Turing and Materialism

[Paul Cockshott]

http://blog.oup.com/2012/06/turing-the-irruption-of-materialism-into-thought/


This year is being widely celebrated as the Turing centenary. He is being hailed as the inventor of the computer, which perhaps overstates things, and as the founder of computing science, which is more to the point. It can be argued that his role in the actual production of the first generation computers, whilst real, was not vital. In 1946 he designed the Automatic Computing Engine (ACE), a very advanced design of computer for its day, but because of its challenging scale, initially only a cut down version (the Pilot ACE) was built (and can now be seen in the Science Museum). From 1952 to 1955, the Pilot ACE was the fastest computer in the world and it went on to be sucessfully commercialised as the Deuce. In engineering terms though, none of the distinctive features of Turing’s ACE survive in today’s computer designs. The independent work of Zuse in Germany or Atanasoff in the US indicates that electronic computers were a technology waiting to be discovered across the industrial world.

What distinguished Turing from the other pioneer computer designers was his much greater philosophical contribution. Turing thought deeply about what computation is, what its limits are, and what it tells us about the nature of intelligence and thought itself.

Turing’s 1936 paper on the computable real numbers marks the epistemological break between idealism and a materialism in mathematics. Prior to Turing it was hard to get away from the idea that through mathematical reason, the human mind gained access to a higher domain of Platonic truths. Turing’s first proposal for a universal computing machine is based on an implicit rejection of this view. His machine is intended to model what a human mathematician does when calculating or reasoning, and by showing what limits this machine encounters, he identifies constraints which bind mathematical reasoning in general (whether done by humans or machines).

From the beginning, he emphasises the limited scope of our mental abilities and our dependence on artificial aids — pencil and paper for example — to handle large problems. We have, he asserted, only a finite number of ‘states of mind’ that we can be in when doing calculation. We have in our memories a certain stock of what he calls ‘rules of thumb’ that can be applied to a problem. Our vision only allows us to see a limited number of mathematical symbols at a time and we can only write down one symbol of a growing formula or growing number at a time. The emphasis here, even when he looks at the human mathematician, is on the mundane, the material, the constraining.

In his later essays on artificial intelligence Turing doesn’t countenance any special pleading for human reason. He argues with his famous Turing Test that the same criteria that we use to impute intelligence and consciousness to other human beings could in principle be used to impute them to machines (provided that these machines communicate in a way that we can not distinguish from human behaviour). In his essay ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence,’ he confronts the objection that machines can never do anything new, only what they are programmed to do. “A better variant of the objection says that a machine can never ‘take us by surprise’…. Machines take me by surprise with great frequency. This is largely because I do not do sufficient calculation to decide what to expect them to do, or rather because although I do a calculation, I do it in a hurried, slipshod fashion, taking risks.”

Turing starts a philosophical tradition of grounding mathematics on the material and hence ultimately on what can be allowed by the laws of physics. The truth of mathematics become truths like those of any other science — statements about sets of possible configurations of matter. So the truths of arithmetic are predictions about the behaviour of actual physical calculating systems, whether these be children with chalks and slates or microprocessors. In this view it makes no more sense to view mathematical abstractions as Platonic ideals than it does to posit the existence of ideal doors and cups of which actual doors and cups are partial manifestations. Mathematics then becomes a technology of modeling one part of the material world with another. In Deutch’s formulation of the Turing Principle, any finite physical system can be simulated to an arbitrary degree of accuracy by a universal Turing machine.

[Kronsteen]

This article is rubbish. It conflates a mechanical process of symbol manipulation with a materialist philosophy, forgetting that symbols don't need to stand for material things - or anything at all. It also confuses the practical limits of human performance with the theoretical limits of mathematics itself.

The central idea of the Universal Turning Machine is not that calculation is necessarily done with chalk, paper or an abacus, but rather that it doesn't matter what tools you use to do the calculation - the calculation itself is unaffected. If anything, that's an idealist position.

The author conveniently forgets that Turing's decription of a physical Turing Machine has a limitless power source, infinite storage capacity and requires no maintenence. That's not 'a technology of modeling one part of the material world with another'.

The Turing Test relies on a pragmatist notion of 'intelligence' and 'consciousness', whereby these things are nothing more than their own appearance. It's a defensible position, but it can't be squared with the marxist notion that creativity and conscious labour are uniquely human attributes, and that the worker is always the ultimate source of production.

Alan Turing was not a marxist. Trying to bend the evidence to posthumously recruit him for the revolution is both dishonest and desperate.

[ckaihatsu]

This article is rubbish. It conflates a mechanical process of symbol manipulation with a materialist philosophy, forgetting that symbols don't need to stand for material things - or anything at all.


If it's a mechanical process, however hypothetical, then it's a *material* process, especially since every *actual* computer in operation actually does conform to the Turing model.





It also confuses the practical limits of human performance with the theoretical limits of mathematics itself.


No, it doesn't:





His machine is intended to model what a human mathematician does when calculating or reasoning, and by showing what limits this machine encounters, he identifies constraints which bind mathematical reasoning in general (whether done by humans or machines).


In this way the Turing model illustrates the *material* constraints on machine or person.





The central idea of the Universal Turning Machine is not that calculation is necessarily done with chalk, paper or an abacus, but rather that it doesn't matter what tools you use to do the calculation - the calculation itself is unaffected. If anything, that's an idealist position.


No, that's spurious reasoning. You're dismissing the whole concept just because the tool used -- and even the protagonist of the calculations -- can vary. (This is like saying that talking about cars in general is "idealism" because a car may be driven by one of a various number of people.)





The author conveniently forgets that Turing's decription of a physical Turing Machine has a limitless power source, infinite storage capacity and requires no maintenence. That's not 'a technology of modeling one part of the material world with another'.


The Turing Machine is *not* physical -- it's a *model*, like many of my own framework-type diagrams. In either case it's more a matter of a 'thought experiment' that applies to the material world, rather than a material object itself -- a metaphor.

Abstraction does not automatically mean non-materialist.





The Turing Test relies on a pragmatist notion of 'intelligence' and 'consciousness', whereby these things are nothing more than their own appearance.


So you're contending that 'intelligence' either doesn't vary, or else is wholly subjective -- ?

And 'consciousness', too, is what -- wholly dependent on whoever is witnessing it -- ?





It's a defensible position, but it can't be squared with the marxist notion that creativity and conscious labour are uniquely human attributes, and that the worker is always the ultimate source of production.


This is apples-and-oranges. Not all materialist postulations are Marxist ones.





Alan Turing was not a marxist. Trying to bend the evidence to posthumously recruit him for the revolution is both dishonest and desperate.


No one -- from what I can see -- is trying to wrap Turing into the revolutionary fold.

I will raise a difference, though:





In his later essays on artificial intelligence Turing doesn’t countenance any special pleading for human reason. He argues with his famous Turing Test that the same criteria that we use to impute intelligence and consciousness to other human beings could in principle be used to impute them to machines


The flaw here is that just because both human beings and machines are constrained by the linear flow of time in their processing abilities, that doesn't mean that -- even theoretically -- a *linear* calculating machine could do what a *complex*, massively parallel human brain does as a matter of course. The physical structures are inherently different -- it's like trying to reproduce what a waterfall does with a number of pipes carrying water.

[ckaihatsu]

This is to clarify and make explicit my position on "artificial intelligence":








While science is increasingly able to pick-apart the inner workings of the brain, and of all of biology, that doesn't mean that organic life is machine-like. The greatest difference is that we're *socialized*, and so brought up within certain cultural norms, while also growing our own individuality within those social frameworks.

An inorganic *construction*, by comparison, has a wholly different social -- and technical -- background to its existence. Its "lineage" is one of tools and mechanistics, and its acceptance in a social context is for that of a tool. We could *pretend* that it's an independent entity, and it could even be programmed to *simulate* much human-like behavior (see 'ELIZA' below), as in the narrative you posted, but in the end everyone would want to know its *background*, just as with being introduced to any person, and society would readily know that it's a simulation and does not in fact have its own actual cognition.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA

[Kronsteen]

If it's a mechanical process, however hypothetical, then it's a *material* process

No. You're conflating two different senses of 'mechanical'. 'Mechanical' as in 'relating to an engineered device', and as in 'Rule governed and deterministic'.

Or as you yourself put it: "The Turing Machine is *not* physical -- it's a *model*, like many of my own framework-type diagrams. In either case it's more a matter of a 'thought experiment' that applies to the material world, rather than a material object itself -- a metaphor."

When marxists accuse each other of 'mechanical thinking' they don't mean 'logic done by a device with gears and pistons'.


especially since every *actual* computer in operation actually does conform to the Turing model.No. The Turing model is of a machine that manipulates symbols according to rules. No reason why the symbols have to represent numbers, or be binary, or model any aspect of the real world. The rules don't even have to be consistent, just unambiguous.

Modern computers loosely follow the Von Neumann model.


the Turing model illustrates the *material* constraints on machine or person.You're using 'material' to mean 'actual', as opposed to the usual sense of 'made of matter'. If we followed your sense, then anyone who acknowledged facts would be a 'materialist'.

The pattern of prime numbers in the list of intergers is actual, but numbers aren't made of matter. Even Engels, who held that all mathematics is practical, didn't argue that numbers were nothing more than physical marks on physical rulers. He knew the difference between quantities and numerals.



it doesn't matter what tools you use to do the calculation - the calculation itself is unaffected.
You're dismissing the whole concept just because the tool used -- and even the protagonist of the calculations -- can vary.No, I'm saying Paul Cockshott has fundamentally misrepresented the notion of the Turing Machine, trying to make it assume philosophical materialism.


Not all materialist postulations are Marxist ones.Obviously not. Otherwise David Hume would be a supreme marxist.


So you're contending that 'intelligence' either doesn't vary, or else is wholly subjective -- ? And 'consciousness', too, is what -- wholly dependent on whoever is witnessing it -- ?No, I'm saying the philosophical assumptions behind the Turing Test are of this kind.

[brigadista]

er - Polish connection seems to have been forgotten in all the Turing celebrations...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marian_Rejewski

[Mr. Natural]

I'm entering this thread from the vantage point of systems-complexity science and the self-organization of matter into living systems and the life process on Earth. My computer background is nil, as are my computer skills. Nonetheless, Turing appears to be exploring the same materially organized basis for intelligence that is now revealed by this new science. Turing was looking at the configuration of matter, and this new science reveals the organizational relations of life's systemic material configurations (living systems), and living systems and their "calculations" are intelligent.

I'm definitely attempting here to "wrap Turing into the revolutionary fold," for his search for the material basis of intelligence has deeply revolutionary implications. Turing appears to be searching for the material underpinnings--the material organization--of intelligence, and as this organization has the same pattern as the organization of the rest of life, apprehending such organization means that we would be consciously seeing and thus able to reproduce the organization of life and community/communism inour lives. That's revolutionary as hell.

Life has a universal pattern of material self-organization that was established 4 billion years ago when organic molecules in the primordial atmosphere autocatalyzed (self-organized) into protocells--primitive "living" systems able to chemically evolve into the first true living systems: bacteria. The living systems that create and compose the life process have been following this same pattern of organization ever since in a process that counterintuitively generates a mindboggling diversity in the forms of Earth's living systems. This astounding diversity of forms emerges from the same general pattern of organization, though.

