On Monday 18 August 2008, Stanley Salthe wrote:

> Folks -- It is well to remember that all probability density

> functions are mere tools for analyzing data.  Nothing in nature is

> either random or orderly.  These are windows we peek out from.  In

> biology in particular the Normal mean is taken as the 'fact' about

> any population.  In that field, studying the only realm where Nature

> has produced functional individuality, individuals are reckoned to be

> of no account.  Science so far cannot deal with individuals except

> insofar as one individual might be scanned many times using many

> different probes, delivering population data.

That science cannot yet deal with indviduals means disaster for self-organizing systems because of the implicit connection between self and individual, an individual is a self except all outside-in. This, of course, is coming from a non-statistical reading of your message.

Re: nothing can be random. An event that is truly random, such as in our pseudo random number generators on our computers, would not generate a number, but perhaps a cow, or a steeming pile of biological tissue that would perhaps belong more in a Douglas Adams novel. And an orderly event? That too sounds questionable. It has been said by someone, I can't recall who, that reality is the most efficient function of predicting its next moment because it's deterministically so. Anything within reality therefore can only gather a small portion of the information required to figure out the big picture. "Control is an illusion, order our comforting lie. From chaos, through chaos, into chaos we fly."

s/chaos/mutations/

The advantages of working with individuals can be seen in the lab with directed evolution and selection experiments. This bares some resemblance to modular unit testing in computer programming practices. This, then, becomes a matter of engineering .. especially because of those 'barriers' of sort that Sungchul mentions below; the connection here needs some more work but looks like something Tony is going for:

On Wednesday 06 August 2008, Tony Smith wrote:

> I'm starting to see that reflexive acceptance of the assumption that

> such a definition is in any way related to the world we find

> ourselves in might be contributing significantly to lack of progress

> in understanding the bigger picture.

>

> At any moment, our cosmos can be seen as bound by various event

> horizons: the Big Bang at the Hubble radius and many black holes

> within. Those event horizons are all very porous, but each in one

> direction, the CMB flux entering from (near) the Big Bang horizon and

> anything that strays too close exiting through the black hole

> horizons.

>

> In 'Three Roads to Quantum Gravity', Lee Smolin argues that we can't

> know anything beyond these event horizons, then goes on to propose

> an evolutionary scenario connecting the two (a scenario I have some

> sympathy for but which I still doubt is yet sufficient to give us a

> full explanation for conservative physics by natural means). But the

> inference relevant here from Smolin's first point is that we should

> not use fact of the Big Bang to jump to a conclusion that even the

> complete "Universe" (for want of a better word) produced by the Big

> Bang is even bound, let alone Closed or Isolated in the sense Sung

> uses for clearly confined systems.

>

> I don't want to take this any further for now. It is just that I have

> developed an allergy to the reflexive assumption that local truths

> can be safely applied to global considerations. There is not even a

> way to get evidence as to whether they can or cannot.

I was going to reply to Sungchul earlier on another email, but might as well mention it here:

On Monday 18 August 2008, Sungchul Ji wrote:

> Can it be that there are many universes, depending on how one defines

> them? For example, the universe defined on the basis of the Big Bang

> theory, and the one defined based on the first law of thermodynamics

> (i.e., the universe wherein the statement, "The energy and matter of

> the Universe remains constant", holds). For convenience, we may

> refer to the former as the Big Bang universe (BBU) and the latter as

> the first-law universe (FLU). If the boundary of BBU is either

> undefinable or porous (due to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle?),

> we can still have FLU if BBU happens to contain FLU, i.e., BBU > FLU.

The other day I came across the first mention of 'groundtruth' (I'm young). I had never seen the word before, even if I've been thinking words similar to it. To 'groundtruth' how you know you know the universe would allow you to say what you can and cannot extrapolate from given models of increasing real reality. The same can be said for data sets in a very practical sense -- you must tell people that certain data is only usable in certain ways because of assumptions made when taking the data, and so on. The same could be done for various systems of thinking in philosophy, and I'm sure somebody's already worked out a way to validate axiomal purity of arguments or somesuch.

I think it, my hear of it I mean, was at one in the morning outside of Wendy's with a biologist from the local robot group. Weird mix of circumstances, but certainly worth it.

- Bryan

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