Re: EmbryoPhysics73:: A Different Universe/emergence
Richard Gordon
Dear Evgenii, Chris & William,
I look forward to Chris’ talk on April 7 (thanks for the references,
Chris), and Rudolf Penninkhof‘s of March 31. The latter is explicitly
on emergence. I’m a little less concerned about emergence itself,
having written:
Gordon, R. (2000). The emergence of emergence: a critique of "Design,
observation, surprise!". Rivista di Biologia /Biology Forum 93(2),
349-356.
Martin, C.C. & R. Gordon (2001). The evolution of perception.
Cybernetics & Systems 32(3-4), 393-409.
I’ll send these on request: gor...@cc.umanitoba.ca.
Some of you may wish to contribute to:
Gordon, R., L. Stillwaggon Swan & J. Seckbach, Eds. (2011). Origin(s)
of Design in Nature [in preparation]. Dordrecht, Springer.
which is very much about emergence. Deadline for chapters is September
1, 2010, and we have a meeting in Utah 2011 of the authors afterwards,
who can get there.
My latest thought, which may be novel(?), is that there are two kinds
of emergence: passive and active. The latter involves change of the
units in response to global properties of the whole. It seems to me
that, in general, this might be what the agents do in:
Holland, J. (1996). Hidden Order: How Adaptation Builds Complexity, Basic Books.
which is my current bedtime reading. Active emergence might strictly
be a property of living systems, always involving perception of some
sort, and thus a distinguishing property of life. Maybe you could
provide counterexamples?
My hesitation about Holland is that his paradigm is embryonic
development, which I don’t think he gets right, precisely because he’s
missing the embryo’s physics.
If any of you know a reference that puts flesh on Laughlin’s ideas,
please divulge it.
As for statisticians, in general they aren’t physicists. The latter seek
cause and effect, not correlations. Perhaps the grains of salt should
be more equitably distributed? Thanks.
Yours, -Dick
On Sat, Mar 27, 2010 at 7:08 PM, Chris Chetland [KOG] <ch...@kog.co.nz> wrote:
>
>
> On Sun, Mar 28, 2010 at 5:00 AM, Evgenii Rudnyi <use...@rudnyi.ru> wrote:
>>
>> Dear Dick,
>>
>> I have read A Different Universe by R. B. Laughlin that you mentioned
>> sometime ago in your lecture. The book is no doubt entertaining and worth of
>> investment of 12 Eur. Yet, I should say that the author is unclear in what
>> is reductionism, emergence and collective phenomena. Do you know some other
>> text where these ideas are expressed more formally with some examples on how
>> it could be used in practice?
>
>
> Here's some I found useful [and online reading links]
>
> Robert Reid - Biological Emergences
> http://books.google.com/books?id=l50tdUNgZZgC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Robert+Reid+-+Biological+Emergences&ei=MJuuS7maKI2skASE9d36Bg&cd=1#v=onepage&q=&f=false
> If there are pages missing in the preview, go to [below link] and they
> should be there.
> http://www.amazon.com/Biological-Emergences-Evolution-Experiment-Theoretical/dp/0262513404/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1269734027&sr=8-2
>
> Roger J. Faber - Clockwork Garden: On the Mechanistic Reduction of Living
> Things
>
> http://books.google.com/books?id=OkTxo9NA2EkC&pg=PP1&dq=Roger+J.+Faber+clockwork+garden&ei=AZuuS8WoL6GMkgTD_pCrDQ&cd=1#v=onepage&q=&f=false
> R Sole and B Goodwin - Signs of life - How complexity pervades biology
> http://www.amazon.com/Signs-Life-Complexity-Pervades-Biology/dp/0465019285/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1269734378&sr=1-1
> S Kauffman - Reinventing the sacred
> http://books.google.com/books?id=o-Owb5IDkSQC&printsec=frontcover&dq=kauffman+at+home+in+the+universe&ei=dpyuS5kjoYySBMP-kKsN&cd=1#v=onepage&q=&f=false
> It's also always worth checking out the Stanford Encyclopedia of philosophy
> Emergence
> http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/properties-emergent/
> Reductionism
> http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/reduction-biology/
> Hope this is of some use : )
> Chris
>>
>> The book has reminded me what I have heard sometime from statisticians in
>> somewhat more crude form. The statisticians believe that what science does
>> is basically data fitting and the difference between a physical law and an
>> empirical model is rather subtle. Hence they say, it does not make sense to
>> perceive a physical law too seriously.
