Часть 1-я: Жажда отклика, или Зачем люди идут в социальные сети

Оригинал взят у в Часть 1-я: Жажда отклика, или Зачем люди идут в социальные сети

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Рантье XXI века: владельцы облаков Знаете ли вы, в скольких базах данных собрана информация о вас? Что известно о пользователях интернет-компаниям? Почему эти сведения хранятся в «облаках», кому они могут быть предложены и с какой целью? Чей это актив? Читайте вторую часть интервью медиаэксперта Андрея Мирошниченко E-xecutive.ru.Далее

On The Inadequacy Of The Empiricist Tradition In Western Philosophy

by Stuart Kauffman


I find myself beginning to realize that the philosophy that I studied, from Descartes to Hume to Kant to Russell to logical positivism and the early Wittgenstein, and perhaps the late Wittgenstein of the Investigations, is seriously inadequate.

It starts with Descartes who conceived of his task to be a lone mind who would doubt all that could be doubted to find that which could not be doubted about what that single mind can know about the world. The emphasis is on "knowing."

Then we come to Hume of the Scottish Enlightenment, essaying to understand "Human Understanding." How can we know the world? By sense impressions, welded together in "bundles," in which the "self," or "I," itself disappears as just a bundle of perceptions: roughly, "all I am aware of is a jumble of sequential awareness," I am aware of no 'I'."

Kant seeks the conditions of knowing in the inner conditions of the mind, categories of perception such as space and time. He considers the phenomenal world we can know and behind it the noumenal world we can never know.

Russell brings us sense data such as "red here" and the tone, "A flat now," then sense data statements, "For Kauffman, 'red here' is true," and hopes that his recently developed predicate calculus working on sense data statements will allow philosophers to build a maximally reliable way of knowing the world, constructed out of sense data statements linked by logic, including quantifiers such as "there exists" and "for all."

To early Wittgenstein's famous "Tractatus": "The world is the collection of true facts" about that world.

On to logical positivism: "Only those statements (about the world) are meaningful which are empirically verifiable," which, ironically drove Western philosophy, yet whose founding statement just noted is not itself empirically verifiable.

The "empiricist tradition" sought and seeks to elucidate how we know the world.

What is wrong?

In the beginning, 5 billion years ago, no life existed on the forming planet. Either life started here or arrived from elsewhere. Let's assume the former. As a concrete working hypothesis let's take collectively autocatalytic sets of polymers like peptide sets, RNA sets, or DNA sets, all realized experimentally, in some bounding membrane like a liposome. For example Gonen Ashkenazi has a 9 peptide (small protein) collectively autocatalytic set reproducing happily in his Ben Gurion University lab.

So what?

So existing as a self reproducing system in a universe that is non-ergodic, (not repeating) above the level of atoms, where most complex things will never exist, is the first condition of life. "Knowing" is not yet a condition.

But that protocell typically lived in an environment with toxic and food molecules. By hook or crook, say by semipermiable membranes, the protocell "discriminated" poison from food and admitted only the latter, thanks to natural selection on evolving protocells.

We now have the rudiments of agency and knowing. The protocell evolved to do something, i.e., discriminate and admit food and block poison. This discrimination required rudimentary "knowing" and hence "semantics", without invoking consciousness.

What the empiricist tradition entirely misses is living existence and agency. Without the existence of the protocell, there is no evolutionary point in knowing. Without agency there is no use in knowing. Suppose, per contra, that the protocell could discriminate poison from food, but could not selectively block the first and admit the second. It would fail natural selection's harsh sieve.

Without being and doing, no knowing could have emerged in evolution. The empiricist tradition misses this central issue, thus is deeply inadequate.

In summary of this first point: Without being and agency, knowing is both pointless and would not arise in evolution.

Not only do we not know what will happen, we often do not even know what can happen.

But the empiricist tradition runs into a still deeper problem. In past posts I have discussed Darwinian preadaptations, where we cannot prestate their emergence in evolution. This has led my colleagues, senior mathematician, Giuseppe Longo, his post doctoral fellow, Mael Montevil, both of the Ecole Polytechnique, Paris, and myself to submit a paper also posted on ArXiv, entitled, "No entailing laws, but enablement in the evolution of the biosphere."

This article is radical. It claims that no law entails the evolution of the biosophere. The grounds for this include the fact that we cannot prestate the ever newly emerging relevant variables in evolution that selection reveals, therefore the very phase space of evolution changes in ways we cannot know beforehand, so we can write no laws of motion for the evolving biosphere, nor, lacking knowledge of the boundary conditions, could we integrate those laws of motion even were to to have them.

These deep issues mean that often not only do we not know what will happen, as when we flip a fair coin 10,000 times and do not know how many heads will come up, but here know all the possible outcomes, so can construct a probability measure. In evolution we do not even know what can emerge in the Adjacent Possible of the becoming of evolution, so can construct no probability measure for we do not know the sample space of all the possibilities, thus not only do we not know what will happen, we do not even know what can happen.

The empiricist tradition is ignorant of this profound limitation to knowledge "beforehand" as the biosphere "becomes."

Even pragmatism, which seeks to unify knowing and doing, falls prey to this last issue: We often do not even know what can happen. Pragmatism takes no account of this feature of our living world.

Hume famously argued that one cannot deduce "ought" from "is." This is the naturalistic fallacy. But Hume is thinking only of a knowing subject, firmly in the empiricist tradition started by Descartes. Hume ignores agency.

I wrote an entire book, Investigations, attempting to define agency. My try: "A molecular autonomous agent is a self-reproducing system able to do at least one work cycle."

