
All the possible configurations of everything in the universe must come down to one principle, and this principle guides what is possible.
Some things that are possible never occur because the actual creates a chain of events that makes it impossible after some time for the possible to happen.
It is possible for a mountain to explode into pieces, or for the earth to split in half, but since actual events have lead up to where we are now, these events will not happen without a cause, and that cause is predetermined by every other cause before it (ie determinism)

So in a way, the possible is the same as the actual, except the possible can only happen if an actual event chain makes it so.
But then if an event was possible, why didn't it happen? Was it ever really possible?
If reality is narrowing its options everyday and excluding possible events, what controls which events could happen? If it's all deterministic then it was never possible to begin with.
Maybe possible events are just a side effect of us being conscious and creative.. We can understand other ways the universe may have unfolded if other conditions were in place.

ConradDJ

Nov2-09, 07:53 AM

I have tried to explain why the global would look like a fixed static context from our view inside even if it is actually a creative and developing process. The global could still change, but it would be changing in ways outside our vision...

So global in this sense is not "everything" in some external, god-like view which would see what lies over horizons. Instead it is an active and process definition of globality. In fact, a more limited one. One that is limited by the nature of observation from within the system.

I see your point – that “global” does not necessarily imply “universal” in the absolute sense of the philosophical tradition. You’re thinking about what’s effectively universal, what can be taken as the maximal scale of uniformity, from some particular point of view.

This restores a "balance" (as you said somewhere) to the dialectic of universal and particular..... giving them in a sense equal weight.

One of the things I most appreciate about your viewpoint is your sense that for a dichotomy to be truly basic, the two sides have to respect each other, so to speak – they have to need something from each other, and yet be profoundly different, “asymmetrical”. This paradigm feels like it’s about genuine relationships... even if it’s describing relationships between ideas rather than between individuals.

And it makes a lot of sense to me to think of systems not only in terms of causality ("local construction"), but also constraint. But where do these constraints really come from?
Objects by their nature can be freely combined in many possible ways.... But can principles - physical laws, global constraints, whatever we prefer to call them - be invented with equal freedom? Well, probably not if self-consistency, for example, is one of the defining characteristics of world-level laws or principles.

To me, the concept of “global consistency” or even “logical self-consistency” seems like a fall-back position, a default rather than a strong explanation. Even if we’re speaking of what’s effectively, practically universal, from a specific viewpoint, rather than some absolute universal logic. Yes, systems are constrained by being in the same world together... but I would try to understand these constraints in terms of their relationships rather than conceiving them just as a matter of scale.

My sense of “hierarchy theory” – which I’m only just learning about – is that it’s looking for evolutionary principles that apply to systems generally. That’s good – but I think it’s critical to take into account that physical systems, biological systems and human systems operate in three radically distinct relationship-contexts. The constraints ultimately come from the functionality that makes each of these contexts possible.

In biology, there are of course important constraints imposed by the physical and ecological environment. “Global” has a literal meaning here, since on a long enough time-scale, the planetary environment evolves as a whole, and that effects the local conditions of every species.

But the fundamental constraints in biology are given by the fact that organisms have to reproduce themselves. This is the basic functionality that opens up the possibility of life. Once you have self-replicating systems, then you get internal constraints requiring that these systems maintain themselves long enough to reproduce, and also external constraints from the environment to which these systems have to adapt.

So to me the key issue is identifying the basic functionality that makes it possible for a particular sort of system to evolve. The key functionality should be obvious, because it underlies everything and happens everywhere. E.g. there is no such thing as a living organism (or even something like a prion or a virus) that does not reproduce itself.

The deep problem is that it can be so obvious that it gets taken for granted. Before Darwin, everyone knew that living organisms reproduce – but it took decades of debate after Darwin’s ideas became well-known, before people began to see how much is implied in that "simple" functionality of self-replication.

Now every physical system is involved in a web of real-time relationships that “measures” it’s characteristics and communicates that information to other systems. And QM tells us that the characteristics of physical systems are only determinate insofar as they are actually determined in this context of communicative interaction.

So it seems clear to me that I need to try to understand what’s required to make this kind of communications / measurement functionality work – and that these special requirements, rather than more abstract logical or structural principles – are likely to be the “ultimate source of constraint” that explains why the physical world is built the way it is.

ConradDJ

Nov2-09, 08:26 AM

All the possible configurations of everything in the universe must come down to one principle, and this principle guides what is possible.