The brain is a self-organized material system and perception/consciousness/intelligence are phenomena that emerge as the brain dynamically integrates with its surround (body and environment). The rest of life automatically enjoys this integration (ecological mind) though, while human intelligence must consciously understand life's pattern of organization and employ it in the design of our socio-economic communities.

And we hardly have a clue yet. This scientific field of the organization of life had been ignored by a left that cannot organize. Indeed, that the material systems of life have a universal pattern of organization is almost universally denied, and the very concept of organization seems to require some sort of paradigm shift in consciousness for people to engage it. People see the things of life but are blind to the equally essential organizational relations of those things.

Christopher Langton, founder of the "weak form" of Artificial Life writes, "Life is a property of the organization of matter, not of the matter so organized." The human brain and its intelligence are nothing more than a profoundly complex, "reflective" development of the same adaptive, interdependent, living organizational relations that maintain a living system in the life process. Again: the rest of life is automatically, ecologically "intelligent," while humans must consciously (intelligently) create the living organizational relations to which our perception is blind.

I hesitate to bring this up, for no one seems to even begin to understand what I'm attempting to say, but the theoretical physicist, Fritjof Capra, has created a conceptual triangle that effectively models life's universal pattern of organization. Capra's triangle thereby makes life's organization accessible and usable to the regular human being who, with others, must successfully organize her life.

Capra's triangle models the living organization of the systems/communities of life and can be employed by people to design revolutionary processes and various forms of anarchism/communism. Human beings are self-organizing material systems that must learn to obey the "rules of life," and life is "communist" and goes to revolution all the time.

Human perception/consciousness/intelligence emerge from the self-organization of matter into living systems, and Alan Turing was on the track of this. He wrote, "So the truths of arithmetic are predictions about the behavior of actual physical calculating systems," and a living system is a "physical calculating system." Turing adds, "Mathematics then becomes a technology of modeling one part of the material world with another," and this ability of one form to model another suggests a similar pattern of organization, doesn't it?

Marx and Engels and their materialist dialectic were also on the track of life's organization. They saw life and society as organic, systemic process, and defined dialectics as the "science of the general laws of the motion and development of nature, human society, and thought." (Anti-Duhring).

So Marx, Engels, the materialist dialectic, and Turing were all looking at the material organizational relations underlying intelligence/thought. This is an intensely revolutionary project that must be continued and brought to revolutionary life.

My red-green best.

[ckaihatsu]

If it's a mechanical process, however hypothetical, then it's a *material* process, especially since every *actual* computer in operation actually does conform to the Turing model.





No. You're conflating two different senses of 'mechanical'. 'Mechanical' as in 'relating to an engineered device', and as in 'Rule governed and deterministic'.

Or as you yourself put it: "The Turing Machine is *not* physical -- it's a *model*, like many of my own framework-type diagrams. In either case it's more a matter of a 'thought experiment' that applies to the material world, rather than a material object itself -- a metaphor."

When marxists accuse each other of 'mechanical thinking' they don't mean 'logic done by a device with gears and pistons'.


Yes, but would you agree that the two different senses of 'mechanical' are both *materialist*? If not then I think we're going by differing conceptions of the term.





No. The Turing model is of a machine that manipulates symbols according to rules. No reason why the symbols have to represent numbers, or be binary, or model any aspect of the real world. The rules don't even have to be consistent, just unambiguous.


Your description is sound, but I still don't see how this *isn't* materialist in conception.





Modern computers loosely follow the Von Neumann model.


The Turing model is congruent with the definition of the Von Neumann model:





The term Von Neumann architecture [...] describes a design architecture for an electronic digital computer with subdivisions of a processing unit consisting of an arithmetic logic unit and processor registers, a control unit containing an instruction register and program counter, a memory to store both data and instructions, external mass storage, and input and output mechanisms.[1][2] The meaning of the term has evolved to mean a stored-program computer in which an instruction fetch and a data operation cannot occur at the same time because they share a common bus. This is referred to as the Von Neumann bottleneck and often limits the performance of the system.[3]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann_architecture





You're using 'material' to mean 'actual',


Yes, my understanding is that everything that's empirical is necessarily material. (Since it exists.)





as opposed to the usual sense of 'made of matter'. If we followed your sense, then anyone who acknowledged facts would be a 'materialist'.


So, then, yes, by extension this would be correct, if this hypothetical person made no other kinds of statements than empirical ones.





The pattern of prime numbers in the list of intergers is actual, but numbers aren't made of matter. Even Engels, who held that all mathematics is practical, didn't argue that numbers were nothing more than physical marks on physical rulers. He knew the difference between quantities and numerals.


Okay, I'm in agreement here. I don't understand what point you're making with this, though. You may want to elaborate.





The Turing Test relies on a pragmatist notion of 'intelligence' and 'consciousness', whereby these things are nothing more than their own appearance.





So you're contending that 'intelligence' either doesn't vary, or else is wholly subjective -- ?

And 'consciousness', too, is what -- wholly dependent on whoever is witnessing it -- ?





No, I'm saying the philosophical assumptions behind the Turing Test are of this kind.


Oh, okay -- makes sense. I misread it initially.

[Paul Cockshott]

This article is rubbish. It conflates a mechanical process of symbol manipulation with a materialist philosophy, forgetting that symbols don't need to stand for material things - or anything at all.

The symbols need not stand for material things, the point is they are material things, and the key point that comes from Turings approach is that computation is just a material process in which material symbols are manipulated by a mechanism. That mechanism can be entirely artificial, or it can be a combination of people and artefacts.





It also confuses the practical limits of human performance with the theoretical limits of mathematics itself.

Well if I confuse it then so does Turing as he explicitly models his Universal Computer on the material limits that human mathematician is subject to.
Ie, that the mathematician has only a finite perceptual ability, and a finite number of states of mind and can only write one thing down at a time.

Chaihatsu suggests that a parallel computing system, giving nervous systems as an example, might be able to compute things that a TM could not. Well if he thinks this is the case he should demonstrate a problem that is computable by a parallel mechanism but is not computable by a von Neumann machine or a TM. The general view in theoretical computer science is that no such problem has yet been found.





The central idea of the Universal Turning Machine is not that calculation is necessarily done with chalk, paper or an abacus, but rather that it doesn't matter what tools you use to do the calculation - the calculation itself is unaffected. If anything, that's an idealist position.

The author conveniently forgets that Turing's decription of a physical Turing Machine has a limitless power source, infinite storage capacity and requires no maintenence. That's not 'a technology of modeling one part of the material world with another'.

Here you are confusing what Turing himself said with subsequent textbook representations of him. An aniversary paper that Greg and I gave to Computability in Europe last week (http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~amp66/CiE%20Homepage/CiE%20abstracts/paper_75.pdf, full paper http://www.scribd.com/doc/87405566/turingcentenary-1) specifically addresses this point. The TM tape is finite but unbounded. If you have a problem that is too big for a given tape, you just run it with a bigger tape.
True enough, you dont have a specification of how to actually build the machine in Turings original paper, but TMs have been built subsequently

There is fine Youtube video of one here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3keLeMwfHY







The Turing Test relies on a pragmatist notion of 'intelligence' and 'consciousness', whereby these things are nothing more than their own appearance. It's a defensible position, but it can't be squared with the marxist notion that creativity and conscious labour are uniquely human attributes, and that the worker is always the ultimate source of production.


I am skeptical about claims like this about human uniqueness. The whole
architect and bee claim is very weak:

This suggests that animals, lacking purpose, can be replaced by ma-chines, but that humans are always required, in the end, to give purpose tothe machine. We cite Marx’s statement because it articulates what is prob-ably a rather widely held view, yet it has several interesting problems. Thisis an issue where it is difficult to go straight for the ‘right answer’. It maybe profitable to beat the bushes first, to scare up (and shoot down) variousprejudices that can block the road to a scientific understanding.First, are animals really lacking in purpose? The spidermay be so small,and her brain so tiny, that it seems plausible that blind instinct, rather thanthe conscious prospect of flies, drives her to spin. But it is doubtful thatthe same applies to mammals. The horse at the plough may not envisagein advance the corn he helps to produce, but then he is a slave, bent tothe purpose of the ploughman. Reduced to a source of mechanical power,overcoming the dumb resistance of the soil, he is readily replaced by a JohnDeere. The same cannot be said of animals in the wild. Does the wolf stalking its prey not intend to eat it? It plans its approach with cunning.Who are we to say that the result—fresh caribou meat—did not “alreadyexist in the imagination” of the wolf at its commencement? We have nobasis other than anthropocentric prejudice on which to deny her imaginationand foresight.Turn to Marx’s human example, an architect, and his argument lookseven shakier. For do architects ever build things themselves? They mayoccasionally build their own homes, but in general what gives them the sta-tus of architects is that they don’t get their hands dirty with anything worsethan India Ink. Architects draw up plans. Builders build. (In eliding thisdistinction Marx showed an uncharacteristic blindness to class reality)
( quoted from http://www.scribd.com/doc/58740926/3/MARX-THE-ARCHITECT-AND-THE-BEE)



Alan Turing was not a marxist. Trying to bend the evidence to posthumously recruit him for the revolution is both dishonest and desperate.

he was no marxist, but he made a huge advance in materialism. Darwin was no marxist but did likewise. Marxists who dont learn from these advances are poor materialists.

[ckaihatsu]

Chaihatsu suggests that a parallel computing system, giving nervous systems as an example, might be able to compute things that a TM could not. Well if he thinks this is the case he should demonstrate a problem that is computable by a parallel mechanism but is not computable by a von Neumann machine or a TM. The general view in theoretical computer science is that no such problem has yet been found.


I'll take the oblique reference and misspelling of my name in the best possible way and note that if the problem is one of *computation*, then, yes, I concur with the general view, as you've stated.

But if the problem is that of *mimicking a person's personality*, then that's a different matter since a *social* dimension is involved, as I noted in post #4.

[Paul Cockshott]

well i think I would agree that it would be easier for a robot to learn social norms by participating in society, and I am pretty sure we would want to provide it with a highly parallel processor on performance grounds. But this does not imply that its computations might not be performed, more slowly, by a sequential machine running multi threaded code.

[ckaihatsu]

and I am pretty sure we would want to provide it with a highly parallel processor on performance grounds. But this does not imply that its computations might not be performed, more slowly, by a sequential machine running multi threaded code.


Yes, I agree about the technical aspects of computation itself.





well i think I would agree that it would be easier for a robot to learn social norms by participating in society,


This is hypothetical, of course -- much moreso than the contention of class struggle coming to a head with the final defeat of the bourgeoisie by the proletariat. You're essentially assuming an artificial cognition here, and in a rather breezy way, too, I might add.








[T]he point is to have an entity that transcends its programming -- that's what sentient organic life can do, because we have self-awareness, free will, and self-determination, within social and political constraints.

So, again, if we can point to its programming then it's not true cognition, by definition of it being pre-programmed (not spontaneous "thinking").

[Paul Cockshott]

Is free will a materialist or scientific concept? I would say no. It is a theological concept deriving fron catholic moral doctrine.

[Lynx]

Artificial intelligence is inevitable and already exists, depending on your definition of intelligence. Biometrics, particularly in facial/feature recognition, is developing algorithms analogous to the naturally evolved mechanisms we use and take for granted.

