>Brian Harper wrote:
>"Glenn's gasket program is an example of self-ordering. The order can be
>seen from the self-similarity of the resulting patterns. The same can be
>said about the Mandelbrot set, it looks really complicated but it's
>reducible to a simple algorithm so it's ordered."
>
>Sorry to quote you from over a week ago,
I'll see your week and raise you a few :-).
GM:================================================
> but I have been pondering this and
>developing some programs to test a couple of ideas. You are correct that the
>gasket program is self-ordering and not self-organizing. But that is not
>irrelevant to the problem of life. Let me try a couple of definintions on
>here and see if we can communicate more effectively.
>
>Self-organization. I would define this as being equivalent to the problem of
>the origin of life. As you have mentioned life is organized, not ordered.
> It is organization which is needed for life to start. I agree with the
>critics of evolution that the naturalists have not proven their case that
>life can arise on its own. This is not to say, as some critics contend, that
>it is impossible for life to have arisen on its own. I am merely stating
>that the data does not prove it possible and does not prove it impossible.
> Thus the scientific thing to do here is remain agnostic on the question.
>
It seems we still don't agree on definitions. I think this is a relatively
minor point here since you say explicitly what you mean by the terms
you're using, i.e. the ideas are more important than the words. Anyway,
I think most complexologists would consider evolution to be, for the most
part, a self-organizing process, especially wrt the origin of novelty.
GM:==========================================================================
>Self-ordering. Life has a self ordering process which is quite universal and
>necessary. This is what a fertilized egg does when it develops into an adult
>of whatever species. The information for the self-ordering is contained in
>the DNA 'programming'. This is why a cat embryo always produces a cat and
>not a platypus. Self-ordering places my liver and your liver in homologous
>places (normally). Self-ordering makes sure that most of us have 5 fingers
>and not 8. Successful self-ordering puts my toes on my feet and not above my
>eyes. But even in the case of major mutation or developmental errors (like
>the Goldschmidt toad we all argued about) the egg was still self-ordering,
>just ordered differently.
I would call all of these examples of organization. I think practically
everything about life is organized, not just life's origin. I think one
of the problems here is that in every day usage order and organization
can mean much the same thing. One dictionary I looked at uses "ordered"
as part of the definition of organized. It's perhaps unfortunate, but
nevertheless true, that words in specialized fields take on different
meanings than in common usage, i.e. "information" in information theory.
The definition of "ordered" in algorithmic information theory is the
opposite of what is generally meant by organization. This may lead to
confusion unless one is careful, but the payback is that ordered has
a precise, mathematical definition. Now all we need is a precise definition
of organization that everyone will agree with :-).
I think a good way to keep clear on this is to think about crystals since
crystals are a really good example of "ordered". For example, eggs are
not at all like crystals and the development of an egg into an organism is
not at all like crystallization.
Here's a good example of the type of confusion one finds in the literature
on this:
To begin, we have to decide what to take as the fundamental quantity
that increases in evolution. One candidate might be order, on the
grounds that this is what decreases in thermodynamical systems, but
this is unsatisfactory because it leads to the prediction that
evolution should produce organisms which more and more resemble
perfect single crystals!
-- P.T. Saunders and M.W. Ho, 1986,"Thermodynamics and Complex Systems",
<Disequilibrium and Self Organization>, C.W. Kilmister, ed.,
D. Reidel, 1986, pp. 243-253.
Well, these guys get an A+ in my book, at least in the sense that they
understand that self-ordering is looking through the wrong end of the
telescope [as Yockey puts it]. Kauffman, Prigogine, take note ;-)
But...
In another article by the same authors *in the same volume*:
One of the most captivating questions about evolution is how
life itself emerged. From the scientific point of view, life
is a particular organization of matter which exhibits metabolism
and reproduction. The question can thus be rephrased in the words
of Pasteur: can matter organize itself ? [...]
So far, so good. Their use of the word organization implies highly complex,
non-ordered. But later, on the same page:
The answer to the question of whether matter can organize itself
must surely be an unqualified yes. The physics and chemistry of
matter is such that ordered structures can arise spontaneously
in open systems. For example, highly ordered hexagonal
convection cells can suddenly appear in a horizontal layer of
fluid which is heated from below to beyond a critical temperature.
Similarly, temporal and spatial oscillations associated with the
Belousov-Zhabotinskii reaction will give rise to a whole range of
coherent structures depending on the geometry of the medium.
"Evidence for self-ordering in pre-biotic evolution comes from ..."
-- M.W. Ho and P.T. Saunders, 1986,"Evolution: Natural Selection
or Self-Organization",<Disequilibrium and Self Organization>,
C.W. Kilmister, ed., D. Reidel, 1986, pp. 231-242.
Note the switch in terms from organized to ordered.
Now, onward to your programs:
First, I think you've done a marvelous job on these programs, but,
I'm afraid you've put me in a bit of a bind. To be fair, I have to
evaluate the little critters according to the same criteria I used
when concluding that your gasket program was an example of self-
ordering, i.e. I have to look for repeating patterns, self-similarities
or some evidence suggesting they are ordered. I ran your programs
in Windows so that I could use a screen capture program to zoom in
and study them in detail. Except for the initial stages, dots and
lines, I have to conclude that the critters are complex. Whether they
are organized depends on how one defines organized. Some people define
self-organization as a spontantaneous increase in complexity. With this
definition it is clear, to me anyway, that the initial phase of the
"evolve" program is one of self-organization. I remember running one
case where there was a sudden inversion of this process, i.e. a
complicated spatial pattern suddenly changed to a vertical line.
So, there doesn't seem to be a continual, upward spiral of complexity
as one would probably want. This is just an observation rather than
a criticism since I realize you were not trying to include this type
of behavior in your model.
I, for one, don't like the above definition of self-organization since
organized and complex come to mean essentially the same thing, which
means, of course, that one of the two words is not needed. So, I would
rather call this self-complexification and let organization refer to
something else. Exactly what is hard to pin down, but, for starters
I would say that organized thingies are always complex, complex thingies
are not necessarily organized.
My bottom line is that Glenn's programs perform as advertised, i.e. they
illustrate the principles that he intended. I agree with Gordon, however,
in that they should be considered, for the time being anyway, as suggestive
rather than conclusive. I still think you go a little over board in
some of your claims about the power of modeling, but, this is forgivable
as a natural reaction to some of the unfair criticisms you have received.
To me it seems much more interesting and exciting to try some daring
experiments and see where they take you than it is to sit on the side
lines yelling "foul ball".
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Brian Harper | "Do not conclude from your apprenticeship |
| that you have nothing left to learn" -- Pascal |
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