Tom, great title! It caught me immediately. The hierarchy is interesting and helps to bin different systems, yet it is also important to recognize all systems are interconnected.

The only reason that something can be a 'toaster' is because it was built by humans. Since one of us conceived of the toaster, and many helped engineer it, we have the potential of understanding the toaster in entirety - re-tracing the development of object to the seed 'idea'. This is still a complex task. I have only a vague idea how to make and chrome steel or cast heat resistant plastic polymers. Toasters have certainly evolved over time: new ones are digital! Their behaviors are far from being predictable. Each toaster is a unique instance of toaster, and some will toast 'better' than others.

As for cats and other living, biological systems that are greater than the sum of their parts, the lines can be blurred. It is not difficult to distinguish between a living and dead cat, or a living and dead human. But what about a human cell? We have the complete program (genome) for these cells. We are cataloging the parts and studying the interactions. We didn't make the human cell, but we're doing a great job of reverse engineering it. Also, unlike humans, living cells can be turned on or off, simply by freezing. More hardy cells than our own, like bacteria, can even be freeze dried, like instant coffee. Need life? Add water.

In the snowflake category, consciousness is probably a good example. Yet this phenomenon emerges from a base of cats (living systems) and toasters (cells). Again, all the systems are interconnected.

In my personal abstractions, I have reduced the binning to simply internal/object/external. Define any object (a system, really) and give it a name: toaster, cat, snowflake. There will always be an inside filled with components (heating element, leukocyte, hydrogen) that interact, and an outside environment that the object will exist and interact with other objects in. The only way to truly understand the object is to be it. Since we cannot be anything other than what we are, we are limited to moving our perspective up or down (internal/external) to understand how the systems work. There are no testable limits to this binning system, only theoretical ones.

-ah

Just came across another way of describing my concluding viewpoint.

Carlo Rovelli, a theoretical physicist writes:

"I am also convinced, but cannot prove, that there are no objects, but only relations. By this I mean that I am convinced that there is a consistent way of thinking about nature, that refers only to interactions between systems and not to states or changes of individual systems. I am convinced that this way of thinking nature will end up to be the useful and natural one in physics." (1)

1. http://edge.org/q2005/q05_2.html

-ah

interesting stuff, Andrew.... this dovetails with Robert Rosen's Relational Biology thinking, too... I am still working my way through his "Life, Itself" book; his daughter, Judith Rosen is active on this group... maybe she will pop in.

Andrew, interesting observations, but I would challenge the idea the you reverse engineer cells the same way we reverse engineer tosters. Evolution is a fundamentally different design process from the way engineers design toasters. To date, we haven't done much successful designing with complex systems (in the chaotic or edge of chaos sense).

My question is, "How do you build cats?" In other words, can we arrange the conditions where "cat like" systems emerge from materials that traditionally have been used to build toasters. One approach is to reverse engineer biological systems and attempt to tweak them or reuse parts to improve something or build something new. This problem is taken on by the other end by the artificial life researchers. Of course, we don't know which of these will pay off, but I suspect that the first approach had the biggest pitfalls and could lead to some sort of "grey goo" or killer virus that futurists worry about sometimes.

Interesting questions, and I have always liked the analogy Tom presents here.

In my world of metaphors, cats are grown, not built:

• Toasters are Built
• Cats are Grown and Evolve
• Snowflakes Condense when the conditions are right.

Tom Munnecke said:

One of the recurring themes of the book will be the need to jump "outside" the current system in order to understand it. Since I plan to be jumping outside of language itself, I'll need something other than words to explain what's going on.

(. . .)

• A cat is something which grows and evolves. The whole, living cat is greater than the dead, dissected cat. Our understanding of a cat does not necessarily increase with the precision of our measurement. Its whole is much greater than the sum of its parts. If we put 10 cats in a room, they are not predictable - we may end up with 2 or 20 cats.

I am really interested in knowing if there is a place for the 'Schrodinger's cat experience' in your book. I think that the analyze of this experience provides some arguments about 'jumping ''outside'' the current system' and a kind of 'virtual-real' world.