Number systems and computers are wonderful tools.

[Lynx]

Is free will a materialist or scientific concept? I would say no. It is a theological concept deriving fron catholic moral doctrine.
If the definition of 'free will' were clear, there would be less argument.

[ckaihatsu]

Is free will a materialist or scientific concept? I would say no. It is a theological concept deriving fron catholic moral doctrine.


I'll heartily disagree with you here, and reiterate that, for our purposes of defining 'artificial cognition', the question is whether the underlying programming can generate a kind of spontaneity in decision and action that corresponds to a self-motivated entity. (Would it be able to estimate the future likely consequences of certain lines of action if it freely chose them, etc.)

[Paul Cockshott]

If you claim free will is a scientific not a theological concept, cite the crucial scientific experiment that demonstrated its material existence.

[ckaihatsu]

If you claim free will is a scientific not a theological concept, cite the crucial scientific experiment that demonstrated its material existence.


More to the point is how *self-determination* is to be demonstrated empirically, for either people or machines, if that's the crux of our politics. We don't want labor to continue to be dispossessed from the very tools it uses for production -- and if a mechanical entity was to be acknowledged as having 'free will' then it would want self-determination for itself, in a self-chosen direction.





Artificial intelligence is inevitable and already exists, depending on your definition of intelligence. Biometrics, particularly in facial/feature recognition, is developing algorithms analogous to the naturally evolved mechanisms we use and take for granted.

Number systems and computers are wonderful tools.








Examples of applications

Expert systems are designed to facilitate tasks in the fields of accounting, medicine, process control, financial service, production, human resources, among others. Typically, the problem area is complex enough that a more simple traditional algorithm cannot provide a proper solution. The foundation of a successful expert system depends on a series of technical procedures and development that may be designed by technicians and related experts. As such, expert systems do not typically provide a definitive answer, but provide probabilistic recommendations.

An example of the application of expert systems in the financial field is expert systems for mortgages. Loan departments are interested in expert systems for mortgages because of the growing cost of labour, which makes the handling and acceptance of relatively small loans less profitable. They also see a possibility for standardized, efficient handling of mortgage loan by applying expert systems, appreciating that for the acceptance of mortgages there are hard and fast rules which do not always exist with other types of loans. Another common application in the financial area for expert systems are in trading recommendations in various marketplaces. These markets involve numerous variables and human emotions which may be impossible to deterministically characterize, thus expert systems based on the rules of thumb from experts and simulation data are used. Expert system of this type can range from ones providing regional retail recommendations, like Wishabi, to ones used to assist monetary decisions by financial institutions and governments.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expert_system

[anticapitalista]

Regardless of whether Turing was a "materialist" (I don't see it, he was firmly in the Hilbert formalist tradition), he was a formal logician, and the whole enterprise of applying formal logic to understand the mind was a monumental misstep that dogged cognitive science and AI for decades. The irony here is that our emerging 21st century conception of the mind and brain is thoroughly dialectical, so we really don't need Turing at all. But i'm hesitant to post my scientific theories on RevLeft, so if anyone would like to discuss dialectical cognitive science further then please PM me.

[Paul Cockshott]

Quote:
Originally Posted by Paul Cockshott

If you claim free will is a scientific not a theological concept, cite the crucial scientific experiment that demonstrated its material existence.


More to the point is how *self-determination* is to be demonstrated empirically, for either people or machines, if that's the crux of our politics. We don't want labor to continue to be dispossessed from the very tools it uses for production -- and if a mechanical entity was to be acknowledged as having 'free will' then it would want self-determination for itself, in a self-chosen direction.

My point is that the notions of 'self determination' and 'free will' are concepts from juridical ideology. The opposition self determination versus freedom arises way back in the juridical ideology of the slave mode of production where it is based on the real opposition of two categories of people : masters who could decide what to do themselves, and slaves in chains and were forced to do what their master set them to.

In this case it is quite a simple empirical matter who is free and who is a slave.

But this was not something specific to humans. Animals were also enslaved. There is the same difference between a horse that has been broken and is bound in a harness to pull a load as compared to that horse free roaming the steppe as there is between a slave in chains and a free person.

In both cases the self determination of the organism is constrained by its owner.

This is all based on material relations and material constraints.

What is idealist is the reification of the concept of 'free will'. This is a reification of the juridical categories of slave and feudal society carried out by christian ideology. This ideology is based on the idea that humans and only humans have a supernatural content - the soul - and this supernatural content has 'free will'.

In Christian ideology there is a dominus ( literally slaveowner in latin) in the sky, who has ultimate power over all individuals, just as earthly slaveowners have ultimate power over all humans. This then gives rise to a paradox, if the the Lord is omnipotent, then they know exactly what each individual is going to do. If every action you take is fore-ordained by the dominus, how can the idea of sin and moral behaviour be rationalised.
If you are going to say that sodomites and heretics will burn in hell for all eternity, and more to the point, if you intend to burn them at the stake now, you can not consistently do that if you say that sodomy and heresy have material causes : in modern thought - say in genetics or changing social relations. Instead the church invented the fiction that souls are endowed with something supernatural - free will - which is unconstrained by material conditions and can 'freely' chose between sin and virtue.

But this archaic construction of the ideology so slave society has nothing to do with a materialist understanding of the world. There are no 'souls' idependent of material cause.
In holding 'free will' out as an objection to Turings ideas, you are essentially repeating the very first of the 'Contrary Views' which Turing refutes in his paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence.

If instead of the theological reification of free will, you take the explicitly juridical concept of self determination as the key then the issue of self determination for future androids has been well examined in speculative fiction, going back to Fritz Lang's Metropolis. The key to an automaton having self determination is that it has a body that enables it to move about coupled with a control system capable of carrying out sophisticated behaviour in the natural environment.

This is what was explored by Philip K Dick in his book 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep' which became the basis for Blade Runner.

Robots with ability to move around, to make complex decisions and act on those are not that far away in military technology - robot drones that can navigate, identify targets and kill people are being actively developed by the Pentagon.

You may say that these do not really have self determination, because they are acting under the orders given by those who constructed and prepared them. But is this different in kind from a pilot of a bomber, who is similarly acting under orders, who has been conditioned by army training to obey orders unquestioningly?

Once they have set off, both the pilot and the drone may act on internal determinations, reacting to stimuli in the environment, but both have be prepared by the military establishment in such a way that they are equally just tool for the achievement of military ends.

[Paul Cockshott]

Regardless of whether Turing was a "materialist" (I don't see it, he was firmly in the Hilbert formalist tradition), he was a formal logician, and the whole enterprise of applying formal logic to understand the mind was a monumental misstep that dogged cognitive science and AI for decades. The irony here is that our emerging 21st century conception of the mind and brain is thoroughly dialectical, so we really don't need Turing at all. But i'm hesitant to post my scientific theories on RevLeft, so if anyone would like to discuss dialectical cognitive science further then please PM me.

Surely Turing's paper in 1936 was the death blow to the whole Hilbertian formalist project.

[ckaihatsu]

Robots with ability to move around, to make complex decisions and act on those are not that far away in military technology - robot drones that can navigate, identify targets and kill people are being actively developed by the Pentagon.

You may say that these do not really have self determination, because they are acting under the orders given by those who constructed and prepared them. But is this different in kind from a pilot of a bomber, who is similarly acting under orders, who has been conditioned by army training to obey orders unquestioningly?

Once they have set off, both the pilot and the drone may act on internal determinations, reacting to stimuli in the environment, but both have be prepared by the military establishment in such a way that they are equally just tool for the achievement of military ends.


Yes, I *do* say that expert systems to guide machinery through physical space is *not* self-determination, because its overall objective has been set from *without*, from a human-social decision.

Juxtaposing the converse, a person turned into a pre-programmed unit of functioning, has no relevance here.

A convenient rule-of-thumb may be to conceptualize the lines of accountability -- if, for whatever reason, a particular action happened to come under investigation, who or what would wind up on trial in a courtroom -- ?

[Paul Cockshott]

The point I am making is that self determination is a juridical category not a scientific concept - which is what you are implicitly acknowledging by asking what would happen in court.

Here you get into all sorts of problems because what counts as a subject of right is historically contingent. In US today law a company is a legal person, and go back 200 years to Alabama and you find that a black person was not a legal person.

The definition of who or what is a legal person with respect to court systems varies with the property relations.

Should future capitalist law so chose, it might grant software systems the right to enter into contracts and as such to act as legal personalities.

[ckaihatsu]

The point I am making is that self determination is a juridical category not a scientific concept - which is what you are implicitly acknowledging by asking what would happen in court.


No, your reasoning is off here -- by using the court arena as an illustrative concept for lines of accountability that does *not* in any way imply that "self-determination is a juridical category".

'Self-determination' is a *political* concept, and it scales up or down, for nations as for individuals, and of course for the world's working class, ultimately.





Here you get into all sorts of problems because what counts as a subject of right is historically contingent.


I appreciate this point on its own, but I'll repeat that your assessment of my premise is incorrect.





In US today law a company is a legal person, and go back 200 years to Alabama and you find that a black person was not a legal person.

The definition of who or what is a legal person with respect to court systems varies with the property relations.




Should future capitalist law so chose, it might grant software systems the right to enter into contracts and as such to act as legal personalities.


Legalities aside your reasoning continues to include unwarranted assumptions about machine capabilities.

You blithely paint a future scenario in terms that make it sound like it's already happened, as with this previous one:





well i think I would agree that it would be easier for a robot to learn social norms by participating in society


This is unfounded optimism about artificial cognition, to put it generously.

[Paul Cockshott]

well a large portion of stock market trading is already done by automatons which enter into legal contracts, so what I am suggesting seems almost inevitable.

[Greg Michaelson]

This is the 21st century. There is no need to descend into medieval style scholasticism in debates on materialism. What the bearded dead ones wrote is only significant if what they wrote is demonstrably right.

The whole notion of dialectical is indeed medieval: the transformation of quantity into quality is transubstantiation writ large.

Materialism can only be mechanical. Reality is composed of hierarchies of entities exchanging information. Yes, this is reductionism. Non-reductionism is mysticism.

Certainly, some levels of interpretation are more useful than others, depending on the context. It's not generally useful explaining on-line banking in terms of the switching of transistors in a CPU. But it could be explained this way. Just as human consciousness will eventually be explained in terms of chemical interactions between neurones. But that won't make consciousness any less a literally mind-boggling experience. Yes, literally...

What is gstill valuable in the dialectical tradition is the notion of contradiction. Mao was right: to understand a pear you have to eat it; to understand the world you have to change ot. He may be dead but he didn't have a beard...

[ckaihatsu]

well a large portion of stock market trading is already done by automatons which enter into legal contracts, so what I am suggesting seems almost inevitable.


So, again, since actually autonomous, self-determining machines *don't* exist, what you're talking about is people signing on as clients with regular companies that happen to use expert systems in their trading practices.

[Paul Cockshott]

So, again, since actually autonomous, self-determining machines *don't* exist, what you're talking about is people signing on as clients with regular companies that happen to use expert systems in their trading practices.

No it is much more than that, the banks use autonomous computer agents to engage in intra bank stock trading. The fast reflexes of these systems are one reason why panics can spread so fast. This was noted as far back as the crash after the dot com bubble.