This is a very beautiful and very ancient idea, going back to Heraclitus and the Greek “physikoi”. And physicists are maybe the only ones who still appreciate the depth and beauty of this idea, the logos that “steers all things through all.”

Some things that are possible never occur because the actual creates a chain of events that makes it impossible after some time for the possible to happen...

But then if an event was possible, why didn't it happen? Was it ever really possible?

To me the basic lesson of quantum theory is that possibility is real – in other words, yes, at one time each of many alternatives is genuinely possible, just as possible as any of the others... and then something happens in a moment that changes the situation, makes a choice. Very tiny accidents can (rarely, but sometimes) make a difference to the course of history.

I think this is just as profound an idea as that of the logos... perhaps just as beautiful, if we can understand it properly. We live in a world that’s somehow both grounded in very deep unchanging principles, and also sensitive to the smallest random events. It’s as though systems of every kind can evolve only by balancing on this knife-edge between fixed order and chaos – as though “possibility” in the deepest sense exists neither in fixed givenness, nor in complete randomness, but only where the two meet, in the moment.

ConradDJ

Nov2-09, 08:43 AM

From the OP:
1) So is anything that is possible, also going to be actual? Why?

2) Or is there always going to be more that is possible than can be actual? Why.

I would answer (2). Because that's how evolution works -- by generating possibilities.

Anything that succeeds in existing, in this world, will be something that something else made possible. And will also be something that’s likely to be able to create new possibilities beyond itself.

apeiron

Nov2-09, 04:24 PM

One of the things I most appreciate about your viewpoint is your sense that for a dichotomy to be truly basic, the two sides have to respect each other, so to speak – they have to need something from each other, and yet be profoundly different, “asymmetrical”. This paradigm feels like it’s about genuine relationships... even if it’s describing relationships between ideas rather than between individuals.
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Exactly. Perhaps it is my poor choice of words to favour "dichotomy". Others like Kelso are talking about complementaries. Or Haken used synergistic. There is also mutuality.

I stick to core greek jargon as this is the central thread of western thought development. It makes it easier to track the places where our ideas branched. But like hierarchy, dichotomy has picked up many negative connotations in our culture. To stratify or to cut in two seem very "old fashioned" when people prefer the apparent flatness networks and worlds based on one-ness.

And it makes a lot of sense to me to think of systems not only in terms of causality ("local construction"), but also constraint. But where do these constraints really come from?
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Constraints are built by local construction of course. It is a mutual story as what happens at the lower scale has to be the kind of thing that then builds the kind of upper scale which constrains in the ways that produce the necessary lower scale actions. It is a closed and circular tale - except across scale. A strange loop as Hofstadter put it.

Each has to be able to make the other, and so there can be systems-level self consistency. The constraints are constructed, and the constructing is constrained.

The big switch in thinking is probably getting the idea that the local grain would, if unconstrained, be doing anything. Its freedoms would be unbounded (so vague). But in trying to do all things at once, constraints emerge. Only some things can actually get done (the others conflicting or cancelling).

This is classic phase transition stuff. Dipoles want to point in all directions, but can't as they would conflict. So a globally constraining magnetic field emerges which then lines up all the dipoles.

But the fundamental constraints in biology are given by the fact that organisms have to reproduce themselves. This is the basic functionality that opens up the possibility of life. Once you have self-replicating systems, then you get internal constraints requiring that these systems maintain themselves long enough to reproduce, and also external constraints from the environment to which these systems have to adapt.

That would be the definition of complex systems (rather than simple ones) - the ability to create their own boundary conditions. To be systems unto themselves.

So the simple system in this case would be the second law of thermodynamics. Life has no control over that, and is in fact completely entrained by it. However life exists by its ability to constrain metabolism - a cell is a membrane that constrains chemistry, and further constrains those equilibrium processes through enzymes and physical channels.

Now every physical system is involved in a web of real-time relationships that “measures” it’s characteristics and communicates that information to other systems. And QM tells us that the characteristics of physical systems are only determinate insofar as they are actually determined in this context of communicative interaction.

So it seems clear to me that I need to try to understand what’s required to make this kind of communications / measurement functionality work – and that these special requirements, rather than more abstract logical or structural principles – are likely to be the “ultimate source of constraint” that explains why the physical world is built the way it is.

Again, hierarchy theory should be as general as we can make it. It should be a maths of scale that accounts for a dichotomisation of causality (as local construction matched to global constraint) in any kind of system - simple or complex. So it should apply to physics and to biology.

