Retrospective 2024-09

This is a retrospective of week 9, 2024 (2024-02-26–2024-03-03).

I finished reading Robert Rosen’s Anticipatory Systems (AS) this week.

Below are some quotes from AS and from podcast I’ve listened to during the week (my emphasis in italics):

Rosen’s scientific legacy is the result of scientific commitment that excluded compromise as a path to acceptance or recognition. It also excluded self-delusion… “If it can’t stand on its own merits, then it doesn’t deserve to.”

—Mihai Nadin, Prologomena, in Anticipatory Systems by Robert Rosen, p. xvi

…the centerpiece…is the modeling relation between a natural system and a formal one. … It is here that the intrinsic limitations of the Newtonian paradigm are spelled out in detail. And it is here, as well, that the major subject of causality, including the teleological, is addressed up front…. Moreover, it is here that the “mathematical image of a complex system” comes into focus, and become subject to mathematical category theory….

—Mihai Nadin, Prologomena, in Anticipatory Systems by Robert Rosen, xviii

…a large body of [Rosen’s] publications testifies to the intellectual effort of defining what life itself is. A material system is an organism if and only if it is closed to efficient causation…. It is worth noting that the definition is focused on causality …; also, that life is embodied in organisms. The matter of organisms is important; but what defines life is what organisms actually do—moreover, why they do it. … Rosen dealt with the “necessary condition, not sufficient one, for a material system to be an organism.” Complexity, which is characteristic of life, …“is the habitat of life … not life itself.” …complexity is defined ontologically—as pertaining to existence—not epistemologically—as pertaining to our knowledge of what exists. Rosen ascertained that something else is needed to characterize what is alive from what is complex….

—Mihai Nadin, Prolegomena, in Anticipatory Systems by Robert Rosen, xx

Rosen was firmly opposed to von Neumann’s understanding that there is a “threshold of complexity” that can be crossed by finite iterations (analogous to the notion that infinity can be reached from a finite number, simply by adding one more). Rosen brought up the need to account for the characteristics of the organism as evolvable, adaptive. Nevertheless, in hindsight we can say that both realized although in different ways, that if complexity is addressed from an informational perspective, we end up realizing that life is ultimately not describable in algorithmic terms.

—Mihai Nadin, Prolegomena, in Anticipatory Systems by Robert Rosen, xlv

…if mathematics is a creation of the human brain, and if the human brain is representable by the machinery of mathematics, then the intrinsic limitations of mathematics (e.g., as exemplified by Gödel’s theorem) are a fortiori limitations of the brain.

—Robert Rosen, Anticipatory Systems, 189

There is no successful mathematical theory which would treat the integrated activities of the organism as a whole. . . . And yet this integrated activity of the organism is probably the most essential manifestation of life. … The fundamental manifestation of life mentioned above drop out from all our theories.

—Nicolas Rachevsky, Mathematical Biophysics

…biological qualities are directly recognizable by us… Thus, they must formally correspond to…observables…, except that they need not take their values in numbers.

—Robert Rosen, Anticipatory Systems, 193

…many (though not all) of the problems traditionally associated with time arise from a failure to recognize that time is in fact complex, and that its different qualities require more than one kind of encoding.

—Robert Rosen, Anticipatory Systems, 220

…biology is in principle irreducible to physics. …the laws governing the behavior of biological systems are not inferable from physical laws although they are compatible with them. …encodings of ordered situations cannot be reduced to encodings pertaining to disordered ones.

—Robert Rosen, Anticipatory Systems, 236

…the quality we perceive as time is complex. It admits a multitude of different kinds of encoding, which differ vastly from one another. … Each of these capture some particular aspects of our time sense, at least as these aspects are manifested in particular kinds of situations. While we saw that certain formal relations could be established between these various kinds of time, none of them could be reduced to any of the others; nor does there appear to exist any more comprehensive encoding of time to which all of the kinds we have discussed can be reduced. This…is indeed the essence of complexity.

—Robert Rosen, Anticipatory Systems, 254

Our aim is to develop at least the rudimentary theory of anticipatory systems… Furthermore, we wish to develop at least some of the implications of such an anticipatory paradigm for human systems, through its bearing on questions of social organization, and its implications for social technologies involving planning and forecasting.

—Robert Rosen, Anticipatory Systems, 319

…human cultures and civilizations exhibit many of the properties of biological organisms, including phases which may at least be analogized with senescence. Such considerations lead us back towards the view of societies as superorganisms…

—Robert Rosen, Anticipatory Systems, 338

…the concept of a model, and the relationships which exist between models, lies at the root of everything we need to know.

—Robert Rosen, Anticipatory Systems, 364

…an anticipatory system must be complex; a complex system may be anticipatory.

—Robert Rosen, Anticipatory Systems, 372

The world as described by physics is not yet the world that we can imagine ourselves living in.

—Jonathan Allday, https://youtu.be/uIYNit9NMKE?feature=shared&t=1586

David Bohm’s strength…[was] his intuition, his ability to to look at reality and append what it was… To be a good physicist, the intuition is paramount.

—Jonathan Allday, https://youtu.be/uIYNit9NMKE?feature=shared&t=2280

[The] conflation of consciousness with computation…is deeply deeply misguided and deeply deeply a flawed approach… Consciousness is far more than just simply computation.

—Jonathan Allday, https://youtu.be/uIYNit9NMKE?feature=shared&t=2939

I do believe there is an aspect of reaching into intuiting the nature of reality directly—in a nonrational, but that doesn’t mean irrational way. I think that’s what the creative physicist does, and I do not believe that can be programmed.

—Jonathan Allday https://youtu.be/uIYNit9NMKE?feature=shared&t=3010

If mathematics is in a sense…pure rationalization, then the mental realm encompasses so much more than that, and the physical realm is just a subset of it, where the thinking and the mathematics is rigid.

—Jonathan Allday, https://youtu.be/uIYNit9NMKE?feature=shared&t=3347

I really wanted to shine a light on the differences…of ontology and epistemology. Ontology being the reality of our being. … Epistemology is how do we know the world. … And right now we have a very, very corrupt epistemology…, because we don’t have a ground of an ontology in order to anchor that epistemology in. So it’s a really interesting time in which we live… How is it that we know the world? How are we going to be able to move forward now?

—Leanne Whitney, https://youtu.be/Tv1PweW4D-o?feature=shared&t=2406

We always tend to think the mind is in the brain, and while certainly we can correlate the mind to the brain, the mind is also in the heart, and the mind is in the gut… We’ve got three minds… So we’ve got … to be as aware and as present as we can.

—Leanne Whitney, https://youtu.be/Tv1PweW4D-o?feature=shared&t=2659

“It’s neither true, nor not true.” (It’s neither true, nor false.)

–Russell Targ, https://youtu.be/AEAGsaLADig?feature=shared&t=930

Och, slutligen, några anteckningar från veckan på svenska:

• Skogsbolag avverkar i känsliga områden — trots miljöcertifiering (DN 20240228). Certifiering är, med andra ord, ett spel för galleriet.
• En organisation måste ha processer för att kunna bli certifierad. Nu har processinriktningen även nått fotbollen. Alexander Axén, svensk fotbolls Leif GW Persson, kommenterar det så här (DN 20240225):
  “Det talas om processer. Till förbannelse.“
  “Processer har blivit en snuttefilt att hålla sig i för alla i ledarposition…“
  “Processer har blivit ett krockkudde att dämpa sig mot…”
  “...tack vare allt snack om processer [kan de] inbilla sig att det finns en garanti att det ska bli bättre — sen.“
  Apropå certifiering!