Entangled bead from Paul S. Prueitt

Entangled Bead, Posted November 5, 1999

Open for comment.

• In response to a question from Chris, to the NECSI Forum Chris said:
  "Don tried to draw a distinction between his system and mine by saying that his system has a "model by which it modifies its PRESENT behavior" (emphasis his). This is a logical impossibility (as long as the system does not consist only of a straight-line speed-of-light signal propagation :-).
• **To which I reply**

  If the model of self exists as an observation from one time scale into another time scale (notion of self image or system image), then the cause of a system image (i.e., the cause of the model used in anticipation) would not be directly observable by the biological awareness involved in anticipation. (Sounds like human memory, as discussed by Tulving and Schactner in, "Memory 1994".)

  In this case, the cause of the system image would be non reactionary with the events that are observed (in the level of organization fro which the observation exists) - except as a "cross level" perturbation, like we see in the two slit experiment and Bell's inequality.

• Chris continues in the say message to the forum:

  "I don't see that what you're saying is interesting to most scientists. Even the extension of this ( a viewpoint presented by Dan and Paul) --that there are multiple types of modeling relations--isn't very significant by itself. Find me a modeling relation that works better for a problem I care about--then I'll be interested. Or invent a branch of science that could produce results by doing something different.

• **To which I reply**

  We feel that the tri-level architecture for full text retrieval will invert the precision/recall graphs that all of us have to put up with from the current generation of web type query algorithms.

• Chris continues in the same message to the forum:

  ... there is value in a call to look for new modeling relations, and the concept of "modeling relation" is a useful structure for the creative enterprise of developing a new one. But stop talking about how bad things are today, and show some new results!

  Give us something we can use! The complexity people have already gone far beyond the bugbear you and Don call the Newtonian paradigm (or reductionism). Stop beating a dead horse."

• **To which I reply**

  I think that we (you and I) disagree as to whether the complexity people have actually made a paradigm shift. Again, part of the problem is that the military and intelligence communities have made some of the wrong stuff secret, and have funded the wrong paradigm. What they call, fund and black box as "emergent computing" is just a buzz word to the program management - they do not see this as a stratified process.

  I have specifically stated over and over again that the complexity people (such as Yaneer and the Santa Fe Institute) make the category error that Don and I and Robert Rosen have talked about. They mistake the formal model for the natural system. This is, I claim due to their not really being able to give up the religion of reductionism.

• ***As for why this stratified view of reality might be important to scientists?

  Well if the ontology of the real world happens to be stratified (as some feel that it is) then stratified views would interest scientists (like myself and Don) because it is a better model of the real world than is the Newtonian Laplacian reductionist model of the real world.

  The utility of science, as seen from the prospective of an industrial age, should not be the ruler that we as a culture measure the investigation of our world. However, the utility of stratified approaches to analysis may be soon more readily seen