No autonomous self-determing systems exist anywhere except in the fantasies idealist ideology. There are only configurations of matter with internal state interacting with the outside environment, that applies to biological organisms just as much as to computers. This is a key insight of Turing.

[ckaihatsu]

---





There are only configurations of matter with internal state interacting with the outside environment, that applies to biological organisms just as much as to computers.





Behaviorism (or behaviourism), also called the learning perspective (where any physical action is a behavior), is a philosophy of psychology based on the proposition that all things that organisms do—including acting, thinking, and feeling—can and should be regarded as behaviors, and that psychological disorders are best treated by altering behavior patterns or modifying the environment.[1][2] According to behaviorism, individuals' response to different environmental stimuli shapes our behaviors. Behaviorists believe behavior can be studied in a methodical and recognizable manner with no consideration of internal mental states. Thus, all behavior can be clarified without the need to reflect on psychological mental states. The behaviorist school of thought maintains that behaviors as such can be described scientifically without recourse either to internal physiological events or to hypothetical constructs such as the mind.[3] Behaviorism comprises the position that all theories should have observational correlates but that there are no philosophical differences between publicly observable processes (such as actions) and privately observable processes (such as thinking and feeling).[4]




http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behaviorism

[Paul Cockshott]

---

I dont get the point there, do you say that computers and organisms do not have internal state?

[ckaihatsu]

I dont get the point there, do you say that computers and organisms do not have internal state?


According to you and your behaviorism if either have an internal state it would be entirely determined by external phenomena.

Again, as I've already explained, computers are not capable of self-determination -- they are the perfect examples of behaviorism since they are pre-programmed from without. They have no internal state other than that resulting from an initial state set by a person.

On the other hand...





In psychology, cognitivism is a theoretical framework for understanding the mind that gained credence in the 1950s. The movement was a response to behaviorism, which cognitivists said neglected to explain cognition. Cognitive psychology derived its name from the Latin cognoscere, referring to knowing and information, thus cognitive psychology is an information processing psychology derived in part from earlier traditions of the investigation of thought and problem solving.[1] [2] Behaviorists acknowledged the existence of thinking, but identified it as a behavior. Cognitivists argued that the way people think impacts their behavior and therefore cannot be a behavior in and of itself. Cognitivists later argued that thinking is so essential to psychology that the study of thinking should become its own field.[2]




http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitivism_(psychology)


philosophical abstractions

http://postimage.org/image/i7hg698j1/

[Invader Zim]

He is being hailed as the inventor of the computer, which perhaps overstates things, and as the founder of computing science, which is more to the point. It can be argued that his role in the actual production of the first generation computers, whilst real, was not vital. In 1946 he designed the Automatic Computing Engine (ACE), a very advanced design of computer for its day, but because of its challenging scale, initially only a cut down version (the Pilot ACE) was built (and can now be seen in the Science Museum). From 1952 to 1955, the Pilot ACE was the fastest computer in the world and it went on to be sucessfully commercialised as the Deuce. In engineering terms though, none of the distinctive features of Turing’s ACE survive in today’s computer designs. The independent work of Zuse in Germany or Atanasoff in the US indicates that electronic computers were a technology waiting to be discovered across the industrial world.

What distinguished Turing from the other pioneer computer designers was his much greater philosophical contribution. Turing thought deeply about what computation is, what its limits are, and what it tells us about the nature of intelligence and thought itself.

An interesting article, thanks.

However, where does Tommy Flower's Colossus machine fit into this? While Flowers, and his team of Post Office engineers, built the machine, it was done so based on (as I understand it), in part, Turing's general principals. And obviously Turing and Max Newman (who was also involved in the Manchester Mark 1 project) would have been well aware of what their post-office colleagues had produced and were operating in the next building or so from their own offices at Bletchley.

Not really on topic, I know. But the inter-connectivity and the transfer of ideas, much of which leads back to Turing, and, of course, Bletchley Park is rather intrguiging and bizarrely absent from your anaylsis.

[Paul Cockshott]

An interesting article, thanks.

However, where does Tommy Flower's Colossus machine fit into this? While Flowers, and his team of Post Office engineers, built the machine, it was done so based on (as I understand it), in part, Turing's general principals. And obviously Turing and Max Newman (who was also involved in the Manchester Mark 1 project) would have been well aware of what their post-office colleagues had produced and were operating in the next building or so from their own offices at Bletchley.

Not really on topic, I know. But the inter-connectivity and the transfer of ideas, much of which leads back to Turing, and, of course, Bletchley Park is rather intrguiging and bizarrely absent from your anaylsis.

Clearly Turing could not have designed the ACE without knowledge of what had been done at Bletchley by Flowers et al, but at the time that was all secret so he could make not reference to it in his own papers. The Colossus though was not a universal machine since it did not have a store that was both usable to store programmes and usable to store data. Instead the sequencing was controlled by plugboards. The article above was written to a strict word count so I had to leave a number of the other people working around the same time out.


According to you and your behaviorism if either have an internal state it would be entirely determined by external phenomena.

Again, as I've already explained, computers are not capable of self-determination -- they are the perfect examples of behaviorism since they are pre-programmed from without. They have no internal state other than that resulting from an initial state set by a person.

On the other hand...
I am not specifically endorsing behaviourism. What I am saying is that there is no such thing as 'self determination', since both organisms and artificial automatons are physical systems with internal state which interact with the environment. The behaviour produced is a product of the internal state with inputs recieved from the environment.

It is wrong to say that computers do not have internal state. In automata theory different classes of automata are distinguised by the nature of their internal state, by whether it is a single state word, a stack, a random access store etc. The key feature of all of these state automata is that their behaviour can only be understood in terms of the past history of their environmental stimulae. But in this they do not differ from nervous systems sufficiently advanced to have memory.

[ckaihatsu]

I am not specifically endorsing behaviourism.


Acknowledged.





What I am saying is that there is no such thing as 'self determination', since both organisms and artificial automatons are physical systems with internal state which interact with the environment. The behaviour produced is a product of the internal state with inputs recieved from the environment.


I'll note that we have differing conceptions of 'self-determination', then -- while I concur with your description of empirical reality, I'll maintain that the internal state of a biological organism, particularly people, is more able to use *cognitive* processes to make a political self-determination possible.





It is wrong to say that computers do not have internal state.





[Computers] have no internal state other than that resulting from an initial state set by a person.





In automata theory different classes of automata are distinguised by the nature of their internal state, by whether it is a single state word, a stack, a random access store etc. The key feature of all of these state automata is that their behaviour can only be understood in terms of the past history of their environmental stimulae. But in this they do not differ from nervous systems sufficiently advanced to have memory.


No, that's too much of a stretch to conflate computer memory with biological memory, and to term a random-access store as having a "history". I do appreciate the unfolding algorithmic complexity that you're indicating, as per the use of automata, but the underlying types of processing involved, inorganic vs. biological, is just too dissimilar for a claim of 'artificial cognition'. It would be more accurate to call it a kind of fancy signals processing.

[Mr. Natural]

Greg Michaelson, You're trolling with a hook baited with your ignorance, but I'll give you a little bite.

Here are two "bearded dead ones" with whom you have an argument: Marx and Engels. They wrote in Anti-Duhring that dialectics is "the science of the general laws of the motion and development of nature, society, and thought." That definition covers a lot of important ground.

You can't shave those beards, Greg Michaelson, so why are you trying?

[Paul Cockshott]

Both or just Engels in Anti Duhring?

[Greg Michaelson]

Mr Natural has a fine pointy white beard. Why do people hide behind pseudonyms? It's not as if Special Branch can't reverse engineer WWW posts back to source...

Ignorant eh? I think ignorance is refuting a critique of debating-by-quoting-from-biblical-sources by quoting from a biblical source. Just because Marx and Engels said something doesn't make it gospel truth.

"Dialectical materialism" has totally ossified the development of a contemporary radical philosophy that can both synthesise 20th century revolutions in physics, biology and computing, and provide a real challenge to the global resurgence of religion.

Hegel's dialectics was patently in the service of reaction and now looks like a badly constructed ontology for the semantic web. Marx and Engles's adaptation of the dialectical method was certainly progressive because it gave a way of decomposing social processes to identify class relations and hence how to maximise outcomes that favoured the working class. But it's codification into "laws" with no scientific basis, from Engels, through Lenin & Stalin, into the catechism of 20th century Communist Parties, put generations of potential radicals right off theoretical aspects of communism altogether.

It isn't just that the great texts are badly translated. They're totally obscure and have little purchase on actually existing reality. I wonder how many people on this list have worked through Materialism and Empiriocriticism. Paul & I have. It's hard work! Even the Short Course, which is simplification of Stalin's Dialectical and Historical Materialism, is tough going.

I was serious about Mao. On Contradiction and On the Correct Handling of Contradiactions Amongst the Masses are really good reads. You learn far more about how to tease apart the forces determing social processes than from struggling to decide if Cameron is the antithesis of Blair and hence Clegg is their synthesis...

Keep on Truckin, Mr Natural!

[Paul Cockshott]

Both or just Engels in Anti Duhring?

[Mr. Natural]

Paul, I'm surprised that you apparently don't know that Anti-Duhring was a shared project of Marx and Engels. They had divided their workload, with Marx to concentrate on Capital, but Engels read every word of Anti-Duhring to Marx, and Marx wrote Chapter 10.

Here is Engels in the preface to the second edition of Anti-Duhring: the polemic [A-D] was transformed into a more or less connected exposition of the dialectical method and of the communist world outlook championed by Marx and myself .... I must note in passing that inasmuch as the mode of outlook expounded in this book was founded and developed in far greater measure by Marx ... it was self-understood between us that this exposition of mine should not be issued without his knowledge. I read the whole manuscript to him before it was printed, and the tenth chapter of the part on economics was written by Marx."

You and ckaihatsu managed to sail past the post in which I demonstrated the uncanny similarities of the new sciences of organization to the Marxist materialist dialectic. I believe this new science brings the dialectic to life and potential praxis.

But I don't know where you stand on the materialist dialectic. If the two of you haven't read Bertell Ollman's Dance of the Dialectic (2003), you do not understand Marx's and the materialist dialectic's roots in Hegelian philosophy and dialectics, and you have some necessary homework to do.

The two of you certainly exceed me in knowledge in various areas, but these continued refusals (from everyone) to take a look at these new sciences of organization that scientifically unpack dialectical relations is an abandonment of revolutionary, Marxist duty, imo.

In any case, attempts to split Marx from Engels are wrong, wrong, wrong.

My red-green, dialectical best.

[Greg Michaelson]

"It was Hegel who said that any philospophy may be reduced to empty formalism, if one confines oneself to the simple repetiotion of its fundamental principles." G. Plekhanov, In Defense of Materialism, Lawrence & Wishart, 1947, p224.

