Note to New England Complex Systems Insititute Forum from Paul Prueitt

In reply to a note from David E. Booher to the Forum and note from Brian Josephson.

Jamie said: "The net issue is perception - in the value of the information to the health of the organism/mind." His statement seems to summarize my own thoughts regarding the exchange between David and Brian. I have thought about the nature of a "self image" and how difficult this topic has been for the science community. Perhaps one can think of each self-image as an oscillatory system that acts in some type of control fashion to move the organism/mind through various behavioral expressions, state - gesture responses. If the oscillators are weakly coupled, then phase coherence is seen to produce a global quasi-unity that is transient and yet enslaving. Emergent process compartments are created, and yet thermodynamical models do not constitute the full reality of the processes that personal introspection informs us about.

If I understand Stan's position, then there is an "incompleteness" in his view of social and mental reality, as there is a class of phenomenon that are not even adequately described in terms of the second law. Certainly, any current explanation of self-image is not a validated scientific explanation. The position he holds is perfectly consistent and rational, but is incomplete as a description of self image.

Even here, we have the problem of other minds, in that the autonomy of each mind seems to be able to select out one type (of a family of types) of coherent expressions. These expressions then form a new level of coherence as expressed into a larger social system. In this social system coherence is not always possible between two individual minds - perhaps this is the basis for Benjamin Whorf's arguments on the un-translatability of some word tokens between a source and target language.

A room, to use the metaphor introduced by David, would be some social coherence that is similar to, i.e., has a communitive modeling relationship (as discussed by Don) with, a basin of attraction in an emergent manifold.

But I think that this room is not of an individual creation, but rather it is socially created. If this is true and relevant to the discussion of David and Brian, then science has much to worry about in regard to the funding of, and acceptance of criterion for, science. The influences of social interactions include many determinants that are not even close to how science is conceived to work by Karl Popper for example. Ego preservation and non-collaborative behaviors being high on the list, but also determinants that act as control mechanisms from political, and economic self interests.

Perhaps that best response to my argument is to say " oh well" what can we do about this. We are after all only individuals.

Paul