Andrew Hessel said:

As for cats and other living, biological systems that are greater than the sum of their parts, the lines can be blurred. It is not difficult to distinguish between a living and dead cat, or a living and dead human.

Not so evident when the cat is in a box with a special poison. . .

I know that, Tom. I'm trying to look at if from another way. We are rapidly aproaching a time where people talk of bio-engineering as if we can redesign living systems, and we start to believe they can and will. Can you not project a not so distant future where artificial life forms evolve, or bio-engineered mistakes put all life at risk?

I'm saying that the better we understand the distinctions you are making and how they interelate, the more the important questions become moral. What emerges? Is it good? How do we make sure it is? Our likelyhood of surviving the next century depends critically on how we address the moral dimensions of developments in science and technology.

Ok, I don't think I'm really getting my point across. Maybe this question. Is a corporation cat, toaster or snowflake? How about monetary systems?

Does this make my first post make more sense? When knowledge of living systems allows for the intervention of science and technology in the the flows and shapes of life and living, we begin to have so much boundary crossing with this classification that it is difficult to find a place to stand ....

What I understand of your thinking leads me to suggest that uplift you seek involves breathing life into dead systems. Many corporations are dead to life, but they don't have to be. Our monetary systems sap the lifeblood of populations for the benefit of a few. Do you see what I mean about moral questions. I think we need a new kind of design that embodies all of these dimensions and make possible a better future. I think that sort of design must know how to cross and navigate the phase changes going from toasters to snowflakes to cats, in other words to learn to engineer living systems with wisdom. If we don't, the engineering happens anyway, without wisdom.

I appreciate your comments on this... the TCS metaphors were intended to open up discussion of topics of complexity theory for a broad audience. I'm not sure I would categorize a corporation as any one specific one of these. Nor is my intention to figure out how to turn cats into toasters.

The richest use of the metaphor, in my head at least, is the notion that we are using toaster-like metrics for cat-like systems. We have only the weakest tools for dealing with what's working while we are overloaded with (archaic) tools for trying to fix what's failing. So, we try to fix a health care system with 100,000 pages of regulations with another 1,000 pages. Fixing a toaster's problem makes it whole, fixing a cat's problem might well make it worse, and by no means necessarily makes it whole.

re: schroedinger's cat... I am (re) reading this at the moment... I am a little reluctant to jump into quantum mechanics on this project, tho. This book is a key stimulus for Rosen's Life, Itself work, by the way.

re: moral discussion. Absolutely this is important. I really do believe that there is a positive "up" direction to humanity, and that as humans we all share a set of positive core values. These core values that drive my uplift model - this thinking derives from Positive Psychology (Martin Seligman) and Appreciative Inquiry (David Cooperrider).

re: designing for emergent properties: I am skeptical that we can do this directly. This is where the "condense" model of the snowflake metaphor comes in... we create the environment within which the positive stuff condenses. In the same way that snowflakes are self-evidently snowflakes, good things would be self-evidently good in the proper environment. And, to get to that environment, I think we need to build a certain infrastructure, then grow a commnity of folks to reach a certain critical mass, and then let it condense the good stuff we seek.

This also gets into Rosen's Anticipatory Systems theory - in which the current state of a system is affected by its anticipation of future states... the placebo effect is an example of this. I am particularly intrigued with the notion of incursion - a kind of forward-looking recursion. In case you haven't noticed, I am using this in writing the book. I built a wormhole (out of which comes a time travelling Tortoise) out of which I am expecting the book to emerge. Stuff tumbles out of the wormhole happening in stories, on Tortoise's island in virtual reality, and in the text of the book. I already have the final paragraph of the book: Tortoise going back into the wormhole to see if he can go back and Do Something. Everything else is condensing out of this, a process of incursion. Not sure I can explain all of this now, but I'm sure it will be clear to all of us when the project is complete.

I am also introducing the notion of a genline instead of an outline, allowing the book to generate itself through this process of anticipation and incursion.