[Paul Cockshott]

That is interesting I had not realised that Marx paid such a role in Anti-Duhring, I must have ignored the preface or forgotten it.
My view is that it is basically an accident of history that the socialist movement is concerned with dialectics. The accident being that Marx studied philosophy in Berlin, if he had studied in Paris or Edinburgh the Hegelian philosophy would have been forgotten by now. It is only by indirect association with the communist movement that Hegel and dialectics are remembered.
I tend to share a lot of Lenina Rosenweg's skepticism about dialectics with the exception of Mao's dialectics, which I suspect owe as much to classical Chinese military theory as they do to Hegel.
On the other hand part of what people refer to as dialectics is simply the understanding of interactions between components that make up a greater whole. But this is something that there are now lots of other formalisms for understanding. The people who do planetary scale climate modelling, or modelling of the feedback relationships between genes and protein synthesis are doing something that dialecticians might label as dialectics. I am thinking of stuff like Kaufmann's work on autocatalytic loops. But labelling these bits of scientific research as 'dialectical' is just an attempt to ideologically appropriate them since the investigators doing the original work are able to do it just fine without the terminology of dialectics, and without having read Hegel.

One has to look at Hegelian dialectics as just part of the intellectual toolset available to a bright German University graduate in the 1840s when attempting to analyse the world. The set of intellectual tools made available to us by the last 170 years of scientific development is very rich indeed, and I think these subsequent ideas are often more helpful in understanding things than Hegel. The advantage of studying Hegel was that it trained Marx in abstract thought, and in the practice of using ideas to transform other ideas. But any good training in abstract thought would have done, given the political and economic ferment of the time. If he had studied Gaussian maths at Goettingen instead of Hegelian Philosophy at Berlin, he would have had an equally good training in abstract thought, and the Marxism we have now would have been rather different.

This is the argument I made earlier in the month here :

http://www.puk.de/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=13:progressive-intellectual-en&catid=12:science-de&Itemid=614&lang=de

[Mr. Natural]

Greg Michaelson, I appreciate your reply. Your take on dialectics is indeed wrong, but I see that you are a conscientious leftist, as am I.

The materialist dialectic is the "life" of Marxism. The materialist dialectic views life and society as organic, systemic processes, which they are. But yes, the Marxist dialectic as taken from Hegel and materialized is a poorly formed, klunky, largely unusable concept, and it must be developed into the mental tool we can all use.

I believe the new sciences of organization--generally systems-complexity science--accomplish this, but this science is almost universally ignored by a left that cannot get organized. There is no discussion of this science in the Sciences and Environment Forum, for instance. Damn! Damn, damn, damn!

Yes, you are currently ignorant on the matter of the materialist dialectic. We all have areas of ignorance we need to commit to clearing up. I struggle with the nitty gritty of Marxist economics. But put down your copy of Stalin's Short Course with its self-serving "dialectics" and pick up a copy of Bertell Ollman's Dance of the Dialectic.

You asked why some people hide behind pseudonyms. I thought Revleft required this. I assure you I have no illusions concerning The System's ability to track down the identities of Revleft posters. I frequently point to global capitalism's systemic envelopment of all aspects of current life.

In any case, I will keep on Trucking. You, too? My red-green best.

[Mr. Natural]

Paul Cockshott, Thanks for your well-considered reply. I skimmed the link, and am impressed with your knowledge and clear prose.

So I am astonished that you indeed were not aware that Anti-Duhring was a joint project of the original Marxists, but there is a powerful anti-dialectics campaign that speciously separates these two lifelong political collaborators and friends. Helena Sheehan's Marxism and the Philosophy of Science has much to say on this and dialectics, and this is one of my most treasured and referenced books.

Now to Stuart Kauffman. You blew me away when you mentioned him. Kauffman and the cast of characters at the Santa Fe Institute and Fritjof Capra (my especial scientific hero) and systems-complexity science are essential to my scientific Marxist worldview and understanding of dialectics. Indeed, this new science brings the materialist dialectic to life and potential praxis.

Let's see if I can encapsulate this. Life is composed of "things" (living systems) isn't it? And don't those things have an internal and external organization and relations? They do, and dialectics works with the organization, motion, and development of the "things" of life and society.

Hegel's dialectics and philosophy of internal relations--world as internally related whole composed of internally related wholes--brought nature and society to life in Marx's mind. IMO, there would be no Marxism without this philosophy and its dialectics. Bertell Ollman's Dance of the Dialectic (2003) is the comprehensive work on this.

Hegel's and the Marxist materialist dialectics's take on the relations of life and society are now essentially affirmed by Stuart Kauffman's autocatalytic loops and systems-complexity science. This new science illuminates dialectical relations and can be employed to embody dialectics in popularly usable form.

The left has ignored this new science, hence my enthusiasm with your mention of it. In the Science and Environment Forum, for instance, which I just researched, there is but one passing reference to Kauffman and but two to the Santa Fe Institute. I have tried over and over in various forums to get some discussion of this science going without success. Yet, Marx and Engels eagerly seized and utilized the scientific developments of their time as they appeared.

You wrote in your linked essay, "To change something it helps a lot to understand how it works." It sure does, and dialectics attempts to show the "workings" of life and society, and this new science can make this happen.

And it has already happened. The theoretical physicist, Fritjof Capra, has created a conceptual triangle that accurately, popularly models the universal pattern of organization of the living systems of life. This is a natural, "embodied" materialist dialectic, and I am apparently the only person currently working with this. Just the same, I am able to understand dialectics as the "science of the general laws of the organization, motion and development of nature, human society, and thought" (Anti-Duhring, with "organization" added).

Without materialist dialectics, life and society are a collection of separate things as the anti-dialecticians and formal logicians would have it. Without dialectics humanity is stuck in place: capitalism's place.

I hope I have piqued your interest in pursuing dialectics in view of the new sciences of organization. There is a materialist dialectic, a revolutionary organizing theory, and anarchism/communism to be developed and practiced.

Capra's triangle is for real. My red-green best.

[Greg Michaelson]

The world is just far too complex to capture systematically in some simple all embracing theory. Attempt after attempt has failed. It won't be even vaguely achieveable until there's an ideologically neutral theory of the semantics/mechanisms underpinning human language and thought.

For a good example, look at the 1980's 5th Generation Programmes to develop expert and natural language systems. Both had oodles of dosh poured into them, all over this peculiar planet. Both proceeded on the assumption that by building lots of little expert systems and subsets of natural language in isolation, they could be bolted together into complementary systems from which intelligence somehow emerged. Quality from quantity, eh? The problem was that each system had its own base set of assumptions/primitives which were inconsistent with each other. Luckily, the developers mostly spoke English and so they could argue about whose system was best. And where are expert systems and natural language understanding today...?

I strongly recommend Neil Stephenson's "Barock trilogy". It's a really good read, has a strong female protagonist, explains how financial markets were manipulated in the late 17th/early 18th century to aid William III's Britain against Louis 14th's France AND explores in great detail the attempts of international natural philosophers, grouped around the Royal Society, to formulate "The System of the World" as a totalising mechanised ontology.

Jonathan Swift pillories this in the usually unread Part III of Gulliver's Travels (1746). The philosophers on the island of Lagado have a great big frame full of cubes with ideas written on the faces. The cubes are rearranged to form new concepts. Oh, they also have a simplified system of communicating where they carry and display things themselves instead of bothering with the words that denote them...

[ckaihatsu]

The world is just far too complex to capture systematically in some simple all embracing theory. Attempt after attempt has failed.


It's already been done -- the basis is that of society's *surplus* of production, and how it's disposed of. This is the all-encompassing basis of societal materialism. (See attachment.)

This *could* have implications for an attempted 'artificial cognition', but there's another key factor involved, which I'll get to in a moment....





For a good example, look at the 1980's 5th Generation Programmes to develop expert and natural language systems. Both had oodles of dosh poured into them, all over this peculiar planet. Both proceeded on the assumption that by building lots of little expert systems and subsets of natural language in isolation, they could be bolted together into complementary systems from which intelligence somehow emerged. Quality from quantity, eh? The problem was that each system had its own base set of assumptions/primitives which were inconsistent with each other. Luckily, the developers mostly spoke English and so they could argue about whose system was best. And where are expert systems and natural language understanding today...?




It won't be even vaguely achieveable until there's an ideologically neutral theory of the semantics/mechanisms underpinning human language and thought.


You're only proposing to follow in the existing tradition of an empirical, *mechanical* approach -- your own critique would apply to your own proposal here.

Referencing my diagram in post #31, I'll note that the thing that makes us *human*, which machines *don't* have, is our ability to spontaneously *reason*, per the scientific method. But the somewhat arbitrary choice of *what* to take up as an initial hypothesis is, yes, materially based in ideology, manifested subjectively, but is still befuddlingly subjective and arbitrary -- especially with *artistic* pursuits.

But even *that* is still not the real chasm that separates organic life from inorganic constructions -- it's the *social* question of how such an artificial entity would be welcomed into regular society, and therefore is a *prerequisite* to its development.





[I'll] maintain that the internal state of a biological organism, particularly people, is more able to use *cognitive* processes to make a political self-determination possible.


A compact, convenient defining question might be, "Would we allow it to raise children?"

And, similarly, when we give rise to future generations of our own it's implicitly understood that as children mature they become more and more an active part of *determining* society going forward. So, by distinction, all of humanity would have to consciously wrestle with this rather tangential and technical issue of an artificial, alien component of society *before* it's allowed to happen.


[2] G.U.T.S.U.C., Simplified

http://postimage.org/image/34ml2e61w/

[Mr. Natural]

Greg Michaelson, As you are a conscientious leftist, I expect you to acknowledge that the various "lefts" are without viable theory or practice at present, and I hope that this stark reality will open your mind a bit to brand-new, radical theorizing that is based in the new scientific understanding of the organization of life on Earth.

You wrote, "The world is just far too complex to capture systemically in some simple all embracing theory."

Well, the world is extraordinarily complex, as you note, but this complexity emerges from same universal pattern of organization, an organization that was established when organic molecules self-organized into the first primitive living system--a protocell--some 4 billion years ago. Life's astounding complexity has then emerged/evolved from this universal pattern of organization ever since, and this pattern of organization is successfully modeled by Capra's triangle.

The preceding is an extraordinarily radical, revolutionary statement that I can back up, and it absolutely kills me that I can't get any engagement for it. The Bolshevik, Alexander Bogdanov, was on the track of this with his Tektology--the first and perhaps only attempt at an earlier science of universal organization--but he lacked the advanced sciences of organization that we can access--and, most of all, he lacked Capra's triadic conception of the pattern of organization of the living systems of life on Earth.

The transformation of quantity into quality is neither dogma nor medieval casuistry. It is a mental guide that points to life's ceaseless change and evolution. Systems grow, relational tensions build up, and things must change to remain in dynamic, living balance. We have reached a bifurcation point or transitional phase point, and the system emerges into new relations and qualities. This is a revolutionary transition, and we who are revolutionaries should consider this to be at least potentially of great significance, shouldn't we?

But then, if conditions build and the transformation doesn't occur, the system dies. That's us. That's humanity. It's change or die time, and we haven't a current clue as how to accomplish this.

The necessary clue is that the left is stuck in very old places and obviously needs to re-revolutionize in theory, and Capra's triangle and the new sciences of organization are the transcendently revolutionary anwers to our revolutionary riddle.

Here is a sample of Ollman in Dance of the Dialectic. "Quantity/quality change is a historical movement encompassing both buildup and what it leads to. One or more of the aspects that constitute any process-cum-relation gets larger (or smaller), increases (or decreases) in number, et cetera. Then, with the attainment of a critical mass--which is different for each entity studied--a qualitative transformation occurs, understood as a change in appearance and/or function. In this way, Marx notes, money becomes capital, that is, it acquires the ability to buy labor-power and produce value only when it reaches a certain amount."