A bacterium swimming up a glucose gradient for food is an agent, reproduces and the rotating flagella is just one of the work cycles the bacterium does. All living cells fulfill the above definition.

But once there is agency, ought enters the universe. If the bacterium is to successfully get food, it "ought" to e.g., swim up the sugar gradient. Without attributing consciousness, one cannot have "actings" without "doing them wisely or poorly," hence ought.

In short, the empiricist tradition, in ignoring agency, wishes to block us from "ought," when we cannot have doing without "ought." The root of the issue is "doing" versus merely "happening," a topic in a near future post.

We need to rethink many problems in philosophy to take account of the issues above.


13.7: Cosmos And Culture : NPR

Comments



Vlad Piaskovskiy (0nothing1) wrote:

1

Stuart wrote:

"Without attributing consciousness, one cannot have "actings" without "doing them wisely or poorly," hence ought."

It seems to me that this phrase is very doubtful. Permissible to say - and I like it! - That living systems possess the innate knowing what for them is good and bad; but this is not consciousness yet. Consciousness - is something more; consciousness involves conflict.

vendredi 3 février 2012 12:40:52


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Vlad Piaskovskiy (0nothing1) wrote:

2

And this conflict seems to be something more than just a competition between two (or more) concurrent stimuli: in this case, at first glance, there is no need for a particularly complex organization. I think it is the conflict between the immediate response to stimulus (what Stuart called knowing) and the reaction that takes into account the developments in the long run - long run adaptation ("in the long run," of course, is relative, if we're talking about the first, primitive consciousness). Ie the basis of the second trend is the ability to forecast and modeling of the world (note also that consciousness is not reducible to win of the second trend, but to their parity).

But it does mean that the long term prognosis can supress immediate response to a stimulus that Stuart called knowing - ie, this trend is against life itself (as the embodiment of creativity and diversity)!

vendredi 3 février 2012 12:40:20


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Vlad Piaskovskiy (0nothing1) wrote:

3.

Life without death would destroy itself - if the death is sudden to disappear, it would be a disaster, and we ourselves would have to be urgently re-invent it! Stuart, you say yourself that the world exists because everything has its constraints, then what constrains your creativity and diversity?

Stuart wrote:

"If our religions from the Axial Age 2500 years ago or so, were sufficient, then what say we to the fact that in WWI, German and British soldiers in trenches 150 meters apart prayed to the SAME GOD OF LOVE. 2000 years after Christ taught us to love, we kill."

Stuart, do not you think that this is a sign that your theory does not account for something, and except for of creativity and diversity god includes the force that constrains them (negates)?

vendredi 3 février 2012 12:39:33


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Vlad Piaskovskiy (0nothing1) wrote:

1

I want to dwell on what might mean knowing, which, according to Stuart, is an inherent property of all living things. Here was an excellent article:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2010/03/the_evolution_of_symbolic_lang.html

In a nutshell the essence:
"Most organisms communicate, but humans are unique in communicating via symbolic language. This entails relationships between signifiers (e.g. words) and what's signified (e.g. objects or ideas), where what's special is the construction of a system of relationships among the signifiers themselves, generating a seemingly unlimited web of associations, organized by semantic regularities and constraints, retrieved in narrative form, and enabled by complex memory systems.
Humans are thus a symbolic species: symbols have literally changed the kind of biological organism we are."

there was another article on this topic:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2010/03/the_iself_and_our_symbolic_spe.html


samedi 4 février 2012 11:45:02


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Vlad Piaskovskiy (0nothing1) wrote:

2

So, this view seems to be not true. And Homo sapiens is just the only one capable through awareness (understanding) to de-symbolize perception of the world. Another thing, thanks to the development of speech, only humans have symbols that got autonomy to such an extent that separated from the objects which signify and have themselves become objects.

Think about it: how a primitive organism can know what he should eat? It apparently does not see plants, as we see them, it sees food. All its perception consists of such features: food, a partner for mating, the danger, and so on. It is sort of mosaic pattern, and the more perfect the nervous system, the more completely the perception - mosaic is becoming finer, and the picture of the world becomes more adequate.


samedi 4 février 2012 11:43:41


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Vlad Piaskovskiy (0nothing1) wrote:

3

The thinking by symbols is typical for some psychiatric patients, and such a condition means a return to a more primitive, archaic form of perception. Interestingly, on the one hand, understanding means the destruction of old infantile features: instead of "grass" we begin to distinguish between different types of plants, and eventually realize that every single plant is unique. On the other hand, we are also creating new, "scientific" features, which more accurately reflect the reality (eg, species, etc.) and these new features have the property that the theory destroying facts - Newton's laws are a good example. I want to say that from this point of view understanding does not imply any new information, but just we have the kind of information transformation.


samedi 4 février 2012 11:42:57


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Vlad Piaskovskiy (0nothing1) wrote:

4

It is also interesting that symbols, according to Jung, is the content of our collective unconscious, then what in this case means "collective"? If this is, in particular, the same as Alva has in mind when he says:
"Mind is not inside us; it is rather, the dynamic activity of the whole, embodied, environmentally situated human being."

than "the redness of red" is really all the same for all of us. On the other hand, if we assume that individual thinking is our internal speech, it arose as a result of communication. I do not know what that means, it's just my speculation ...


samedi 4 février 2012 11:42:21


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WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE DEEP, ELEGANT, OR BEAUTIFUL EXPLANATION? - Richard Dawkins

Evolutionary Biologist; Emeritus Professor of the Public Understanding of Science,...