>>
>> Best wishes,
>>
>> Evgenii
>>
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>>
>
>
>
> --
>
> --
> CHRIS CHETLAND :: KOG STUDIO :: HANDMADE MUSIC LIBRARY
> +64 27 532 1564:: +64 9 846 1966 :: ch...@kog.co.nz :: http://www.kog.co.nz
>
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- Show quoted text -
--
Haiti Earthquake Kids’ Education:
http://www.freeplayfoundation.org/haitiearthquakefund.html
Dr. Richard Gordon, Professor, Radiology, University of Manitoba
GA216, HSC, 820 Sherbrook Street, Winnipeg R3A 1R9 Canada
E-mail: gor...@cc.umanitoba.ca, Skype: DickGordonCan, Second Life:
Paleo Darwin, Cell: 1-(204) 995-7125
Embryo Physics Course: http://embryophysics.org/;
http://bookswithwings.ca; Adjunct Scientist: TRLabs, http://www.win.trlabs.ca/
http://www.umanitoba.ca/faculties/medicine/radiology/stafflist/rgordon.html
Affiliate, Institute of Industrial Mathematical Sciences (IIMS),
http://www.umanitoba.ca/institutes/iims/
Principal Scientific Advisor, EvoGrid: http://www.evogrid.org
Evgenii Rudnyi
> Some of you may wish to contribute to:
>
> Gordon, R., L. Stillwaggon Swan & J. Seckbach, Eds. (2011). Origin(s)
> of Design in Nature [in preparation]. Dordrecht, Springer.
>
> which is very much about emergence. Deadline for chapters is September
> 1, 2010, and we have a meeting in Utah 2011 of the authors afterwards,
> who can get there.
I should say that work for a company changes somewhat mentality. It
definitely spoils the fun for an idea to write does not look so
attractive anymore. In this respect the Laughlin's book looks actually
good, its rank on Amazon is #141,796, quite amazing. What rank on Amazon
do you target?
> If any of you know a reference that puts flesh on Laughlin�s ideas,
> please divulge it.
Quick search at Google Scholar on who cites Laughlin revealed
Jochen Fromm, Emergence of complexity
http://www.uni-kassel.de/upress/publi/abstract.php?978-3-89958-069-3
pdf to read is available for free.
> As for statisticians, in general they aren�t physicists. The latter seek
> cause and effect, not correlations. Perhaps the grains of salt should
> be more equitably distributed? Thanks.
A few comments here. First, the relationship between a theory and
experiment seems to be like a chicken-egg one, there is a good book from
Feyerabend about this (Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory
of Knowledge).
My own experience here was to determine fundamental properties of
substances from experimental values. Here one cannot afford to
underestimated the contribution from mathematical statistics. One
example is a paper in Journal of Physical and Chemical Reference Data
(the title of the journal states the expectation)
Simultaneous assessment of the YBa2Cu3O6+z thermodynamics under the
linear error model
J. Phys. Chem. Ref. Data, 1998, v. 27, N 5, p. 855-888.
The preprint is at
http://evgenii.rudnyi.ru/doc/papers1/98jpcrd_y123.pdf
In the high temperature superconductivity boom there was a lot of
experiments and it was fun to deal with them. It is rather a not trivial
question whether they agree with each other or not.
Finally there is an interesting development in the system theory.
Originally it was developed in term of input-output methodology (the
best known implementation here is Matlab Simulink). It seems to be
perfect for a cause and effect study. Yet, Jan Willems claims that this
methodology is inappropriate to model a physical system
J.C. Willems, The behavioral approach to open and interconnected
systems, Control Systems Magazine, Volume 27, pages 46-99, 2007.
http://homes.esat.kuleuven.be/~jwillems/Articles/JournalArticles/2007.1.pdf
He has nice slides in this respect
http://homes.esat.kuleuven.be/~jwillems/Recentlectures/2008/Delft.pdf
Evgenii
> Saturday, March 27, 2010 8:42 PM from Winnipeg, Canada
> Dear Evgenii, Chris & William,
> I look forward to Chris� talk on April 7 (thanks for the references,
> Chris), and Rudolf Penninkhof�s of March 31. The latter is explicitly
> on emergence. I�m a little less concerned about emergence itself,
> having written:
>
> Gordon, R. (2000). The emergence of emergence: a critique of "Design,
> observation, surprise!". Rivista di Biologia /Biology Forum 93(2),
> 349-356.
>
> Martin, C.C. & R. Gordon (2001). The evolution of perception.
> Cybernetics & Systems 32(3-4), 393-409.
>
> I�ll send these on request: gor...@cc.umanitoba.ca.
>
> Some of you may wish to contribute to:
>
> Gordon, R., L. Stillwaggon Swan & J. Seckbach, Eds. (2011). Origin(s)
> of Design in Nature [in preparation]. Dordrecht, Springer.
>
> which is very much about emergence. Deadline for chapters is September
> 1, 2010, and we have a meeting in Utah 2011 of the authors afterwards,
> who can get there.
>
> My latest thought, which may be novel(?), is that there are two kinds
> of emergence: passive and active. The latter involves change of the
> units in response to global properties of the whole. It seems to me
> that, in general, this might be what the agents do in:
>
> Holland, J. (1996). Hidden Order: How Adaptation Builds Complexity, Basic Books.
>
> which is my current bedtime reading. Active emergence might strictly
> be a property of living systems, always involving perception of some
> sort, and thus a distinguishing property of life. Maybe you could
> provide counterexamples?
>
> My hesitation about Holland is that his paradigm is embryonic
> development, which I don�t think he gets right, precisely because he�s
> missing the embryo�s physics.
>
> If any of you know a reference that puts flesh on Laughlin�s ideas,
> please divulge it.
>
> As for statisticians, in general they aren�t physicists. The latter seek