But within hierarchy theory, we would then need to capture that secondary difference between the fundamentally simple and the emergently complex.

What worries me here is that you might be thinking of "ultimate constraint" in terms of some particular micro-physical model. Once more, to move this intuitive picture to the level of maths, we need to frame the truths of systems logic at a level more general than even QM or conscious brains or whatever.

QM would have to be an example of the maths.

The second point is that you also want to focus on relationships rather than scale. This sounds like my comment earlier that networking sounds cooler than hierarchies.

Relationships are important, but just the step along the way. In the Peircean scheme, we start with monadic fluctuations, that result in dyadic relations, which then get summed across to produce figure-ground style hierarchical scale.

Relating itself becomes stratified. You get local interaction happening against a backdrop of everything globally interacting. So relating at extremes of scale. And when that happens, the relationship across scale - between the local and globa - becomes crystallised as local construction in interaction with global constraint.

ConradDJ

Nov4-09, 08:24 AM

But like hierarchy, dichotomy has picked up many negative connotations in our culture. To stratify or to cut in two seem very old fashioned when people prefer the apparent flatness networks and worlds based on one-ness.

I have no problem with these terms, if we understand hierarchy as the result of evolutionary processes, rather than as something fixed in the structure of the world from the start.

And dividing the world in two, conceptually, seems to me to be the basic step in any attempt to understand the world at a foundational level... going back to creation myths, long before philosophy got going.

The thing is, there are at least a few profoundly different ways of doing this – projecting an ultimate ontological dichotomy at the basis of things. There are mythologies in which Life and Death are asymmetrical antitheses, that “take turns” and give rise to each other – an image from myth that Anaximander drew on. There are those in which Earth and Sky are essentially equal partners that define each other in a stable, ongoing relationship that generates all that grows up between them. Then Philosophy itself grew up by developing a new kind of dichotomy, between Reality and Seeming, in which only one side has any truth at all, and the other is just a sort of common mistake.

This one-sided dichotomy reached its peak historically with neo-Platonism, and still finds new expressions all the time in New Age “one-ness” thinking – and also in positivistic notions of science as the accumulation of facts and theories that don’t really need any deeper ground.

But the Western intellectual tradition has reinvented itself over and over again, in Medieval and modern times, by finding new ways to express genuine ontological Difference within the framework of the concept of the One Reality... bringing more and more of our historical existence back into the dimension of what’s fundamentally “real”. Hegel, with his creative notion of logical dichotomy – imagining he could generate all of history out of “Yes” and “No”... a very remarkable thought.

So I see your emphasis on dichotomy as appreciating the deep “two-sidedness” of the world. But I don’t see dichotomy per se as a principal, a starting-point... rather as the fundamental expression of any particular stage in the evolution of relationships.
The second point is that you also want to focus on relationships rather than scale. This sounds like my comment earlier that networking sounds cooler than hierarchies.

Relationships are important, but just the step along the way. In the Peircean scheme, we start with monadic fluctuations, that result in dyadic relations, which then get summed across to produce figure-ground style hierarchical scale.

Yes, I’m looking for a way of thinking in which dyadic relationships are the starting-point, and are ultimately what underlie the evolving structure of things. They are (for me) what our existence is ultimately made of, what our actual experience of the world consists in, how all this works.

The goal of ancient philosophers was to achieve a certain state of mind, an “autarchy” or independence of intellectual perception, by identifying their own true being with the One Reality – the independence of Aristotle’s “thought thinking itself”, his conception of God. They succeeded to a remarkable degree in establishing an “intellectual” mindset that nowadays we all take for granted... an ability to think from a standpoint utterly removed from daily life and personal relationships. (A viewpoint vectorcube has been expressing forcefully in several recent threads.)

As for me, both my parents were philosophers, and I literally grew up with the language of abstract ontology. I have the deepest respect for the intellectual viewpoint we inherit from our tradition, but my sense is that this point of view has reached its limit quite some time ago.

The problem is that the standpoint of intellectual detachment is so natural to us, by now, that we can write books of existential philosophy and develop “internalist” perspectives on the world, without really shifting our mental perception. So I’m trying to find some leverage – specifically in the dichotomy between things and their real-time, one-on-one relationships.

For me the abstract big-picture is – things get to be what they are, only in and from their relationships with each other. And as new kinds of things become possible, so do new kinds of relationships between those things. So the basic structure has to do with the stages of this back-and-forth evolution, of things in relationships. It’s not a logical structure, based on a logical dichotomy, but a structure of what happens by accident in an existing context of relationships.