Redundancy Reduction and Pattern Recognition

Deep, elegant, beautiful? Part of what makes a theory elegant is its power to explain much while assuming little. Here, Darwin's natural selection wins hands down. The ratio of the huge amount that it explains (everything about life: its complexity, diversity and illusion of crafted design) divided by the little that it needs to postulate (non-random survival of randomly varying genes through geological time) is gigantic. Never in the field of human comprehension were so many facts explained by assuming so few. Elegant then, and deep—its depths hidden from everybody until as late as the nineteenth century. On the other hand, for some tastes natural selection is too destructive, too wasteful, too cruel to count as beautiful. In any case, coming late to the party as ever, I can count on somebody else choosing Darwin. I'll take his great grandson instead, and come back to Darwin at the end.

Horace Barlow FRS is the youngest grandchild of Sir Horace Darwin, Charles Darwin's youngest child. Now a very active ninety, Barlow is a member of a distinguished lineage of Cambridge neurobiologists. I want to talk about an idea that he published in two papers in 1961, on redundancy reduction and pattern recognition. It is an idea whose ramifications and significance have inspired me throughout my career.

The folklore of neurobiology includes a mythical 'grandmother neurone', which fires only when a very particular image, the face of Jerry Lettvin's grandmother, falls on the retina (Lettvin was a distinguished American neurobiologist who, like Barlow, worked on the frog retina). The point is that Lettvin's grandmother is only one of countless images that a brain is capable of recognising. If there were a specific neurone for everything we can recognise—not just Lettvin's grandmother but lots of other faces, objects, letters of the alphabet, flowers, each one seen from many angles and distances, we would have a combinatorial explosion. If sensory recognition worked on the 'grandmother principle', the number of specific recognition neurones for all possible combinations of nerve impulses would exceed the number of atoms in the universe. Independently, the American psychologist Fred Attneave had calculated that the volume of the brain would have to be measured in cubic light years. Barlow and Attneave independently proposed redundancy reduction as the answer.

Claude Shannon, inventor of Information Theory, coined 'redundancy' as a kind of inverse of information. In English, 'q' is always followed by 'u', so the 'u' can be omitted without loss of information. It is redundant. Wherever redundancy occurs in a message (which is wherever there is nonrandomness), the message can be more economically recoded without loss of information (although with some loss in capacity to correct errors). Barlow suggested that, at every stage in sensory pathways, there are mechanisms tuned to eliminate massive redundancy.

The world at time t is not greatly different from the world at time t-1. Therefore it is not necessary for sensory systems continuously to report the state of the world. They need only signal changes, leaving the brain to assume that everything not reported remains the same. Sensory adaptation is a well-known feature of sensory systems, which does precisely as Barlow prescribed. If a neurone is signalling temperature, for example, the rate of firing is not, as one might naively suppose, proportional to the temperature. Instead, firing rate increases only when there is a change in temperature. It then dies away to a low resting frequency. The same is true of neurones signalling brightness, loudness, pressure and so on. Sensory adaptation achieves huge economies by exploiting the non-randomness in temporal sequence of states of the world.

What sensory adaptation achieves in the temporal domain, the well-established phenomenon of lateral inhibition does in the spatial domain. If a scene in the world falls on a pixellated screen, such as the back of a digital camera or the retina of an eye, most pixels see the same as their immediate neighbours. The exceptions are those pixels which lie on edges, boundaries. If every retinal cell faithfully reported its light value to the brain, the brain would be bombarded with a massively redundant message. Huge economies can be achieved if most of the impulses reaching the brain come from pixel cells lying along edges in the scene. The brain then assumes uniformity in the spaces between edges.

As Barlow pointed out, this is exactly what lateral inhibition achieves. In the frog retina, for example, every ganglion cell sends signals to the brain, reporting on the light intensity in its particular location on the surface of the retina. But it simultaneously sends inhibitory signals to its immediate neighbours. This means that the only ganglion cells to send strong signals to the brain are those that lie on an edge. Ganglion cells lying in uniform fields of colour (the majority) send few if any impulses to the brain because they, unlike cells on edges, are inhibited by all their neighbours. The spatial redundancy in the signal is eliminated.

The Barlow analysis can be extended to most of what is now known about sensory neurobiology, including Hubel and Wiesel's famous horizontal and vertical line detector neurones in cats (straight lines are redundant, reconstructable from their ends), and in the movement ('bug') detectors in the frog retina, discovered by the same Jerry Lettvin and his colleagues. Movement represents a non-redundant change in the frog's world. But even movement is redundant if it persists in the same direction at the same speed. Sure enough, Lettvin and colleagues discovered a 'strangeness' neurone in their frogs, which fires only when a moving object does something unexpected, such as speeding up, slowing down, or changing direction. The strangeness neurone is tuned to filter out redundancy of a very high order.

Barlow pointed out that a survey of the sensory filters of a given animal could, in theory, give us a read-out of the redundancies present in the animal's world. They would constitute a kind of description of the statistical properties of that world. Which reminds me, I said I'd return to Darwin. In Unweaving the Rainbow, I suggested that the gene pool of a species is a 'Genetic Book of the Dead', a coded description of the ancestral worlds in which the genes of the species have survived through geological time. Natural selection is an averaging computer, detecting redundancies—repeat patterns—in successive worlds (successive through millions of generations) in which the species has survived (averaged over all members of the sexually reproducing species). Could we take what Barlow did for neurones in sensory systems, and do a parallel analysis for genes in naturally selected gene pools? Now that would be deep, elegant and beautiful.

http://www.edge.org/response-detail/2825/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation

Is The Possible Ontologically Real?

by Stuart Kauffman

I adduce four lines of evidence for a radical claim: Perhaps the "possible" is ontologically real and the world consists of two realms, "Possibles" and "Actuals."