I think that I am also breaking some new literary ground by setting the stories in an existing virtual environment (readers from the future will be able to visit the exact bench in Second Life where Tom interviewed Homer); the on line text-based forum where the genline of the book emerged (e.g. this thread), and the prose describing all this as an experiment in anticipatory systems and incursion.

Tortoise says he understands all this; I can't say that I do yet, so I am just being patient for a while to figure out if he is insane or really up to something big. I am pretty sure that he'll accomplish whatever we anticipate, however.

Tom,

I have learned through my own experience that one does not find solutions by venturing deeper into complexity. Adding more information to any system only causes the system to expand. Inertial effects come into play.

To engineer change to a complex system, go to the source. As a geneticist, I think often in terms of DNA, a chemical that I use as a finite endpoint in moving up and down in biological systems. Entire metabolic pathways can be altered by engineering a change in a single base pair. We see similar changes even in large corporations, by replacing a CEO or COO. The difficult here is understanding or predicting how the system will respond. Most systems find dynamic equilibrium quickly, though.

Engineering a change assumes a static environment, which is never the case. Changing one system affects the others, and vice versa. When one does not know how to engineer a solution or change by changing a fundamental property of a system, it is sometimes possible to change the environment in which the system interacts. In biology, this is done by creating a selective pressure, with or without increasing the rate of change in the system (mutagenesis). For example, to make drug resistant bacteria, we need only grow cells on increasing concentrations of the drug -- thus using external forces to change an existing system. We can only understand how the system changed by taking it apart. Also, the result goes on to change external systems. Sometimes, depending on what we select for, these systems can be highly perturbed.

Morality to me is simiarly dynamic, with no fixed grounding. Our environment can work to affect what we consider moral. Moral change that originates within us can also change our environment. I interpret the positive "up" you believe in mainly as more evolved moral complexity. However, I suspect that such complexity is highly dependent on the environment. We can only have these discussions because we are not fighting for our lives, or scrounging for food.

I like the idea of book that evolves.

My last two bank points to this comment, Tom. Thank you very much.

My reference Schr?dinger's Cat is Robert Anton Wilson's fictional trilogy.

Have you read David Bohm's work and the way he talks about 'involution/evolution' and similar? He worked with Einstein at the end of his life on the 'theory of everything'. (http://www.geocities.com/saint7peter/ResponsetoBohmsAnswer.html)

Tom Munnecke said:

re: schroedinger's cat... I am (re) reading this at the moment... I am a little reluctant to jump into quantum mechanics on this project, tho. This book is a key stimulus for Rosen's Life, Itself work, by the way.

I understand why you are reluctant to jump into quantum mechanic on this project : I first work on schroedinger's cat when I was trying to understand quantum history and issues ; I re-thought about that when reading this TCS thread, and it was on a very different way. I haven't read Rosen but I will correct that pretty soon. I am very interested in knowing what you think after the (re) reading in this context : only with the 'jumping outside current system' idea, and in your book writing context without the quantum context.

Everything else is condensing out of this, a process of incursion. Not sure I can explain all of this now, but I'm sure it will be clear to all of us when the project is complete.

Really hurry to read the complete project ! For me the process of incursion you expose is very very very close to the concept of 'intuition a priori' in the Emmanuel Kant book : 'La Critique de la Raison Pure' ; 'Kritik der reinen Vernunft' for the original (German) name of the book ; the English name is :'The Critique of Pure Reason'. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critique_of_Pure_Reason

In this book the philosopher explain the knowledge process, and he has a very subtle way for introducing this complex 'incursion' in the 'Real World', before a very scientist explanation of knowledge process. I am sorry for the limits of my English that forbid me to explain clearly that (if you have this book or any 'Kantian people' around you, you will see what I mean).

Sorry, this part is from me and doesn't have to appear like a citation of Tom : 'In this book the philosopher explain the knowledge process, and he has a very subtle way for introducing this complex 'incursion' in the 'Real World', before a very scientist explanation of knowledge process. I am sorry for the limits of my English that forbid me to explain clearly that (if you have this book or any 'Kantian people' around you, you will see what I mean).