There’s a lot in your post above that makes sense to me, especially about the “mutual story”. I feel a real depth in your approach – I think we share an intuition of what this is all about, though you express it in a kind of “logical idealist” language and I insist on trying to be “existential” about it.

But the basic question for both of us seems to be – where does possibility come from, in our world? In that possibility isn’t "just given" any more than actuality is – something is going on here that makes new things possible, all the time. And we think we can learn to make it understandable somehow.

apeiron

Nov5-09, 06:13 AM

So I see your emphasis on dichotomy as appreciating the deep “two-sidedness” of the world. But I don’t see dichotomy per se as a principal, a starting-point... rather as the fundamental expression of any particular stage in the evolution of relationships.
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Dichotomisation is certainly not the starting point, just the transition, and hierarchies are the destination.

So it seems sensible that all causal stories would follow a three step pattern: a before, a during, an after. There was (1) a state of some kind, there was (2) a change for some reason, then there was (3) a new state of some kind.

So my argument has been that (1) is a state of vagueness, (2) is a process of dichotomisation, and (3) is a hierarchical outcome when what has been divided has also mixed. Two things in interaction make three things altogether.

This is the basic insight of Anaximander and Peirce. Not so much Hegel of course.

an ability to think from a standpoint utterly removed from daily life and personal relationships. (A viewpoint vectorcube has been expressing forcefully in several recent threads.)

Perhaps that can be said of some of the people Vectorcube quotes.

But the basic question for both of us seems to be – where does possibility come from, in our world? In that possibility isn’t "just given" any more than actuality is – something is going on here that makes new things possible, all the time. And we think we can learn to make it understandable somehow.

And vagueness is not this kind of ocean of pure possibility?

I think it is safe to apply a precursor arguement to establish what must have come "before". We can reason that whatever we find now must have once been somehow in that original state.

So what do we find now? Well we find something for a start, rather than nothing, or everything.

And we find that that something is also highly dichotomised, highly asymmetric. As you say, philosophy is all based on complementary dualisms, opposites which arise out of the negation of each other. There are many dozens - one~many, local~global, substance~form, stasis~flux, discrete~continuous, atom~void....on and on....

So to recover the origins of our world, we should attempt to reverse what we find, go backwards in a way that steadily erases it. If our world evolved, then to find its initial conditions we must devolve it.

So from asymmetry we would go to symmetry. What was broken gets reunited. This is exactly the thought path taken by Anaximander.

Thus possibility is the unbrokenness of a symmetry. That is the basis of our model. The idea of a state of infinite symmetry.

Of course, people will want to say if the start was a symmetry, well who cooked that up? That too would seem to require a prime mover.

But vagueness, as far as it is possible to imagine such a thing, does seem the kind of thing that can "just be" because it isn't really there. It is the everything and nothing.

Imagine you are rowing a boat on a mist shrouded lake. You paddle hard. But you might have travelled a long way, or no where at all. As far as you can visibly tell. If your motion could have been anything, then what has actually happened seems vague. From an internalist perspective - which is part of what we assume for this way of looking at reality anyway.

So when action looks the same as inaction, you do have everything and nothing. But when scale arises, when a dichotomy of event and context emerges, the fog lifts and a boat's motion can be judged against a reference frame. It become crisply a something.

In a reference frame, we can count the multiple possibilities - the total ensemble of microstates. In the boat example, with no fog, we can see that the boat underwent motion x, and also count every other not-x possibility - all the other possible actions that did not take place because we went in that direction, at that rate, and in no other.

But in vagueness, the other microstates cannot be counted. They are symmetric. They are indistinguishable. In the fog, all actions look the same so we can no longer stack the not-x's up against the putative x. There is no possibilities (in the usual sense of countable microstates, an ensemble) in vagueness, only pure unbroken potential.

It is not easy to convey what vagueness means it seems. But I find when you get it, it clicks right into place. It is just a very different concept to any we would normally encounter in modern anglo-saxon education.

Louis Kauffman wrote this very helpful paper on x/not-x.

http://www2.math.uic.edu/~kauffman/Peirce.pdf

ConradDJ

Nov5-09, 09:25 AM

Dichotomisation is certainly not the starting point, just the transition, and hierarchies are the destination.

So it seems sensible that all causal stories would follow a three step pattern: a before, a during, an after. There was (1) a state of some kind, there was (2) a change for some reason, then there was (3) a new state of some kind.