Empedocles, in ancient Greece, claimed that what was real in the universe was what was Actual. Aristotle flirted with "potentia." Alfred North Whitehead in Process and Reality proposed that Possibles gave rise to Actuals which in turn gave rise to Possibles: P -> A -> P -> A. Few take Whitehead's proposal seriously. Yet maybe he is right.

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Вслед за Ливией «управляемый хаос» грозит России

Гладилин Иван

Стратегия расчленения России вступила в горячую фазу, предостерегает армянский политик

«Варшавская Декларация (Варшавская декларация Евросоюза по случаю Европейского дня памяти жертв тоталитарных режимов, которую приняли 23 августа в Варшаве министры юстиции стран ЕС. – Прим. KM.RU) создает благодатную почву для демонтажа таких организаций, как СНГ, ШОС, ЕврАзЭС, Таможенный союз России, Казахстана и Белоруссии и, конечно, Военно-политический союз Организации Договора о коллективной безопасности». С таким предостережением выступил глава армянской партии «Национальное единение», председатель правления общественной организации «Северная перспектива» Арташес Гегамян.

Ведь не секрет, пишет он в материале, который публикует ИА REGNUM, что цементирующей основой духовной близости народов государств – членов СНГ является чувство родства и кровной причастности к поколению, которое ценой колоссальных жертв и лишений сумело спасти Европу от коричневой чумы фашизма. Грядущие же за ним поколения воспитывались в духе сынов и внуков победителей единой страны – спасительницы Старого континента. А вот реализация Варшавской Декларации приведет к тому, что души детей и внуков более чем 600 000 армян – участников Великой Отечественной войны, половина которых не вернулась с фронта, будут в смятении.

Не секрет, продолжает Арташес Гегамян, что уже более 20 лет их мозги промывают якобы идеями «демократии» и «либерализма», а на самом деле меняют их психологию, которая унаследована ими от их отцов и дедов, психологию народа – победителя фашизма. Более того, стремятся навязать молодому поколению синдром покаяния, психологию оправдывающегося поколения за то, что, как это записано в Варшавской Декларации, «Европа страдала под властью тоталитарных режимов (читай, СССР. – А.Г.), независимо от того, был ли это коммунизм, национальный социализм...».

В случае с Республикой Армения расчет прост, поясняет политик. Армянский народ, по логике инициаторов Варшавской Декларации, который испытал ужасы геноцида в Османской империи в 1915-1923 гг. и который в годы Второй мировой войны в составе СССР опять-таки ценой колоссальных жертв добился победы, оказывается, должен покаяться за то, что «Европа страдала под властью тоталитарных режимов», а наши родители и мы не только не бунтовали против этого режима, но своим посильным и честным трудом приумножили мощь и богатство страны, нашей великой Родины.

Это – не ностальгия по советским временам и тем более по маразматическим и бездарным лидерам СССР конца 1980-х гг., специально оговаривается армянский политик. Это – всего лишь осмысление того факта, что уже в современных условиях ведется крайне продуманная системная работа по навязыванию России, как справедливо отметил Модест Колеров в своей вышеуказанной статье, «Нюрнберга против России» (так было озаглавлено интервью главного редактора ИА REGNUM, опубликованное на днях информагентством, на которое ссылается Арташес Гегамян. – Прим. KM.RU). При этом остальным странам СНГ уготована роль холуев – разоблачителей преступлений тоталитаризма.

Существует ли связь, задается далее политик вопросом, между принятой 23 августа с. г. Варшавской Декларацией с событиями, которые имеют место быть в Ливии и Сирии? Какие последствия Декларация может иметь для постсоветских государств, охваченных программой ЕС «Восточное партнерство», в которой задействованы Украина, Белоруссия, Молдавия, Грузия, Азербайджан и Армения?

Чтобы понять подлинную суть происходящего в Ливии и Сирии, он приводит выдержки из интервью Пола Крейга Робертса, бывшего заместителя министра финансов в администрации Рональда Рейгана, которое тот дал телекомпании Press TV. Арташес Гегамян напоминает, что Пола Крейга Робертса сам Рейган называл «настоящим отцом рейганомики». Итак, в вышеуказанном интервью Пол Крейг Робертс заявляет: «Мы хотим свергнуть Каддафи в Ливии и Асада в Сирии, потому что хотим выгнать Китай и Россию из Средиземноморья». Дальше – больше. «Какой наш интерес в протестах в Сирии?», – задает вопрос Пол Крейг Робертс и отвечает на него так: «За протестами стоят американцы. Мы заинтересованы в этом, потому что у русских есть военно-морская база, которая обеспечивает им присутствие в Средиземном море. Так что, вы видите, Вашингтон вмешался в Ливии и прилагает все больше усилий для вмешательства в Сирии, потому что мы хотим избавиться от русских и китайцев».

Судя по сообщениям самых разных источников, режим Каддафи обречен, отмечает Арташес Гегамян. Удастся ли Национальному переходному совету (НПС) сохранить единую Ливию и не дать распасться на три государства в соответствии с границами исторически существовавших областей: Триполитанию на северо-западе, Киренаику на северо-востоке и Феццан (Феззан) – на юге, покажет время. Установится ли мир на земле Ливии, которая по своей площади (1 759 540 кв. км, из них 90% занимают пустыни) является четвертой страной в Африке и 17-й в мире? Это – тема для отдельного анализа, пишет автор.

