So equilibrium is the big picture in a very real sense.

[octelcogopod]

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.

 

[apeiron]

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 learned 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]

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]

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 - 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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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.
.

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?
.

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]

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]

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.
.

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 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. 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 traveled 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]

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 relevant 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]

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]

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]

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 occurred 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