I think it is safe to apply a precursor argument to establish what must have come before . We can reason that whatever we find now must have once been somehow in that original state.

So what do we find now? Well we find something for a start, rather than nothing, or everything. And we find that that something is also highly dichotomised, highly asymmetric.

So to recover the origins of our world, we should attempt to reverse what we find, go backwards in a way that steadily erases it. If our world evolved, then to find its initial conditions we must devolve it.

Whether or not there is a “safe” or logical argument here, I do think we are both trying to take what seems most fundamental to us in the world we experience now, and project back to where that came from. And of course what ultimately counts is – to what extent does this projection help us appreciate and understand the empirical world?

So let me back up and ask about something that came up earlier –

I wrote that –
The fundamental constraints in biology are given by the fact that organisms have to reproduce themselves. This is the basic functionality that opens up the possibility of life. Once you have self-replicating systems, then you get internal constraints requiring that these systems maintain themselves long enough to reproduce, and also external constraints from the environment to which these systems have to adapt.

You responded –
That would be the definition of complex systems (rather than simple ones) - the ability to create their own boundary conditions. To be systems unto themselves.

So the simple system in this case would be the second law of thermodynamics. Life has no control over that, and is in fact completely entrained by it. However life exists by its ability to constrain metabolism - a cell is a membrane that constrains chemistry, and further constrains those equilibrium processes through enzymes and physical channels.

That makes sense to me – but it makes me think that hierarchy theory misses the key point, in an attempt to establish principles that apply to all systems. Organisms are able to maintain boundaries and constrain physical processes not because they’re complex, but because they reproduce themselves and so can evolve. The radical difference here is not one of scale or complexity, but functionality. In a complex environment such as must have existed on this planet long ago, there may have been many kinds of more and less complex homeostatic systems (like those Prigogine studied), channeling energy gradients and perhaps creating boundaries. The only one that was relevent to the emergence of life was the one that somehow by accident was split into multiple copies, some of which were capable of being split into multiple copies, again... At the physical level there was probably nothing special about these systems – what was special, to begin with, was just that they were lucky enough to be replicated, and managed to sustain their homeostatic processes in enough copies, that selection could make them better and better replicators.

So my question is – Salthe’s work surely recognizes the role of evolution – reproduction and selection – and I understand that he and Oyama and others want to emphasize that there are other kinds of processes also at work in biology. But it almost sounds as though the concept of generative hierarchy overlooks the radical discontinuity that occurred with the origins of life – when a different kind of relationship-context was accidentally established, without necessarily (at first) involving any major difference of scale or complexity.

To me this kind of “creation of possibility” is basic. I’m trying to imagine the origins of human communication in a similar way – and the origins of the physical world – through the accidental beginning of a new kind of relationship-context, involving a new functionality that sustains and is sustained by it.

apeiron

Nov5-09, 03:38 PM

So my question is – Salthe’s work surely recognizes the role of evolution – reproduction and selection – and I understand that he and Oyama and others want to emphasize that there are other kinds of processes also at work in biology. But it almost sounds as though the concept of generative hierarchy overlooks the radical discontinuity that occurred with the origins of life – when a different kind of relationship-context was accidentally established, without necessarily (at first) involving any major difference of scale or complexity.

First, I do argue that the notion of hierarchy can be generalised to cover all natural outcomes. Boiled down to its essence, a hierarchy needs only two things in interaction. And these things must have opposing scale in some definite sense as the interactions are dichotomised. There must be a difference between the top-down actions and the bottom-up actions. Even though together they must have a creative mutuality, a synergy, that makes the whole greater than its parts.

Further, a hierarchy is stable because it is an equilibrium state. The two sources of action must develop to have a steady-state balance so the hierarchical state can exist (or rather persist).

So cannonically, the fundamental unit or cell or a hierarchical relationship involves an uppper, lower and middle level. But then, these atomistic triads can become stacked up to form the kind of multilevel structures we think of as "true hierarchies".

Then on your second question, what theoretical biologists have been trying to do is make a clear distinction between development and evolution. The two concepts have been muddled together too long.

Development is the open, self-organising, side of things. Put together a bag of organic molecules and an equilibrium state will self-organise. An outcome freely develops. Evolution is then the imposition of constraints on such freedoms. So if a system can throw different enzymes into the mix at chosen moments, it can regulate that development. It can switch it down paths. It could evolve the state of the mixture.