Бесспорно одно, подчеркивает он, что после последних событий в Ливии основное внимание мировых центров силы будет сосредоточено на Сирии. В случае дальнейшей эскалации напряженности в Сирии неизбежно вовлечение во внутренний конфликт этой страны соседней с ней Турции, хотя бы под предлогом приостановления надвигающейся «гуманитарной катастрофы», связанной с массовым пересечением беженцами сирийско-турецкой границы. Определенная роль будет отведена и курдскому населению, и не только Сирии, но и Ирана, и Турции. Естественно, эта роль предполагается быть дестабилизирующей. И все это будет происходить в приграничных с Арменией государствах Турции, Иране, а также в Сирии, в которой вот уже около 100 лет проживает более чем 200-тысячная армянская диаспора. Не приходится сомневаться в том, что «политика управляемого хаоса», которая успешно реализуется под фирменным названием «арабская весна», может быть распространена как на Армению, так и на Азербайджан, предостерегает Арташес Гегамян.

Если же при этом, пишет он далее, не без участия внешних сил будет одновременная дестабилизация ситуации в Армении и Азербайджане, то это приведет к созданию положения «управляемого хаоса» и взорвет ситуацию в Южном Кавказе. А там на очереди, глядишь, уже центральноазиатские государства – члены СНГ. И, следуя логике последних событий в Северной Африке, такая политика мировых центров силы будет реализовываться при одновременных попытках дестабилизировать обстановку в самой России. Россия в союзе с ослабленными государствами – членами ОДКБ будет иметь все меньше и меньше возможностей противостоять действиям западных стратегов, которые устанавливают «новый мировой порядок», основанный на «управляемом хаосе».

К достижению этой же задачи, скорее всего, нацелена Варшавская Декларация от 23 августа 2011 года. С одной стороны, заложенные в Декларации положения в случае их реализации неизбежно будут разрыхлять основы единства российского общества. С другой стороны, через программу «Восточного партнерства» авторы Варшавской Декларации будут вовлекать партнеров России по ОДКБ (Армения, Белоруссия) и СНГ (Азербайджан, Украина, Молдавия) в работу по сбору материалов, обличающих «преступную деятельность тоталитарного СССР». В то же самое время соответствующая пропагандистская машина на этом фоне развяжет очередной виток информационной войны, преследующей цель нагнетания антироссийских, русофобских настроений. Это, в свою очередь, по принципу сообщающихся сосудов, незамедлительно перекинется в саму Россию. Ведь не секрет, что сегодня в РФ проживают и обеспечивают не только свое, но и существование своих родственников в СНГ многомиллионные армянская, азербайджанская, грузинская, молдавская, таджикская диаспоры.

Можно привести и другие веские аргументы, подтверждающие факт проведения целенаправленной и эшелонированной работы по размыванию основ государственности России и его союзников по ОДКБ, однако думается, что вышеизложенное позволяет сделать вывод: стратегия расчленения России уже вступила в горячую фазу, заключает Арташес Гегамян.

Темы: Территориальные и финансовые претензии к России со стороны республик бывшего СССР, Отношения России с республиками бывшего СССР, Геополитическая стратегия Запада в отношении республик б.СССР
Источник: KMnews

NPR13.7 - A New Kind of Law Beyond Entailing Law: The Ensemble Approach7

by Stuart Kauffman

Two posts ago, in "The End Of A Physics Worldview: Heraclitus And The Watershed of Life," I agued, I believe correctly, that no law entails the detailed evolution of the biosphere, or human life. At stake is our entire framework of understanding the universe, for reductionism claims that there shall be a "theory of everything" that entails all that happens in the universe, evolution, life, social systems, and history.

If I, with Giuseppe Longo, am right, the reductionist view is inadequate. We live beyond the watershed of life and beyond entailing law.

In this post I wish to speak to a new issue: If life is beyond entailing law, what forms of law can we have where life is concerned, if any? I believe we can. One approach is based on what I call the "ensemble approach."


I begin with the insights of Longo and Bailly in Mathematics and the Natural Sciences: The Physical Singularity of Life (Imperial College Press, 2011). Longo and Bailly establish convincingly that the modern foundations of physics, classical and quantum, have the following two essential properties: i. The phase space of the system in question, i.e., the space of its "possible behaviors," is pre-stated and pre-fixed. ii. The behavior of the system is, however, always a unique trajectory that optimizes some criterion. For a ball rolling down a set of interconnected bowls, the optimum is a path that minimizes an action, the principle of least action. In general terms, they claim, the actual trajectory follows a shortest path or geodesic on some surface, or manifold which may be curved.

Bailly and Longo, and I in Reinventing the Sacred, believe that the phase space of life is ever changing and unprestatable. Life follows myriad pathways, not geodesics, without entailing law.

The Ensemble Approach And A Form Of Self Organization

The ensemble approach may prove useful. I will give four examples where it has been applied: genetic regulatory networks, the origin of life, that statistical features of rugged fitness landscapes, and in physics, spin glasses. I discuss the first in detail.

First, as a young man I was thinking about cell differentiation. How could different cells in you, all having the same genes, be different: liver, kidney etc.?

It was known that in different cells types, different genes were active making specific and different sets of proteins. In 1961 and 1963, French microbiologists, F. Jacob and J. Monod, cracked the problem when they showed that, in E. coli bacteria, one gene could make a protein, say A, that bound to a DNA region next to another gene, say the B gene, and turn on or turn off the B gene's formation of its own B protein. In a seminal 1963 paper they argued that if two genes, A and B, each repressed, or turned off, the other gene, the little two gene circuit had two dynamical steady states: A on B off; A off B on. Hence they said, the same set of genes could express different proteins corresponding to two cell types.