'

In this book the philosopher explain the knowledge process, and he has a very subtle way for introducing this complex 'incursion' in the 'Real World', before a very scientist explanation of knowledge process. I am sorry for the limits of my English that forbid me to explain clearly that (if you have this book or any 'Kantian people' around you, you will see what I mean).

Gregoire: thank you for your reference-and feel free to post without apologies for your English... it is good enough! I am reading some more Kant material now. I am printing out the glossary of his work now - This is my own glossary.

I had a very interesting (but barely understandable to me at the time) conversation with Stuart Kauffman about pre-adaptation - that species would evolve in anticipation of future adaptation, which probably is similar to the notion of incursion.

Another twist to all this is that I tend to think in terms of spaces, rather than systems as I see frequently mentioned. To me, a space is where systems emerge.

I also have some thoughts about evolving spaces in my thoughts on protospaces or spaces that are sucked in to existence by the very stuff they contain. In the biological sense, the species which have evolved create the "evolutionary adjacent" possible for the succeeding evolutionary adaptation. Thus, the stuff is shaped by the void it creates. A practical example of this is Mendeleyev's periodic chart of the elements, arranging what he knew about the elements in a regular chart. The chart had holes in it, (missing nothings, in my terminology), which attracted attention to discover those elements.

And, finally, I want to draw attention to the similarity between gravity in the cosmological inflationary space, and Pam's comments about love as an enzyme in this space out of which I expect good things to condense. They are both universal attractive forces.

....snowflakes,Cats and toasters...and trees and movie stars and ON? hmmmmm...

Researchers have discovered that a remarkable diversity of complex networks, including the World Wide Web and patterns in cellular biochemistry, have a common architecture with snowflakes and trees. These networks all display similar patterns, whether viewed from up close or far away. "It's a fundamental advance," says Albert-L?szl? Barab?si, a physicist who studies networks at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana. The question of whether complex networks can show such a fractal pattern, also known as self-similarity, "has been bugging us for a while," he says.

http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20050129/fob3.asp

and of course fibonachi numbers might crop up somewhere along the line...

this morning the window cleaner carefully positions his ladder between the snowdrops

enjoying the interchange

paul

Thanks, Dexter...

I particularly liked this para:

"The researchers note that they discovered this wide-ranging characteristic by figuring out how to "zoom out" and look at networks from farther and farther away. They started by using computer analysis to cover each network with non-overlapping boxes, each of which contained a cluster of nodes separated by less than a specified number of links. Next, the investigators essentially blurred their vision, paying attention to how the boxes?rather than the individual nodes?were connected."

I am using the notion of a zoom stick in the book, a kind of variable-length yardstick for looking at the same thing from different scales. Zoom lapse photography would show this dynamically.

I suspect that there are some profound self-similarities in life processes in general...particularly related to fractal-like physiological indicators. Ari Goldberger has done some interesting research on fractals and heart rate variability. http://reylab.bidmc.harvard.edu/people/Ary.html

I've also written some stuff on fractals and health care in Health and the Devil's Staircase

I call properties which manifest themselves over scale intrinsics... these are scale-free properties which can have a powerful cascading effect. So one of the ways of creating a "snowstorm" of condensed Good Stuff is to align the intrinsics...

I highly recommend Barabasi's book Linked and Strogatz' book Synch by the way.

Didn't mean to ignore your Haiku, Paul..

if you used linebreaks, it might be more legible.

since I have to interupt this session because of a window cleaner coming to my door, it seems very appropriate, except that there are no snowdrops in my 70 degree San Diego weather today. I look forward to more Haiku.

"this morning the window cleaner carefully positions his ladder between the snowdrops"

hi tom - more nearer a tanka than haiku - a 'one line tanka'

i'm increasingly writing haiku as one line peices with no punctuation - working with marlene mountain has moved me in this direction though not exclusively the reader has to work a little harder...

this morning

the window cleaner

carefully positions

his ladder between

the snowdrops

our window cleaner came to our door tonight for his money

he always slips a cardboard card through the door after cleaning to say 'windows cleaned will call back later'

he sometimes runs out of these homemade cards and so always leans into the house and picks the card up off the mat if he can see it

bringing this back tenuously to schroedinger's cat he remarks that unless customers actually observe a card on their doormat they refuse to believe that the windows have been cleaned even if they are obviously clean...

paul

sorry, Paul... didn't mean to cramp your literary style. i thought it was a formatting problem with the software...

how about: (adapted from Douglas Hofstadter):

• The soul is greater than the hum of its parts.
• Definition of recursion: See Recursion.
• Law of Uplift: The world is a better place than you think, even after applying the law of uplift.