Perhaps you and the anti-dialecticians are searching for some sort of rock-ribbed certainty, which dialectics does not provide. Dialectics enables us to view the relations of the organic, systemic processes of life and society. Hegelian philosophy and dialectics brought these living relations to life in Marx's mind (see his letter to his father upon reading Hegel at age 19).

Here's another major example of quantity/quality. The human brain became so complex through engaging life to create our social living systems that it "doubled back, reflected back" upon itself to emerge into consciousness, a sense of self, etc. This reality is both profoundly complex (consciousness) and simple (its pattern of organization).

Well, I've had my little dialectical work-out. My red-green best.

[Paul Cockshott]

Without materialist dialectics, life and society are a collection of separate things as the anti-dialecticians and formal logicians would have it. Without dialectics humanity is stuck in place: capitalism's place.

I hope I have piqued your interest in pursuing dialectics in view of the new sciences of organization. There is a materialist dialectic, a revolutionary organizing theory, and anarchism/communism to be developed and practiced.

I do accord considerable importance to complex systems analysis, and have in the past, found Mao's On Contradiction to be helpful in analysing concrete conjunctures. But I have never found Hegel to be anything more than a pretentious load of old tosh. His Science of Logic is attempting the impossible - the deduction of everything from the antithesis between being and nothingness, and is full of conjuring tricks in which he introduces new concepts in a quite arbitrary manner claiming that they are dialectical necessities.

I give more weight to the findings of modern complexity theory, in particular Chaitin's aphorism : you cant get two kilos of theorems from one kilo of axioms.

You should look at what WARP and the new Center for Transition Studies (CTS) are doing, they are very into complex systems analysis. I have just uploaded the opening talk I gave at the start of CTS in May, here:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/98679025/Main-feedback-loops-in-the-world-system
It is looking at the world as a whole and the main feedbacks between the atmosphere climate system, the population system and the revolt system.

[Mr. Natural]

Paul Cockshott, You won't have your current opinion of Hegel, Marx's debt to Hegel, or the Marxist materialist dialectic if you read Bertell Ollman's Dance of the Dialectic (2003). Ollman's lifelong scholarship in this matter is unique and, imo, definitive. Ollman reveals Marx's and the materialist dialectic's roots in the Hegelian philosophy of internal relations (world as internally related whole composed of internally related wholes).

This philosophy of internal relations and its dialectical categories then parallel the new systems-complexity sciences. As I've posted before, Hegelian philosophy thus anticipated the science that confirms the philosophy. This is profoundly radical and useful stuff, and Capra's triangle brings it all together with its modelling of the universal pattern of organization of a living system. Life consists of and is composed by living systems:self-organized, integrated wholes existing in dynamic interdependence with each other and the physical environment. Natural living systems range from the cell to the Earth's biosphere (Gaia; a self-regulating ecosystem), and human social systems must be organized as natural living systems.

The organization of life is also the necessary organization of the various forms of anarchism/communism. Remember the definition of a living system as a self-organized, integrated whole existing in dynamic interdependence with its environment? That's also a definition of communism. Communism is bottom-up, self-organized community.

Here are the major "new science" works from which I marry Marxist dialectics and the new science. Fritjof Capra's Web of Life (1996) is the definitive book on systems-complexity science. Web is written for a popular readership and succeeds in bringing the new science to earth for all of us to understand. And employ: Chapter 7 of Web introduces Capra's triadic conceptual model of the pattern of organization of life on Earth.

Two other works proved immensely valuable: Roger Lewin's Complexity: Life At The Edge of Chaos (1999), and M. Mitchell Waldrop's Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos (1992). These two books and others explore the organization of life--life's "rules." They reveal the organization underlying life's stuff that the many formal logicians and anti-dialecticians ignore.

Interestingly (and woefully), systems-complexity science has passed through its period of intense creativity and has almost disappeared. Its center, the Santa Fe Institute, has become respectable and boring. I attribute this development to the entropic triumph of capitalism as a system. Capitalism's organization is opposed to living organization, and its envelopment of life on Earth has resulted in a systemic stasis wherein the living connections are disappearing from the human mind and society. New ideas are scarce; we are all recycling capitalist values and decay now.

My red-green best.

[Greg Michaelson]

Mr Natural/ckaihatsu: "emergence" is the latest in a long line of mystical terms used by dialecticians to cover the gaping hole between quantity and quality. When emergence is deployed, I want to ask "how is it emerging" and "how is it known to emerge"? Let's take Mr N's:

"The human brain became so complex through engaging life to create our social living systems that it "doubled back, reflected back" upon itself to emerge into consciousness, a sense of self, etc."

Let's not argue just now about weasel words like "life", "self" etc. So just how complex does a brain have to become to "reflect back" on itself and become conscious? You can construct trivial self-replicating expressions in one line of lambda calculus which quickly extend to self-replication to underpin recursion. But a Dell laptop running a lambda calculus interpreter running a self replicator is not really very conscious.

John McCarthy, one of the "parents of AI", famously argued that there is consciousness in a thermostat, just not much...

And how is consciousness known to emerge? We feel our own consciousness. Do we really? Well, anyway... We can only impute consciousness to other entities on the basis of them somehow seeming to be like us through their observable behaviours and therefore somehow feeling internally like us.

Whoops! Here we are back with Turing's Test. Thoroughly materialist and thoroughly mechanical and thoroughly reductionist.

Emergence, like quantity to quality, is in the eye of the beholder.

For discussion on the social relations of robots, see the end of Chapter 5 "From machines to the universal machine" in our "Classical Econophysics", Routledge, 2009, where we argue that once a robot can perform universal labour, as humans do, it becomes socially indistinguishable from a human. So, a robot performing universal labour must be as complex as a human so presumably it would be equivalently conscious to a human...?

[Mr. Natural]

Greg Michaelson, Emergence seems "mystical," but it is science--the science you and the rest of the left must learn.

On Earth, organic (material) molecules self-organized into primitive living systems 4 billion years ago and the systemic process of life emerged. Isn't the whole greater than the sum of its parts? That's emergence; life is emergent from material relations.

In the deep universe, energized patterns and processes emerge into material systems that have emerged into living systems on Earth that have, with the extraordinary complexity of the human brain, emerged into consciousness.

If prebiological (material) evolution is mysticism, not science, then Haldane and Oparin were mystics, not Marxists.

Greg, I can guaranteethat you as well as the rest of the left are stuck in place. Why don't you take a look at the new sciences of organization and learn to get organized? Your anti-dialectics also oppose Marxism and communist revolution and a human future.

My red-green, dialectically emergent best.



My red-green best.

[ckaihatsu]

I'll concur with Mr. Natural's thesis, and add my own comments:





"The human brain became so complex through engaging life to create our social living systems that it "doubled back, reflected back" upon itself to emerge into consciousness, a sense of self, etc."




So just how complex does a brain have to become to "reflect back" on itself and become conscious?


This is actually a sound scientific point -- not all animals demonstrate a recognition of themselves as distinct from their environments. Awareness without the ability / opportunity to reflect "inward" on one's own internal experiences is an unending stream-of-consciousness that is very much influenced by external events in realtime from the environment.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_test


It can be argued that the human condition was very much this way until relatively recently when the settling-down into static locations for the sake of agricultural production, and its resulting surplus, allowed human consciousness the "free time" to consider its own role as an entity *separate* from the surrounding environs. The rest is history, literally.





John McCarthy, one of the "parents of AI", famously argued that there is consciousness in a thermostat, just not much...


I would strongly disagree here, since (self-)consciousness is a function / result of *complexity* -- inorganic matter is explicitly excluded, as are all plants and most animals.





[O]nce a robot can perform universal labour, as humans do, it becomes socially indistinguishable from a human. So, a robot performing universal labour must be as complex as a human so presumably it would be equivalently conscious to a human...?


Hardly. I'll posit that modern humanity is characterized by the ability to *manage* our affairs, particularly over natural phenomena. While labor may have been *evolutionarily* critical, it's another matter altogether to talk about *social* being.

[Greg Michaelson]

Mr Natural: to say emergence is mystical is absolutely not to say evolution is mystical. Evolution is thoroughly scientific and reductionist.

Your "emergence" is a Snark. You write:

"On Earth, organic (material) molecules self-organized into primitive living systems 4 billion years ago and the systemic process of life emerged. Isn't the whole greater than the sum of its parts? That's emergence; life is emergent from material relations"

and we know from The Hunting of the Snark that "what I say three times is true."

How did molecules self-organize into living forms? How did the systematic process of life emerge? How does life emerge from material relations? I would more science and less rhetoric, please.

And:

"Your anti-dialectics also oppose Marxism and communist revolution and a human future."

is also not pursuasive.

ckaihatsu: consciousness is to do with having internal models of external reality which can be used to make predictions about one's circumstances. Good predictions are fitter than bad ones: entities with good models are more like to survive. (See Mr N, that's evolutiion for you!) Survival enables reproduction enables growing brain capacity, and complexity and ultimately language. Human consciousness involves having good predictive models of other humans. Self-consciousness involves having a good predictive model of one's-self. And of course a predictive model can even include itself, as this posting shows, though to less and less accuracy.

[Mr. Natural]

Greg Michaelson, You're just saying "No." Cut it out. Emergence is a real, radically essential scientific phenomenon, and evolution is not reductionist. Evolution works with the developmental relations of life's "things."

Why didn't the reference to an obvious reality- that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts--open your mind to the reality of emergence? Things come together and new systems are formed with new qualities and behaviors none of the parts possess. That's emergence. Two flammable gases (hydrogen and oxygen) merge and water--a liquid that quenches fire--emerges. And in prebiotic evolution, organic molecules autocatalyzed (self-organized) to form the first, primitive living systems. That's emergence, and life is an emergent process. Life emerges from the self-organization of matter, and revolution emerges from the self-organization of people (who are matter).

Revolution is an emergent process. Individuals come together to form revolutionary cells that grow and emerge into a party that grows to emerge into a revolutionary process.

Science and the materialist dialectic recognize emergence. Are you just going to say "No!" or is there something essential to learn here? Try wrapping your mind around the emergent reality that the whole is, indeed, greater than the sum of its parts.

And don't get in the habit of hanging out with the anti-dialecticians. There's no future there.

My red-green best.

[Paul Cockshott]

emergence is a bi slippery and metaphorical. What counts as emergence? Phase change is a more specific and objective concept.

[Paul Cockshott]

combining hydrogen and oxygen gave steam, not water last time I tried it!

[Paul Cockshott]

emergence is a bi slippery and metaphorical. What counts as emergence? Phase change is a more specific and objective concept.

[Mr. Natural]

Paul Cockshott, Are you really going to pooh-pooh the critical scientific concept of emergence? Just because it is a "slippery" concept? As are life and revolution? Aren't we to be developing a scientific socialism?

Yes, emergence is difficult to nail down, for it works with the relations of the things of life and the universe. Things are much easier to nail than the relations that bring them to life, but living relations are essential to living things, and when the things generate living relations, life emerges. And when and if Marxists ever get their shit together, revolutionary processes will emerge from political assemblages of people.