Their work led to the central question of systems biology: What is the genetic regulatory network among 23,000 human genes, of which about 2,200 regulate one another's activities and regulate the rest of the 23,000?

Here we need to know which genes regulate which genes, and by what rules. Then we need to integrate the equations of motion of such a network to discover its integrated behavior.

Just as Newton's laws for billiard balls yield, upon integration and given initial and boundary conditions, the trajectory of the balls, for a classical physics genetic network, the behavior of the system has a trajectory from each initial state. These typically end up on small subsets of states, called attractors, each of which drains a basin of attraction. Cell types probably correspond to attractors, differentiation to noise or signal induced flow among attractors.

Here is the ensemble approach: I wondered if natural selection had to struggle to create very specific, engineered networks to achieve controlled differentiation from the fertilized egg, or zygote, called ontogeny, or, I hoped, some broad class, or ensemble of networks would all have good enough dynamical behavior to underlie ontogeny with just some tuning by natural selection.

To ask this question I idealized the behavior of a gene as an on-off device, a light bulb, and asked was there a class of large genetic networks that yielded orderly behavior. To ask this question is inherently to take the ensemble approach. It asks whether there are typical (i.e., generic) behaviors in different classes or ensembles of networks.

In my case I imagined N genes, each with K inputs. There are vastly many networks, an entire ensemble of networks, with N = 23,000 genes, and K = say, 2 inputs per gene. To study the typical properties of this ensemble, one approach is to sample at random from this ensemble. Thus, I chose the K = 2 inputs to each gene at random from among the N, and for each I assigned at random one of the 16 possible logical, or Boolean, functions prescribing the behavior of the regulated gene at the next-time moment, given the on or off states of its two inputs at the current moment. The and function is such a Boolean function. It says the regulated gene will be on at the next moment only if both its inputs are on at the present moment.

To summarize many years of work by many on Random Boolean Networks, it turns out that they behave in three regimes: ordered, chaotic, and a critical edge of chaos regime which is a phase transition between order and chaos. K = 2 networks turn out to be critical for the ensemble of networks with randomly chosen Boolean functions. Critical networks can have other values of K greater than 2 by using non-random choices of Boolean function of K inputs.

Now three essential facts: i. critical and ordered networks exhibit very ordered, and also multiple, attractors, hence the generic behaviors of these networks exhibits a new form of self organization — generic order in an ensemble of systems. These ordered attractors are so ordered that the different attractors could explain the order of the different cell types in an organism. ii. It is becoming clear that differentiated cell types are almost certainly attractors. iii. More amazingly, cells appear to be critical, to live on the edge of chaos.

Note two essential features of the ensemble approach: i. There is a vast ensemble of NK Random Boolean Networks, or more realistic models of genetic networks, all of which are dynamically critical. In short, criticality is a feature of an entire ensemble of networks, not just of one. ii. Critical networks are a subset of all Random Boolean Networks, those at the edge of chaos. If cells are critical, natural selection must hold networks at the edge of chaos for adaptive reasons — here is the mixture of ensemble self-organization and natural selection.

The Ensemble Approach Can Yield Statistical Laws Beyond Entailing Laws

As noted at the start of this post, no law entails the detailed evolution of the biosphere, including the evolution of genetic regulatory networks. This means we cannot deduce ab initio what those networks are. But the ensemble approach allows statistical laws about the typical features and behaviors of the entire ensemble of critical networks.

More profoundly evolution does not follow geodesics. Thus evolution is not entailed. It follows myriad pathways mixing quantum random indeterminate mutations and non-random natural selection. The ensemble approach is the natural way to seek statistical laws about the behaviors of genetic regulatory networks, without needing to know the details of any specific genetic regulatory network. As we learn more about real networks, we can refine the specifications of the ensemble, hence the generic behaviors of the refined ensemble, for better statistical predictions.

In short, the ensemble approach marries to the lack of entailing law for evolution, to yield a viable approach to statistical laws beyond entailing law.

Finally, the ensemble approach has been used by physicists with respect to spin glasses, and by me and others with respect to models of the generic origin of self-reproducing, collectively autocatalytic sets of organic molecules, where it appears that there is a phase transition in complex reaction networks to molecular self reproduction.

I hope life is generic.

The ensemble approach has also been used by me and others to study the typical statistical properties of tunably rugged fitness (or payoff) landscapes, of use in biology, and even economics, (See my Origins of Order or At Home in the Universe, Oxford University Press 1993, 1995).



Comments


1

Stuart, I'm sorry that I misspelled your name, I sometimes use Google's translator to recheck was written, but then from Russian there is only this variant of your name.

I really think you should still take into account context. For example, you can definitely reduce the variable K, and therefore do landscape smoother if the connections within the system move in context (if instead of connection within the system we connect it with its context).

For example, this happens when an individual shifts his or her responsibility to someone else. I think that in this way can be described hierarchy.
samedi 27 août 2011 11:50:01

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Vlad Piaskovskiy (0nothing1) wrote:

2

Stuart, do not you think if you look at a larger scale, when the system reaches the attractor, its present state is determined not so much by the previous one, but by the very attractor, ie its future state?