I like the Law of Uplift...

And although not on such an intellectually high plane as the discussions on Kant and the like I'm drawn back to my window cleaner and the system that he's central to - the window cleaning system... well the business interaction parts...

A rexamination of his cards - the ones left after he's cleaned your windows - shows me that he has now removed the 'will call back later' part - they just say 'Windows Cleaned' - the cards are often cardboard from a cornflakes packet or some other product that have been cut into small rectangles and then the words 'Windows Cleaned' are stamped on to them in black ink - he doesn't have to say 'Will call back later' anymore because all his customers know that when they get this card their windows have been cleaned and that the window cleaner will call back in the evening to collect his money - as i mentioned before this card has taken on a powerful role - the leaving of the card actually means that the windows 'have been cleaned' - he tells me that he thinks that if he didn't clean the windows but still left a card then most people would believe that their windows had been cleaned and pay him when he called back in the evening - they very rarely check up on him - and as he comes every month the windows generally don't get so bad that they would immeadiatly notice that they havent been cleaned - they also don't like it if he just turns up to collect his money without leaving a card even if the windows have obviously been cleaned - if he hasn't got cards he usually moves some garden furniture or some other object and doesnt replace it exactly where it was before - this he says is a more important indicator to some of his customers than the state of their windows

this situation has evolved because of the trust that they have in this window cleaner 'good window cleaners are hard to come by' built out of experience but the codification of those little cards made out of cornflake boxes and stamped up with 'Windows Cleaned'- all that they've come to signify beyond the actual cleaning of the windows - the looking forward to the interaction with the window cleaner - the good feeling that 'my windows have been cleaned' - the cultural aspect of 'window cleaners' - even bound up here in the uk with songs such as "when i'm cleaning windows'...

well i'm rambling Tom so i'd better shut up as this is perhaps not at all relevent to this Cats and Toasters etc discussion or interesting to anyone but me...

But it was the Law of Uplift that got me going... despite being able to probably get away with not cleaning everyone's windows every month I believe my my window cleaner... the card tells me so...

in every icicle along the drainpipe the moon

paul

Just a quick update on how things are progressing. A few more characters have tumbled out of the wormhole:

Another character, just out of the wormhole:

I posted some comments from Fred Turner on Natural Religion (which includes some wormhole thinking and Quantum computing) at http://www.omidyar.net/group/tcs/ws/turner

Some Snowflake images, with permission, from http://snowcrystals.com. Note the emergence of greater order and greater diversity from the chaotic state of supersaturated water vapor molecules. The environment for a snowflake is "poised" to condense a snowflake when a "seed" nucleates a crystal. Snow crystals are self-evidently crystals, and are "positive" in the sense that non-crystals do not grow (the absence of negation). They can form at large scale very quickly.

The application of this metaphor is to figure out a way of creating an environment which is poised for very large scale uplift, and discovering the seed conditions which will nucleate this crystalization process. To be done at massive scale, this needs to be done in the "positive" model (absence of negation), analogous to the autoassociative pattern matching of the neocortex or the antibody recognition model of the immune system. Trying to build snowflakes akin to the toaster model would be prohibitively expensive.

---

---

Tom, have you read Eastern Standard Tribe (http://www.craphound.com/est/), by Cory Doctorow? I've only gotten one sentence into it so far so cannot yet recommend it, but here how it starts:

I once had a Tai Chi instructor who explained the difference between Chinese and Western medicine thus: “Western medicine is based on corpses, things that you discover by cutting up dead bodies and pulling them apart. Chinese medicine is based on living flesh, things observed from vital, moving humans.”