William Connelly reading, "A World of Becoming"

1. Summary of key points...

2. Develop an argument about compelling points:

There’s a break between the humanities and the sciences, for several reasons, but there’s this complexity theory that might be able to bridge that gap. It purports the following 3 ideas:

From any given moment and perspective in time, we’re unable to predict what will arise in the future, especially on a large scale. This is because everything that happens depends in some part on its environment. Some of the changes that happened in the past, which resulted in some sort of occurrence (or in the field of organismal biology, some trait) that hasn't been lost since then, might encounter novel aspects in the environment at just a time to make that trait or occurrence become suddenly important. These are unpredictable from our perspective, because we don’t understand all of the dynamic rules that are in flux and the underlying, “unimportant” traits or properties that will mix under such rules and fluctuations. And if we don’t understand those rules, how could we understand either the potentials for what they might become, or the direction these elements will take in the present-and-given-future?

I was trying to figure out what Poincare resonances are when I stumbled onto this interesting blog, http://quantumresonance.wordpress.com/tag/poincare/.  First let me just take a moment to say that it’s RIDICULOUS when a class transmits some understanding that then becomes the ability to read meaning and information where I previously would have gotten gibberish. Second, this blog helped me interpret the meaning of Poincare resonances through the example of a harmonic string that vibrates in response to a string nearby of the same note that vibrates first. The transmission that happens there is due to complex rules in the environment (it seems to me, btw that this examples makes it impossible to reduce the world to something we only experience in our heads) allowing the strings and the vibrations to resonate with one another. To make the string example greater, think of an orchestra. If a whole bunch of strings are vibrating together next to another, then the string from one cello is likely causing vibrations in a harmonic string from the next cello, so on and so forth, creating a vibrational effect that…may be undetectable to the normal ear?...but has a subliminal effect that may explain why we’re so drawn to live music, or huge orchestras. And probably this is a horrible example, but potentially there’s some self-organizational aspect, in that the composer works from both the individual sounds and the subliminal sounds of the vibrations, to inform his composing so that these sounds build into one another and inform each other in a way that leads to this incredible musical phenomena… And while we could say that these reactions or these huge (emergent) creations are due to chance, the very fact of this being inside of a system (or environment) means that the result is due to complex interactions that come about thru the play of the system’s rules and the actual causal point (or more appropriately, infinite points of causality, each informing the next). And here I’m going to refer again to this blog post I found, because I think he took this concept even further…

“Causality has from a philosophical viewpoint two integrated elements: The causal potential and the complex harmonic receptor effects. Together they form a complex adaptive system of resonant layers between which new phenomenons emerge where resonances support information/energy exchange.”

I think this is essentially saying what I blathered on about. Each causal point informs every other causal point when it’s effect filters around through time and space, such that each changing point in the system ripples through time, space, and the changes each mechanism or agent caused can to become potentially larger than the cause it initially started, because one small change can cause changes nearby that cause huge changes later on (i.e. the butterfly effect).

“Those layers of emergent properties are on the lowest layers seperated by boundaries of symmetry-breaking phase transitions. More on those in my next posts.”

And then…wtf? The closest I can think of this (using models!) is that one emergent property, i.e. resonating strings, is in a way delineated by another emergent property, such as matter and sound waves, so that only nearby strings of the same note or harmonic can vibrate in response to the original string. 

I think I touched on this already, as it pretty flawlessly flows from the previous 2 points Connelly made. But I’m curious about the idea of systems being open. This may somewhat contradict the previous point made by my bloggist, and his idea of “symmetry-breaking phase transitions.” Or they may inform one another, and this is actually an example of how what you know really informs how much and the caliber of what you get from information. Scary thought…We're all trapped in our own perspective.

...

 Agency AND creativity! Each thing has a mechanical ability to become something in this world. This is both dependent upon its abilities and it’s environments, and also the springboard for its agency. The becoming, as I see it now, is something like…(the strong desire for sleep, which is all that I crave now)…no, it’s like the emergent phenomena of things acting inside a system. The emergent phenomena of e.coli eating shit in our gut is the digestive system! Or a part of it. The becoming of neurons firing and synapsing electrically is our brain…and more importantly our perceived SELF.

And because of previous points, let’s keep in mind that this act of becoming through our agency is unpredictable, and certainly not progressive. Here’s how he finally defines agency, which isn’t totally how I would have thought about it (I thought anything being able to interact with anything else would have some degree of mechanical agency):

And then of course he goes on to make the distinction between agency, mechanical stuff, and proto-agency, tying in the idea of emergent properties with the idea of becoming and attaching a degree of human-centered ideation and progress on his values of agency. It feels a little out of character with everything else he says. But he does eventually mention mechanical agency and how even things like electricity can be harnessed and formed into something with degrees of becoming. He talks about a power grid, I prefer to think of a streak of lightning…

Agency is further examined and broken down into the parts of minimal agency (something reacts to rules and does stuff), proto-agency involves life, meaning, and values (and so can react with intention, such as a baterium performing chemotaxis to find glucose), and complex agency, which humans and certainly some other primates seem to possess.

And what I said earlier about the butterfly effect, I'm realizing can be stated better: change to one agent in a system sets off concatenations of reactions. Whether we're discussing mechanical, proto-, or complex agents, the interactions of these things in a system of rules can cause novel or creative changes to emerge, that were not foreseen from the behaviors and understanding of the rules before that novel change emerged. 

To hearken back to my boyfriend's argument about free will, if we were some transcendent being that new all of the parts and the rules at every scale, every emergent property would be inevitable. There would be no creativity or surprise. Our sense of emergence comes from being embedded in the system.

3. Words I learned today:
concatenations: connected or linked in a series
confluences: a gathering, flowing, or meeting together at one juncture or point
dynamical: changing, objects in motion (adj)
apodictic: demonstrably true, incontrovertible
incontrovertible: impossible to dispute, unquestionable
flouts: to show contempt for or scorn
holism: The theory that living matter or reality is made up of organic or unified wholes that are greater than the simple sum of their parts