So it seems this virtual skeleton, which shapes and orders chaos, acts from the future ... And if so, cancer must be one of the most natural disease - problem with this virtual skeleton should naturaly lead to out-of-control chaos.
samedi 27 août 2011 11:45:30

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Vlad Piaskovskiy (0nothing1) wrote:

3

Richard Dawkins looks at the genes "from the bottom" as a reductionist, and quite rightly concludes that, from this perspective, the notion of an individual organism is an illusion. On the other hand, it is not clear why, for example, not all parasites that get inside a body, not become organelles. So this virtual form, in my opinion, is simply the negation of context, and your model should take this into account.
(There was a very interesting article that Lamarckism can not be discounted, perhaps not a coincidence that it was written by immunologist, I do not give a link because unfortunately it was in Russian.)
Interestingly, this form can not be regarded as a hierarchy, but it's probably only defines boundaries within which is complete freedom, for exampe, skin cells must cover everything and stop.
samedi 27 août 2011 11:44:53

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Basil Roche (NagaJr) wrote:

Me too, Bob, but now Russell's gone and raised the bar. A 4-track mind. Sheesh!
samedi 27 août 2011 01:05:28

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Bob Wilson (PorchGuy) wrote:

Basil Roche (NagaJr) wrote:
Well, there's Science, Bob, and now there's Systems Science. It's possible to both chew gum and walk down stairs simultaneously, you know.
---
Very well said!
I'm chewing on the problem of Synthesis.
I’m not happy with SJ Gould’s ideas about non-overlapping magisteria.
Stuart asked the central question on a previous post: would you rather be Newton or Shakespeare?
A very interesting “either or" question.
Walking and chewing gum simultaneously is the transcendent ideal I long for.

vendredi 26 août 2011 21:50:35

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Stuart Kauffman (SAK43) wrote:

Thanks Russell. .Stu
vendredi 26 août 2011 17:16:28

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Russell Grunloh (boatguy) wrote:

Darn it.
Here's the clean link
http://www.radiolab.org/blogs/radiolab-blog/2011/jul/26/4-track-mind/
without my inept attempt at hypertext.

vendredi 26 août 2011 13:28:29

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Vlad Piaskovskiy (0nothing1) wrote:

2

Stuart, do not you think if you look at a larger scale, when the system reaches the attractor, its present state is determined not so much by the previous one, but by the very attractor, ie its future state?

So it seems this virtual skeleton, which shapes and orders chaos, acts from the future ... And if so, cancer must be one of the most natural disease - problem with this virtual skeleton should naturaly lead to out-of-control chaos.
samedi 27 août 2011 11:45:30

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Vlad Piaskovskiy (0nothing1) wrote:

3

Richard Dawkins looks at the genes "from the bottom" as a reductionist, and quite rightly concludes that, from this perspective, the notion of an individual organism is an illusion. On the other hand, it is not clear why, for example, not all parasites that get inside a body, not become organelles. So this virtual form, in my opinion, is simply the negation of context, and your model should take this into account.
(There was a very interesting article that Lamarckism can not be discounted, perhaps not a coincidence that it was written by immunologist, I do not give a link because unfortunately it was in Russian.)
Interestingly, this form can not be regarded as a hierarchy, but it's probably only defines boundaries within which is complete freedom, for exampe, skin cells must cover everything and stop.
samedi 27 août 2011 11:44:53

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Basil Roche (NagaJr) wrote:

Me too, Bob, but now Russell's gone and raised the bar. A 4-track mind. Sheesh!
samedi 27 août 2011 01:05:28

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Bob Wilson (PorchGuy) wrote:

Basil Roche (NagaJr) wrote:
Well, there's Science, Bob, and now there's Systems Science. It's possible to both chew gum and walk down stairs simultaneously, you know.
---
Very well said!
I'm chewing on the problem of Synthesis.
I’m not happy with SJ Gould’s ideas about non-overlapping magisteria.
Stuart asked the central question on a previous post: would you rather be Newton or Shakespeare?
A very interesting “either or" question.
Walking and chewing gum simultaneously is the transcendent ideal I long for.

vendredi 26 août 2011 21:50:35

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NPR STAFF:

Stuart Kauffman (SAK43) wrote:

Thanks Russell. .Stu
vendredi 26 août 2011 17:16:28

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Russell Grunloh (boatguy) wrote:

Darn it.
Here's the clean link
http://www.radiolab.org/blogs/radiolab-blog/2011/jul/26/4-track-mind/
without my inept attempt at hypertext.

vendredi 26 août 2011 13:28:29

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Russell Grunloh (boatguy) wrote:

All,
For a brief aside, I recommend _this_">http://www.radiolab.org/blogs/radiolab-blog/2011/jul/26/4-track-mind/"/>_this_ short from "Radiolab".

We've discussed the mysterious unity of consciousness before on this extended thread, and now the ensemble approach. The subject of the piece appears to be able to run four different complex threads simultaneously without "ensemble-ing" them, through the means of a unifying 3D visualization.
As a musician having had to perform multiple time signature Charles Ives charts, I must concede his performance to be almost unbelievable and revelatory of the nature of comprehension.

I apologize if this seems off-topic, but I trust it will be worth your while.


vendredi 26 août 2011 13:25:25

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Vlad Piaskovskiy (0nothing1) wrote:

Stewart, do not you think that your model must also take into account and the relationship with contests? Could you assign a variable for this? To me, this is exactly what is missing.


