Background to an evolving story

Bumping up against other stories (multiple non-falsifiable stories, and a there there that isn't everywhere)

• The Wolfram Challenge: Digital Determinism
  • a one-dimensional CA can produce all algorithmically calculable patterns, sequences of patterns
  • no agent, meaning, purpose, compassion
  • absolutely deterministic, though can be "unpredictable" in narrow (but important) sense as well as non-reversible
  • has some interesting features (non-reversibility, non "anticibility"), some less appealing ones (as above)
  • not (yet?) falsifiable, generative?

  As of and from 8 February Emerging emergence: evolving a form of inquiry that makes no appeal to truth/reality denies determinism the significance of either a fixed starting point or a pre-existing goal the existence of any preferred reference frame (spatial, temporal, conceptual) yet is capable of successful local puzzle-solving more integrative activity local and more global progress has yet to be falsified co-exists productively with other yet to be falsified forms of inquiry creates context for/attributes causal significance to agency/purpose/meaning/compassion/social justice is generative Issues arisen so far Are the properties enumerated characteristics of emerging emergence or of the stories that result from it? a mix of both? What role does "falsifiability" play in emerging emergence? Emerging emergence may reduce successfully to "science" locally but how does it handle more global considerations? What is "generativity"? Ought there to be an elaboration that distinguishes "compassion" from "social justice"? Is there significance to the etymological relation between "normal" and "normative"? Is "non-normal" perjorative? undesireably so? for students? for others? Let's continue "bumping" emerging emergence against other forms of inquiry to see what emerges ...

• Intelligent Design (and sundry variants thereof, including science as progressive approach to a true description of reality)
  • assumes at least one intentional agent, allows for possibility of many
  • may be deterministic or non-deterministic
  • implies a well-defined (if potentially not knowable) starting point and objective (if potentially not knowable/attainable)
  • "What moves things outside the sphere of science (for better of for worse) is not "personal experiences" but convictions based on them (or anything else) that one chooses not to subject to the possibility of further revision ... primary concern is the likelihood of future change, of seeing what has not yet been seen"
  • not (yet?) falsifiable, generative?

• Compassion and social justice
  • assumes intentional agents
  • assumes significance of intentional acts
  • implies a fixed objective
  • not yet falsifiable
    • though clearly runs into problems of attribution and efficacy, failures to achieve objectives not always attributable to competing intentional forces
  • generative?

• Evolution, science as story telling, emergence

  "We may ... have to relinquish the notion that changes of paradigm carry scientists and those who learn from them closer to the truth ... nothing that has been said or will be said makes [science] a process of evolution toward anything ... If we can learn to substitute evolution from-what-we do-know for evolution-toward-what-we-wish-to-know, a number of vexing problems may vanish in the process ... I cannot yet specify in any detail the consequences of this alternate view of scientific advance. But it helps to recognize that the conceptual transposition here recommended is very close to the one the West undertook just a century ago. When Darwin first published his theory of evolution, what most bothered many professionals was neither the notion of species change nor the possible descent of man from the apes ... For many men the abolition of [a] teleological kind of evolution was the most significant and least palatable of Darwin's suggestions ... What could 'evolution', 'development', and 'progress' mean in the absence of any specified goal? ... The process described [here] as the resolution of revolutions is the selection by conflict within the scientific community of the fittest way to practice future science ... The net result ... is the wonderfully adapted set of instruments we call modern scientific knowledge ... And the entire process may have occurred, as we no suppose biological evolution did, without benefit of a set goal, a permanent fixed truth ..." ------ Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

  

  • does not assume intentional agents at the outset but allows from their subsequent appearance (along with meaning, compassion, and conceptions of/concerns about social justice)
  • allows for significance of intentional acts but recognizes that they may be constrained in their efficacy by potent non-intentional forces
  • denies a fixed objective or an optimal set of process rules
  • allows for (requires?) indeterminacy
  • not (yet?) falsifiable
  • in fact not only allows for but encourages the existence at any given time of multiple competing stories
  • avoids premature story telling that would inhibit future story development (by self and others)
  • and hence tries to rely on "simplest" starting points?
  • generative?
  • demonstrably expansive, with perhaps no criterion for "generativity" except after the fact ... leaving scientists/story tellers (like living organisms in general, to have to guess/bet?

Multi-level architecture and bidirectional causality

science	brain	social organization/culture
The relations between observations and interpretations are nested rather than parallel or hierarchical. The relations among physics, biology, social science are nested rather than parallel or hierarchical	The relations among body/brain/self are nested, rather than parallel or hierarchical	The relations between individuals and societies/cultures are nested than parallel or (necessarily) hierarchical

A current evaluation of the generativity of science as story telling/emerging emergence/bipartite brain/?

• Declines equally to be trapped into the known problems of both "naive reductionism" and "abject relativism" (to say nothing of a "dictatorship of relativism")
• Intersects productively with other stories, as per the above and
  • Science as Storytelling or Story Telling?
  • The Art Historian and the Neurobiologist
  • The Novelist and the Neurobiologist
  • The Linguist and the Neurobiologist
• Intersections raise (or highlight) new questions requiring new stories/observations, directions that might be pursued productively(?), as above and ...
  1. What IS an "agent" as distinct from the universe?
     • a "bounded" element in the universe, potentially able to represent aspects of the universe (a "model builder")
     • Contrast Game of Life, The World of Langton's Ant, and ....
  2. What is a intentionality, free will, meaning, compassion if we don't start with such things as primitives?
     • an element consisting itself of bounded elements, able to generate counter-factuals and perhaps exploit indeterminacy?
     • See, for example, Free Will?, and to come ... ?
  3. How could things that don't exist as primitives come into being?
  4. Is indeterminacy essential for these phenomena?
     • The Magic Sierpinski Triangle
     • A Voyage of Exploration
     • Hill climbing and its limitations
     • to come?
  5. What new things could come into being in the future?
• Provides a (for now) coherent/comprehensible guide for individual behavior/choices (a "morality"?), including some rationale for compassion, social justice ...

• There is neither a solid foundation nor a fixed objective
  • and so no point in fighting about either
• Start where you are, solve local problems/puzzles, learn from/be changed by the process, imagine what might yet be, act to try and create it, learn from/be changed by that ("radical incrementalism"?)
  • Defer for the present those problems/puzzles lacking local solutions or for which possible local solutions seem likely to reduce rather than enhance the ongoing process of exploration
• Accept/value that everyone starts in a different place, experiences/tries different things, and so will have at any given time different stories (also,like yours, always in progress)
• Listen to other peoples' stories, share one's own, learn from, be changed by the exchanges
• Avoid getting preoccupied with what has been, is, should be. Enjoy process and the room made available by what might be that neither you not anyone else has yet conceived.

Notes after second session Interesting to think of this in "closed/open" system terms. What this does, in some ways, is to "open" the system by embedding the story teller in the system, treating the story teller as simultaneously describing/being influenced by the system and as an influence on the system (cf Being, Thinking, Story Telling: What It Is and How it Works, Reflectively). There are important (?) resonances to the difficulties of formally handling recursion, as well as to the problems of completeness/consistency. In any case, the simple bottom line at the moment seems to be that "conflict" is a feature rather than a bug, that non-normal inquiry is critically dependent on the tensions between various forms of normal inquiry and needs itself to be in tension, both with normal inquiry and alternate non-normal inquiries?

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