So development is the naked action that generates creative potential, evolution is about the application of constraints that forces development down forking paths - crisp choices that mean the system went this way, and not that way.

Salthe and others then distinguish between bios and abios on these criteria. All material systems are based on development - ruled by the second law, dissipative structure. So a dust devil or whorl in a stream both develop in a self-organising fashion into organised energy-transacting structures. They seem a bit alive in their order and the way they dance about their landscapes creatively. But they are not alive (or mindful) because they have no way of constraining the "choices" or paths they find themselves taking. They are not evolving structures.

However, if we take a longer term view of a structure like a river network, we do see the beginnings of evolution because a river is a fast changing thing (the current) that carves out a persisting thing (a riverbed). So there is a kind of system memory. The river ends up taking choices about cutting across this part of a landscape and not that part.

But still this is not really evolution in a strong sense because a river's branching is fractal. It is ruled by powerlaw statistics - the hallmark of simply constrained dynamics, dynamics with the same constraint acting over all scales. It is a generalised action rather than a more powerfully focused one. Really strong systems constraint has not the open-ended nature of powerlaws but the closed nature of gaussian statistics.

So we move to life and mind, which are about harnessing developmental potential with strong evolutionary constraints.

Take genetic replication. It is about controlling development so as to produce a gaussian variety - instead of a powerlaw range of possibility, possibility is restricted to a mean and a normal curve. So the height of a population has a controlled statistics. There is a longterm memory for how high it is sensible for a population to be, and then enough variety around that mean for a very focused selective competition - a fine-tuning of a parameter within bounds.

This should give you the flavour of the difference. The discontinuity that makes the boundary between bios and abios was the jump to gaussian control over boundary conditions. The restriction of possibility from something too open to be meaningful (powerlaw variation like fractal branching) to something more focused like gaussian variation that allows selection within a single scale, selection within a longterm context.

But the dissipative structure view also preserves what is continuous here - the fact that both dust devils and lifeforms are founded on developmental potentials.

Development is what happens when things self-organise within a set of constraints. Evolution is what happens when constraint becomes hierarchical so that there is a nesting of levels of constraint. Simple constraints produce powerlaw statistics and more complex constraints produce gaussian statistics. We go from systems exploring spaces of broad possibility to systems exploring spaces of much more narrowly defined possibility. Or from vaguer to crisper paths.

The machinery of life and mind - the means by which constraints are exerted - does come in many grades and forms. We have membranes, pores, channels, vessels and other stuff closer to the riverbed or powerlaw end of the spectrum. And then neurons, enzymes, genes, words, which are towards the gaussian end of the spectrum.

Genes and words - both serial codes that can preserve system information, memories for constraints, over many generations of individual examples of a system - are of course the most power level of constraint. They carry over the paths taken, the paths not taken, a whole weight of evolutionary history, from instance to instance of some general dissipative structure. They are constraints freely transported across time and space.

ConradDJ

Nov6-09, 09:37 AM

I have to say, based on the above – it seems that hierarchy theory is developing general descriptive categories that may well become widely useful, but I'm not sure it's working out real explanatory principles. It seems to gloss over basic differences in the structure of what’s going on and what’s possible at different levels.

Concepts like equilibrium and dissipative structure are indeed relevant to most categories of physical order. But they are fundamental only at a certain level. Specifically – the laws of physics make it natural for many kinds of systems to arise that recreate their own structure again and again over time. A planetary orbit is the simplest example, though here the concept of equilibrium doesn’t yet apply – if an orbit is perturbed there is no tendency for it to return to a previous state. A star is an example of a system that does maintain an equilibrium-state through opposing forces of gravitation and nuclear fusion. In this kind of dissipative structure, many perturbations can easily be absorbed – but if this kind of system is pushed beyond a certain limit, it fails and will never recover equilibrium.

Once a self-replicating system is established, we have a completely new kind of possibility-generating dynamic. Each organism by itself is a complex of self-equilibrating chemical systems, that can maintain itself over time or else fail and die. But the failure of individual organisms to survive and reproduce is the basis of “selection”, which plays a necessary constructive role in the evolutionary process. This is completely new.

As you say, biological evolution evolves constraints that channel homeostatic processes. But it’s not as though some system invented the possibility of imposing constraints on itself! The constraints come from the new "requirement" of self-reproduction.

And equilibration is now playing a secondary role. The primary biological dynamic is a one-way process that improves the homeostatic efficiency of organisms as a means of improving their reproductive success, and adapts the species to a given physical environment for the same reason.