Here is one definition of emergence: "global properties arising from local interaction" Roger Lewin, Complexity, p. 152. These global properties will then possess new qualities and behaviors not present in their parts, as isolated individuals can come together in revolutionary formations that possess new powers. Or individual cells come together in a body. You, Paul Cockshott, possess many new qualities and behaviors as a consequence of your individual cells coming together into your body. This is life, this is emergence, and this is science.

How can ostensible revolutionaries dismiss emergence out of hand? It's much too easy. Human perception and consciousness are reductive and conservative. We see "things" and the living relations of those things appear to us as "mystical."

But we're supposed to be radicals who get to the root of things,, aren't we? And the root of life is the emergent self-organization of matter.

Here are some more definitions of emergence:
"Regularities of behavior that somehow seem to transcend their own ingredients." From Cohen and Stewart, Collapse of Chaos, p. 232.

From computer scientist W. Daniel Hillis, p. 383, Third Culture: "On the physics side, we're studying the general phenomenon of emergence, of how simple things turn into complex things. All these disciplines are trying to get at essentially the same thing, but from different angles: how can the whole be more than the sum of the parts?"

From Scott Camazine et al, Self-Organization in Biological Systems, p. 8: "Emergent properties are features of a system that arise unexpectedly from interactions among the system's components. An emergent property cannot be understood simply by examining in isolation the properties of the system's components, but requires a consideration of the interactions among the system's components."

"This appearance of new characteristics in wholes has been designated emergence." Ernst Mayr, Growth of Biological Thought, p. 63

Finally, an example of emergent life from Lewin and Regine, Weaving Complexity and Business, p. 25: "Most of the systems in the world, then, are nonlinear and complex, not in the sense of complicated, but in the sense that the interactions of the components in the system generate something that is more than the sum of the parts; and that something is constantly changing. This process is known as emergence. In nature, for instance, an ant colony is a complex adaptive system. Individual ants interact in a few simple ways, following simple rules of behavior ... and from this emerges a complex nest architecture, a complex social dynamic, and even properties such as temperature and humidity control of the colony. None of these emergent features can be predicted by knowing how the individual ants interact."

On Earth, matter has self-organized to emerge into the living systems of the process of life. "Evolution, of course, was a lot more than just random mutation and natural selection. It was also emergence and self-organization." John Holland quoted in Waldrop's Complexity, p. 257.

Emergence is self-organized revolution, but Marxists who must learn to self-organize revolutionary processes have shunned the new sciences of the revolutionary, emergent organization of life on Earth. Marxism is consequently stuck in place. I experience this reality as inexpressibly frustrating and depressing.

Engels at Marx's graveside: "Science was for Marx a historically dynamic, revolutionary force."

My red-green best.

[ckaihatsu]

...Any given sporting event or game, where simple heuristic rules of interaction potentially give rise to fierce competition and high drama....

[Greg Michaelson]

Mr Natural: you keep quoting people and you have gone from underlining "emergence" to putting it in bold but you are still not giving any concrete explanation of how it works beyond koans about "the whole being more than the sum of the parts". I think that "emergence" is often used as sort of place holder, where something palpably happens, and it seems to involve large quantities of poorly understood interactions, but where it is not yet possible to give an adequate explanation and more science is required.

For example, you quote: "None of these emergent features can be predicted by knowing how the individual ants interact." Why is this necessarily the case? For sure, as yet entmologists don't have explanations. Does "can" mean "right now" or "ever"? The difference is crucial. I'm happy with "can" as "right now".

For example, before the Higgs Boson was confirmed last week it might have been said that mass emerges from interactions between sub-atomic matter. But now the maths and the measurements seem to confirm each other. So, might it still be said that mass emerges rather than being predictable from fundamental properties of the universe?

To come back to the ants, I think that comparative and longitudinal studies of colonies of the same and different species of ants in the same and different habitats will tie down how variability in ant behaviour versus habitat characteristics affects colony architecture, temperature, humidity, division of labour etc.

Will you still think that consciousness emerges from complex self-acting brain stuff when in say 15 or 20 years time neuroscientists can tie down quite precisely how specific changes in behaviours in specific areas of the brain give rise to specific feelings, affects, emotions, senses of self etc? Even now they can stuff people full of radio active sugar and watch different bits of their brains light up as they solve different sorts of tasks while being PET scanned. 20 years ago this was the stuff of science fiction.

Do you think information emerges from the complex, self acting, 80,000 computers in Google's server farm? You'd probably give an explanation in terms of symmetries between physical representations of information in mind-bogglingly enormous numbers of transistors. So why would you not accept a simlilar explanation of a human answering a question, substituting only neurones for transistors?

[Mr. Natural]

Greg, Your reductionist conservatism is all too evident. You have lots of company on what is left of the left, though, a left that currently wouldn't be able to organize a good nosepicking contest amongst four-year-olds.

Marx and Engels and the materialist dialectic and to-the-roots radicalism have been abandoned to chats and heated debates full of sound and fury signifying nothing. I knew discussing revolutionary organizing theory based in the new sciences of organization would be a tough sell when I got a computer a year ago to try and find some revolutionary spirit and action on the internet, but I didn't expect to find such overwhelming, determined, enthusiastic conservatism.

I'll now leave our "discussion" with the observation that you have ignored the reality that the whole is, indeed, greater than the sum of its parts in a living system, and that this is rock-solid evidence of the existence and pervasiveness of the scientific phenomenon of emergence.

[ckaihatsu]

Someone's missing the forest for the trees...!


= D

[Mr. Natural]

You nailed this thread's problem, Ckaihatsu. Reductionists/anti-dialecticians/formal logicians are loggers who chop down trees without regard for the forest.

There is no separate, isolated life, and when living things (trees) come together into a new system (forest), the system has emergent properties and behaviors.

That's life and science, and life is emergent from the self-organization of matter, and science emerges from the self-organization of the brain's matter in dynamic interaction with its internal and external relations.

My red-green best.

[ckaihatsu]

You nailed this thread's problem, Ckaihatsu. Reductionists/anti-dialecticians/formal logicians are loggers who chop down trees without regard for the forest.

There is no separate, isolated life, and when living things (trees) come together into a new system (forest), the system has emergent properties and behaviors.

That's life and science, and life is emergent from the self-organization of matter, and science emerges from the self-organization of the brain's matter in dynamic interaction with its internal and external relations.

My red-green best.


Yup, and thanks, and thanks for your tireless efforts along these lines.

Incidentally, I posted an excerpt about 'chunking' on another thread in recent days, which is still *another* example of emergence -- it's not just a city in China -- ! (grin)





‘’’Chunking’’’, in psychology, is a phenomenon whereby individuals group responses when performing a memory task. Tests where individuals can demonstrate "chunking" commonly include serial and free recall tasks. All three tasks require the individual to reproduce items that he or she had previously been instructed to study. Test items generally include words, syllables, digits/numbers, or lists of letters. Presumably, individuals that exhibit the "chunking" process in their responses are forming clusters of responses based on the items' semantic relatedness or perceptual features. The chunks are often meaningful to the participant.It is believed that the assimilation of different items according to their properties occurs due to individuals creating higher order cognitive representations of the items on the list that are more easily remembered as a group than as individual items, themselves. Representations of these groupings are highly subjective, as they depend critically on the individual's perception of the features of the items and the individual’s semantic network. The size of the chunks generally range anywhere from two to six items, but differs based on language and culture. For example, Chinese speakers can remember up to ten digits because the number words are all single syllables. "Chunking" maintains a number of characteristics when observed in recall tasks.

[...]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chunking_(psychology)


Are too many choices bad for us?

http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=2476839&postcount=35

[Mr. Natural]

Ckaihatsu, Thanks for your "Thanks." Now I'm going to have to take a look at the "Too Many Choices' thread.

As for "chunking," if I understand it, it has its roots in "life as systems." Our brains are composed of tiny systems--neurons--that form larger systems that engage and interact with each other in the internal environment of the brain and with the external world. All of these interactions are deeply emergent and human consciousness--an emergent phenomenon--employs language--an emergent phenomenon--to "bring forth" our internal and external worlds in a radically emergent process.

So in order to reply to your post I had to "chunk" (reference) first my general mental area of systems phenomena, and then that of emergence. From these large mental "environments" I then attempted to winnow out details (smaller systems) for a reply to your post.

Life is a bottom-up process of living systems. Small systems form larger systems in the inseparable unity of life's bootstrap of living systems. Your "chunks" are the larger categories of our brain's mental processes rooted in the dynamic, bottom-up relations of its neurons.

Life is systems, systems, systems, and all of them are emergent from the self-organization of matter.

Revolutionary organizing theory would be emergent from the self-organized material brains of revolutionaries, and revolutions, themselves, emerge from the self-organized, material, systemic actions of self-organized, material, systemic beings.

That all of this is so complex and difficult to understand has to do with a human consciousness that perceives things but is blind to their organization. And life is a self-organized, emergent, systemic process.

The materialist dialectic, as understood by Marx and Engels, as revealed by Bertell Ollman in Dance of the Dialectic, correctly views life and society as emergent, organic, systemic processes.

Are ostensible Marxist revolutionaries ever going to "chunk" the organization of life when they attempt to address revolutionary organizing? We sure as hell need to.

My red-green, chunky best.

[ckaihatsu]

Ckaihatsu, Thanks for your "Thanks."


Thanks for, uh, ummm... thanking my thanks.





Now I'm going to have to take a look at the "Too Many Choices' thread.




As for "chunking," if I understand it, it has its roots in "life as systems." Our brains are composed of tiny systems--neurons--that form larger systems that engage and interact with each other in the internal environment of the brain and with the external world. All of these interactions are deeply emergent and human consciousness--an emergent phenomenon--employs language--an emergent phenomenon--to "bring forth" our internal and external worlds in a radically emergent process.

So in order to reply to your post I had to "chunk" (reference) first my general mental area of systems phenomena, and then that of emergence. From these large mental "environments" I then attempted to winnow out details (smaller systems) for a reply to your post.


Sure.





Life is a bottom-up process of living systems. Small systems form larger systems in the inseparable unity of life's bootstrap of living systems. Your "chunks" are the larger categories of our brain's mental processes rooted in the dynamic, bottom-up relations of its neurons.

Life is systems, systems, systems, and all of them are emergent from the self-organization of matter.


Yes.





Revolutionary organizing theory would be emergent from the self-organized material brains of revolutionaries, and revolutions, themselves, emerge from the self-organized, material, systemic actions of self-organized, material, systemic beings.

That all of this is so complex and difficult to understand has to do with a human consciousness that perceives things but is blind to their organization.


Well, this understanding is itself emergent, and ongoing. Even a rudimentary self-awareness has not been a given, evolutionarily speaking -- consciousness can arguably easily become "trapped" in the ongoing neverending moment, no matter what kind of organism you are. Part of building up to being ready to comprehend and actively participate in the (systemic) *class* struggle is one's *own* struggle to make sense of society this way and come to consciousness about it.





And life is a self-organized, emergent, systemic process.


Yes.





The materialist dialectic, as understood by Marx and Engels, as revealed by Bertell Ollman in Dance of the Dialectic, correctly views life and society as emergent, organic, systemic processes.


Okay, I haven't read that one, but I've been through some of the others you've mentioned before.