NPR STAFF:

Stuart Kauffman (SAK43) wrote:

cont As physicist Max Aldana is spearheading, we can study the effects of selection on the evolution of the ensemble itself, again with new predictions. It seems the ensemble approach is one sensible approach to predicting the typical behaviors of systems in an evolving ensemble, but without predicting the detailed structure, logic and behavior of any one network. In turn, if successful, the ensemble approach implies that the successfully predicted generic behaviors of the ensemble members do NOT DEPEND upon the specifics of any particular evolved member of the ensemble. It is new kind of statistical mechanics, not over the states of one system, but over the generic behaviors of an ensemble of evolving systems.
jeudi 25 août 2011 13:00:29

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NPR STAFF:

Stuart Kauffman (SAK43) wrote:

cont, where critical random Boolean nets predict that the number of cell types in an organism scales as the square root of the number of its genes - which seems roughly true. Or we predict the statistics of transitions among attractors and try to map it to the statistics of differentiation from one cell type to others, which again matches reality. Or we propose that the fertilized egg does not "reach" all cell type attractors of which the genomic system is capable, so some of the unused cell types may be cancer, hence open to curing by inducing them to differentiate into normal cells - cancer differentiation therapy where my colleague Sui Huang and I are finding initial confirming (to be tested much further) results. Or we find that critical networks have optimality properties and predict that cells are dynamically critical due to a marriage of self organization AND selection. Here initial evidence says cells may really be dynamically critical. So: in summary, the ensemble approach does truly allow predictions that can be and are being tested.

But as we learn more of real genetic regulatory networks we can refine the specifications of the ensemble of model networks to get refined predictions and can also, as Max Aldana cont
jeudi 25 août 2011 12:57:35

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NPR STAFF:

Stuart Kauffman (SAK43) wrote:

HI All, There are two main themes of this post: i. from "The End of a Physics Worldview: Heraclitus and the Watershed of Life", I hope, with Giuseppe Longo, to be building an increasingly strong case that no law entails the evolution of the biosphere or our econosphere or all of human life. We must treat such a huge claim with caution, for if it is true, Nobel laureate S. Weinberg's dream of a final theory that entails all that happens in the universe is false. 2. Assuming the truth of the Heraclitus post, if the detailed evolution of life and the living is beyond entailing law, what types of laws might we have? This opens the door to all of the social sciences, economics, sociology, psyschology, anthropology. It also opens the door to an Ensemble Approach. In this approach we purposely give up trying to model the details of whatever we study, eg genetic regulatory networks, and study instead a definable class, or ensemble, of genetic regulatory systems and seek the average, or typical, or generic behavior of members of that ensemble. One way to do so is to sample from the ensemble at random, eg my Random Boolean Networks. Then one DOES try to make predictions: eg the number of attractors to the number of cell types, cont.
jeudi 25 août 2011 12:52:39

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Bob Wilson (PorchGuy) wrote:

If ensemble theory yields testable hypotheses I am interested.
F=MA yielded testable predictions, as did e=mc^2.
What is the equation of ensemble theory?
Is ensemble theory empirically testable?

mercredi 24 août 2011 20:34:33

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Elliot Tarabour (etarabour) wrote:

Hi Bob,

I agree. It is good to be critical and question everything. But if you Cauldron boils hot you may kill many things off or you may get some excellent soup.

e.

mercredi 24 août 2011 14:06:01

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Vlad Piaskovskiy (0nothing1) wrote:

1

Stuart, thanks, what you wrote sounds reassuring. As you can see, I read your book (Origins of Order or At Home in the Universe) very carefully and not once, and it's worth it! Now I am happy to discuss it!

Phil wrote:
"Life is a non-equilibrium state, so it need not follow the path of least action - it can choose to expend energy to follow another path."

Phil, I think in this case, you're wrong: in each case we are dealing rather with a choice of different paths of development, within each of them the system follows the path of least action. We have already discussed the collapse of quantum states, and it relates to the relationship between Potential and Actual and between text and context.

Here is an example, Mike, this is my answer to you!
mercredi 24 août 2011 12:01:35

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Vlad Piaskovskiy (0nothing1) wrote:

2

Imagine that you have your own business, and like any normal businessman your main task - to make a profit. And then, one day a corporation - it still was your rival - invited to join them, promising that there you will have more. You have joined, the money you won but maybe you lost something? Now you have a boss - this is another happy purchase - in fact, your relationship is purely formal, then you can treat him as your client - who cares? Try it, and then tell me what happened ... Clearly, if with a client you were on an equal (ideally) then now you become subordinate - there hierarchy emerged. This means that no sane economist should no longer consider you as an independent selfish players.
mercredi 24 août 2011 12:00:53

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Vlad Piaskovskiy (0nothing1) wrote:

3

In terms of game theory, you and your boss are playing entirely different rules - that is allowed to Jupiter is not allowed to bull - this is hierarchy. So what you lost? Your Potential. If before, at least theoretically, your company could become the second Microsoft, but now it is not you who determines your future. The relationship with context was changed: instead of preserving the independence of it (negation), it is obedience (ie - merger). It was a choice between maintaining Potential and the transition to a stable state. But within each scenario BUT WITHIN EACH SCENARIO THE SYSTEM FOLLOWS THE PATH OF LEAST ACTION!

This implies many interesting conclusions, for example, that money does not necessarily make us free, but quite the contrary - we often have to pay them for our independence. The same applies to the States: to maintain the sovereignty they need to maintain many of the unprofitable national industry (in the U.S., I have heard similar problems with the automotive industry, for example), but it is perfectly rational strategy!
mercredi 24 août 2011 11:59:42

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Vlad Piaskovskiy (0nothing1) wrote:

4

And these are two different strategies in real life: to earn as much as possible and to maintain your own independence. So that once we sold ourselves, we find ourselves trapped in a local peak - this secret known by all the founders of large companies: during their evolution they are definitely not once received tempting offers to merge - they all refused, but they somehow convince us that a "rational economic player" has to climb to the first available local peak.

So the call of the Tea Party to return to the early capitalism in practice should mean the transition to the strategy of independence for each player - to do business for the sake of business itself, in order not to work for others.
mercredi 24 août 2011 11:57:15

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Бинарная экспансия: метод создания и консервирования социального хаоса

http://perevodika.ru/articles/19089.html