Once life gets going, this species-level evolutionary process itself begins to evolve. Since the physical environment changes over time, there is a selective advantage for species that evolve more effectively than others. As species become more and more interdependent, this co-evolutionary dynamic becomes more important, and the evolutionary process itself starts to evolve more and more rapidly – in the emergence of sexually reproducing species, the emergence of flowering plants, etc.

So there are stages in which one level of order emerges “naturally” from a previous level – as homeostatic systems arise naturally in any complex physical environment, or as ecological structures of inter-species dependency emerge naturally once life begins to proliferate.

But there are other stages – notably the origin of life itself – that are unique, one-time events that may be extremely improbable... but eventually create an entirely new playing-field — a new game with entirely new rules. And I think that human evolution is based on a similarly unique and improbable emergence of a new kind of relationship – communication between individuals – that opens an entirely new evolutionary dynamic.

Now each stage takes up and incorporates the fundamental structures of previous stages. At every stage of evolution there are new kinds of self-equilibrating processes, e.g. in economics... new kinds of “gradients” and “dissipative structures”. That means that hierarchy theory can indeed find instances of its basic principles almost everywhere. But the fact that homeostatic equilibrium is a more generally applicable concept than reproduction doesn’t make it more fundamental as an explanatory principle, when it comes to biology.

Philosophically, my personal proclivity is to emphasize the unique, the breakthroughs to a new level of possibility. I think there is an overarching “logic” to the way new possibility-structures have emerged in the world, but I don’t think concepts like equilibrium are adequate, even as metaphors. The “logic” needs to include both the “natural” emergence of new kinds of structure over time, within given constraints, and unique events (like the origin of the universe itself?) that in certain special contexts can create a whole new ball game, making accidents meaningful in new kinds of relationships.

apeiron

Nov6-09, 07:23 PM

Concepts like equilibrium and dissipative structure are indeed relevant to most categories of physical order. But they are fundamental only at a certain level. Specifically – the laws of physics make it natural for many kinds of systems to arise that recreate their own structure again and again over time. A planetary orbit is the simplest example, though here the concept of equilibrium doesn’t yet apply – if an orbit is perturbed there is no tendency for it to return to a previous state. A star is an example of a system that does maintain an equilibrium-state through opposing forces of gravitation and nuclear fusion. In this kind of dissipative structure, many perturbations can easily be absorbed – but if this kind of system is pushed beyond a certain limit, it fails and will never recover equilibrium.
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Quite true. But I am trying to go beyond these everyday imperfect examples to extract the general truths. So we actually want to forget all the local particulars which hide the deeper principles.

This has been one of the problems in the development of hierarchy theory I have argued. The urge to include unnecessary details.

But there is something that is deeply counter-intuitive in my approach, agreed. The normal idea of dissipative structure is as a closed and stable system transacting energy. So you have a cell that takes in stuff at one end and pushes it out the other. The cell itself stays the same size. Likewise a star. A balance of gravity and fusion, it stays the same size by varying its burn rate.

But I instead am thinking about systems like scalefree networks and universes which instead are dissipatively expanding, not statically transacting. A big difference, though thermodynamically the same second law applies.

So a universe, in effect, is making its own heat sink. The expansion of spacetime is paid for by the cooling of spacetime. This is more like a star than a cell because it is more freely self-organising. A cell has to construct its walls, a star just collapses to a balance point. And a universe just freely expands and cools.

It is all about removing the constraints until you have a hierarchy as naked as possible.

Once a self-replicating system is established, we have a completely new kind of possibility-generating dynamic. Each organism by itself is a complex of self-equilibrating chemical systems, that can maintain itself over time or else fail and die. But the failure of individual organisms to survive and reproduce is the basis of “selection”, which plays a necessary constructive role in the evolutionary process. This is completely new.
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True, true, true. But again, this is the very familiar story of complexity, and I am talking about a hierarchy theory approach to simplicity as well - that is where the novelty lies.

I was for many years very focused on issues of complexity. And it was a big surprise to find that the same systems logic - stripped to its fundamentals - would seem to give a view of the origins of simplicity as well. I shifted track to this new area of study. But I don't deny my original one.

As you say, biological evolution evolves constraints that channel homeostatic processes. But it’s not as though some system invented the possibility of imposing constraints on itself! The constraints come from the new "requirement" of self-reproduction.
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The evolvability of species has in fact itself evolved. Bacteria for example will exchange RNA at any time with any species (OK, within limits, but in handwaving way...). So this is quite unconstrained. Then higher levels of biotic complexity gradually tightened the moment of genetic experimentation and the choice of partner. We have fruit flies doing little mating dances and copulating/laying eggs. Genetic variation in each new generation is a highly constrained matter, compared to the very random bacterium.

Interesting to think how many replicational constraints the human species is now removing to create its new freedoms.

And equilibration is now playing a secondary role. The primary biological dynamic is a one-way process that improves the homeostatic efficiency of organisms as a means of improving their reproductive success, and adapts the species to a given physical environment for the same reason.
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In populations, genes form equilbriums. There is coming and going and a resulting gaussian distribution - the definition of equilbrium. Same in ecosystems. Species come and go, and there is no great change in entropy throughput overall.

There may be some progressive trend in the history of life towards richness, complexity, entropy throughput, but it is perhaps surprisingly weak. Major steps forward would have to depend on new breakthroughs, like photosynthetic pigments early on, mitosis, somewhat later, grammatical language very recently. Then we see punctuations in the evolutionary equilbrium!

Once life gets going, this species-level evolutionary process itself begins to evolve. Since the physical environment changes over time, there is a selective advantage for species that evolve more effectively than others. As species become more and more interdependent, this co-evolutionary dynamic becomes more important, and the evolutionary process itself starts to evolve more and more rapidly – in the emergence of sexually reproducing species, the emergence of flowering plants, etc.

So there are stages in which one level of order emerges “naturally” from a previous level – as homeostatic systems arise naturally in any complex physical environment, or as ecological structures of inter-species dependency emerge naturally once life begins to proliferate.
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So we agree generally. But I think I am making the point that major game-changing advances are more random and unpredictable than natural and automatic - steps just waiting to be found.

Another problem with life is that it exists in a dynamic context - shifting tectonic plates, variable sun brightness, wobbly earth orbit, asteroid smashes - so this would obscure any natural path of innovation that did exist.

However, I myself would argue that there is a deep natural path to be seen if we drill down a few levels to that of a succession of increasing dimensional constraints. So as I mentioned, I think, the innovation of serial codes - OD symbols on a 1D line - is this kind of deep structure, the explanation of the causal power and dramatic shifts that occured with genes, then words.

So there is something for sure in this search for a progressive tendency. But that is why you need a hierarchy theory approach stripped right down to raw geometry really.

Now each stage takes up and incorporates the fundamental structures of previous stages. At every stage of evolution there are new kinds of self-equilibrating processes, e.g. in economics... new kinds of “gradients” and “dissipative structures”. That means that hierarchy theory can indeed find instances of its basic principles almost everywhere. But the fact that homeostatic equilibrium is a more generally applicable concept than reproduction doesn’t make it more fundamental as an explanatory principle, when it comes to biology.
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And this is the value of dichotomistic logic. It does not force us to chose one or the other as more fundamental. Instead it forces us to chose both as equally fundamental.

So homeostasis = innovation. Stasis = flux.

This is explicit in the MR (metabolism and repair) systems approach of Robert Rosen - the doyen of recent mathematical biology. See...

http://www.people.vcu.edu/~mikuleck/PPRISS3.html

Philosophically, my personal proclivity is to emphasize the unique, the breakthroughs to a new level of possibility. I think there is an overarching “logic” to the way new possibility-structures have emerged in the world, but I don’t think concepts like equilibrium are adequate, even as metaphors. The “logic” needs to include both the “natural” emergence of new kinds of structure over time, within given constraints, and unique events (like the origin of the universe itself?) that in certain special contexts can create a whole new ball game, making accidents meaningful in new kinds of relationships.

Perhaps I have persuaded you that it is one-sided to have such a preference - either for what changes/progresses, or what stays the same. You need both these things to have anything - simple or complex.

The unique can only exist with the context of the general. But a holistic model would model both and not expect to construct the world merely by reference to the unique.

And a last comment on placing progressive tendencies and complexity on a pedestal. In the long run, the second law wins. Destiny is heat death. So simplicity is there at the start and there again at the end. And globally, slice the universe at any moment along the way and it has to be at equilibrium, regardless of whether it is all the simplest kind of equilibrium, or whether as now, around about the middle of its history, that simplicity is seasoned with a small dash of complexity.

Remember that the cosmic background radiation constitutes most what exist so far as the universe is concerned. The rest is just a few percent at best.

http://www.mso.anu.edu.au/~charley/papers/LineweaverEgan2008v2.pdf