Are ostensible Marxist revolutionaries ever going to "chunk" the organization of life when they attempt to address revolutionary organizing? We sure as hell need to.

My red-green, chunky best.


It *is* important to at least acknowledge, or be mindful of, our organic origins in going on to discuss and address revolutionary matters, if only because that's our baseline commonality. Nothing can substitute for a human individual, so we owe it to ourselves, each other, and to revolutionary politics to be cognizant of our population-proportionate personal sovereignty -- and that of others -- in political matters.

I'm watching this video, which looks pretty solid:


Athene's Theory of Everything

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbh5l0b2-0o&feature=fvst

[Lynx]

Athene's TOE: the first part is interesting, which reiterates developments in neuroscience.

I'm skeptical of the 2nd part, and given that this guy (Chiron B.) is known as the 'biggest troll on the internet' it'd be best to wait for a published version.

[Greg Michaelson]

Sorry to see you go Mr N. I think that the absence of serious comradely interaction to establish a new line fit for serious 21st century communist politics is an important reason why the left can't emerge from its ghetto. In particular, we can't simply judge new science on the basis of how well it fits contemporary understandings of what the founding fathers wrote: that really is interpreting the world rather than changing it.

Happy trails!

[Mr. Natural]

Lynx, ckaihatsu, I am currently unable to get sound with my video links (I'm an idiot at computers) and thus was unable to hear "Athene's Toe," nor could I learn more by googling. I need to fix this.

As for neuroscience, isn't it interesting that individual neurons have no consciousness? That consciousness is an emergent phenomenon arising from bottom-up neuronal self-organization in dynamic interdependence with their internal (brain) and external (outside world) environments?

So what is the organization underlying all this action? As it turns out, life has a universal pattern of organization--the pattern of organization established when living systems and the life process emerged from Earth's chemical soup some 4 billion years ago.

This pattern of organization--the organization underlying consciousness, mind, individual ants and the emergent colony their interactions create, trees and forests, and communism-- this organization is modeled by the transcendently revolutionary conceptual triangle I call "Capra's triangle."

At present I am the only Marxist to have "seen" Capra's triangle. The problem is a human consciousness that perceives things but is blind to their relations. Organizational relations must be deduced as opposed to being readily seen, and the human species thus habitually ignores the organization that must be brought to human social systems. And communism and revolutionary processes. Well, Are we not life?

Lynx, ckaihatsu, Might you comment more on Athene's Toe? Would it make a worthwhile thread?

In the meantime, I am flummoxed by Greg Michaelson's statement, "I think that the absence of comradely interaction to establish a new line fit for serious 21st century communist politics is an important reason why the left can't emerge from its ghetto."

I thought that was exactly what we are attempting in this thread.

My red-green best.

[Lynx]

I think the first part is worthwhile to view, the second part proposes that consciousness is subject to quantum effects. I don't understand the second part. Quantum effects are supposed to be negligible at the macro scale.

When I find more time I will look into Capra's triangle.

p.s. Earth's albedo might be an emergent property, one that affects climate.

[ckaihatsu]

Athene's TOE: the first part is interesting, which reiterates developments in neuroscience.

I'm skeptical of the 2nd part, and given that this guy (Chiron B.) is known as the 'biggest troll on the internet' it'd be best to wait for a published version.


Yeah, I thought the actors' body movements were a bit stiff and their performance was stilted and only so-so.


= D





I think the first part is worthwhile to view, the second part proposes that consciousness is subject to quantum effects. I don't understand the second part. Quantum effects are supposed to be negligible at the macro scale.


You were supposed to be fully hypnotized by the voice and visuals by that point to just accept it unquestioningly.

[ckaihatsu]

According to the video I've *already* joined their science cult because I don't *really* have free will. I've been forced to seriously question the certainty of my quantum underpinnings.

Also, I understand how there could have been a Bizarro version of Superman.

Can we talk about the font now -- ?


x D

[Mr. Natural]

Lynx, My could-be-wrong take on quantum effects and consciousness is that quantum effects are inseparable from the phenomena of the universe, but that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon many levels above its atoms, and that we can deal with consciousness on its own level.

As for Capra's triangle, I strongly recommend that you read the book: Capra's Web of Life (1996), which brings the mindboggling profundity of systems-complexity science to Earth for mere mortals such as ourselves to understand. The triangle is then presented in Chapter 7 of Web, "A New Synthesis."

IMO, Capra's triangle makes it possible for regular people to understand the organization of life and apply that organization to the design and creation of forms of human community. Nature is community; Mother Nature is a commie. Capra's triangle potentially provides the necessary design for bottom-up, grassroots revolutionary processes, and communist revolution, as is true for the rest of life, must be organized from the bottom up. Otherwise, the top levels of what must be a dynamically interdependent whole (the society of communities) becomes divorced from the popular grassroots and you wind up with some form of a poorly functioning dominator system with bad connections. Also, the vast complexities of a society cannot be designed from the top down, but must be "grown" from the bottom up, as in evolution. Via evolution, the systems of the life process have experimented in countless ways and grown up together. What worked was included in the increasingly complex life process, and the result--our biosphere with its myriad species--could not possibly have been designed from above.

To have succeeded, the Russian Revolution would have had to have been thoroughly grassrooted in an aware proletariat and peasantry. This was anything but the situation in Tsarist Russian, and the Bolsheviks' tendencies to centralized control were exacerbated by these conditions. Then there were the other problems that faced the Russian Revolution and made communism impossible.

Communist revolution in the West can only come about through the aware, grassroots efforts of its people-workers. Life is a self-organized, bottom-up process, as must be communist revolution.

Capra's triangle makes such a process possible.

My red-green best.

[ckaihatsu]

Capra's triangle potentially provides the necessary design for bottom-up, grassroots revolutionary processes, and communist revolution, as is true for the rest of life, must be organized from the bottom up. Otherwise, the top levels of what must be a dynamically interdependent whole (the society of communities) becomes divorced from the popular grassroots and you wind up with some form of a poorly functioning dominator system with bad connections. Also, the vast complexities of a society cannot be designed from the top down, but must be "grown" from the bottom up, as in evolution. Via evolution, the systems of the life process have experimented in countless ways and grown up together. What worked was included in the increasingly complex life process, and the result--our biosphere with its myriad species--could not possibly have been designed from above.

To have succeeded, the Russian Revolution would have had to have been thoroughly grassrooted in an aware proletariat and peasantry. This was anything but the situation in Tsarist Russian, and the Bolsheviks' tendencies to centralized control were exacerbated by these conditions. Then there were the other problems that faced the Russian Revolution and made communism impossible.

Communist revolution in the West can only come about through the aware, grassroots efforts of its people-workers. Life is a self-organized, bottom-up process, as must be communist revolution.

Capra's triangle makes such a process possible.

My red-green best.


Mr. Natural, I'm going to have to reluctantly take issue with at least part of what you're saying here.

While I don't dispute the structural aspect of your worldview I think we also need to keep in mind that the structure, as you've presented it, does not exist in a vacuum. As political people we have to deal with the way the world *is*, as well as how we'd like it to be.

I don't think it's saying much that the societal world is now very well developed and has not been anywhere *near* the grassroots for quite a while now. To uphold the line that, given a revolutionary upheaval we would want to "reboot" and start all over from scratch, per the standard libertarian fantasy, is a bit off.

To be clear, I'm not suggesting that anything is amiss with your politics, but rather that the world presents us with certain *existing* structures -- methods -- of industrial mass production that cannot just be devolved or sidestepped. A revolutionary politics must insist that these pre-existing forms of production be *handed over* as-is by those currently wielding them, to be used in like manner by the proletariat for its own benefit until it can dissolve the state and create a newer society.

While the exercise of monolithic power is understandably distasteful, given its history in the hands of the elite, such institutional control in and of itself is *not necessarily* misguided and is in fact the *only* form of political power large and strong enough to have any chance of defeating the class foe in the first place.

I simply picture it as a kind of high mountain range that must first be traversed with a considerable focused effort before the warmer pastures beyond may be enjoyed. I hope my comments are taken in the best way possible.

[Mr. Natural]

ckaihatsu, Your comments are definitely taken in "the best way possible": with my open but critical mind. Your comments are also the product of your open but critical mind--the mindset all of us must cultivate in the face of the triuimph of capitalism. Obviously, the left must learn some new tricks.

Your comments are exceedingly valuable, too, for they provide the opportunity to clear up what is a misunderstanding, not a disagreement. It is my daily magnum frustration that Revlefters do not make their disagreements with my posts evident: I usually get no comment at all, and the rest just say "No!"

Our misunderstanding is that I am looking at a revolutionary organizing process--the process by which people become aware of their situation and of means to radically change it--while I believe you assumed that I meant we must change the physical, capitalist economic institutions into socialist ones prior to revolution.

So I'm looking at the means by which workers and others can wake up to their current physical and mental imprisonment and begin to take charge of their lives in aware forms of community opposed to capitalism. There would be some anarchist/communist alterations of socio-economic institutions going on, and they are most desirable, but most of this would occur post-revolution.

There would also be some "top down," too. But the "leaders" who "educate the masses" must educate them to the means of their own self-organization and revolutionary transformation. Anarchist/communist revolutions must, indeed, be bottom up for at least the two reasons I noted: the complexities generated in such a process can only be grown from the grassroots, not dictated; and top-down processes are "dead" and dictatorial--they deny living connections to the lower levels of the "body" of society.

You posted, "I simply picture it as a kind of high mountain range that must be first traversed ..." Indeed, and how would our mountain climbers self-organize to traverse the range? That is my mission. How might it be possible for regular people to "see" the high mountains and organize to climb them?

I insist that Capra's triangle is the absolutely unique, transcendent, revolutionary mental tool that could make necessarily grassroots anarchist/communist revolutionary processes possible.

My red-green best.

[ckaihatsu]

Mr. Natural, you're already familiar with some of my illustrations. To respond briefly and not go off-topic, I'll just say that I'd be open to doing what I can to assist you in the creation of like materials, as with the triangle-based concept.

Feel free to email me, with a sketch scanned into a jpg file, to get things going.

[ckaihatsu]

(There are a couple of conceptual illustrations already done that sound similar to what you're describing, for those who haven't seen them....)


Consciousness, A Material Definition

http://postimage.org/image/35t4i1jc4/


universal context

http://postimage.org/image/fn8hqaxrh/

[Mr. Natural]

ckaihatsu, Thanks much for your generous offer. My computer inexpertise continues to get in the way, though. For instance, my e-mail, which I seldom use, just dropped three straight e-mails from the screen and existence once I had typed a certain amount. Then I typed short e-mail and I don't believe it was successfully sent.

Your excellent thumbnail designs were among the first posts I viewed when I joined Revleft. Here's a really, really imortant point: your thumbnails portray the details of the various levels of the phenomena of life, such as consciousness.

What I'm trying to present--and it does challenge all human thinkers with a revolutionary paradigm shift in consciousness--is the simple, universal pattern of organization that underlies and births the levels and the details of life. A simple cell has the same pattern of organization as the body that emerges from cellular organization, and a neuron has this same pattern of organization as does the human brain formed by neurons and the consciousness that results.

These are almost unbelievably radical concepts, and so far, no one believes them. I don't believe anyone has yet "seen" what I'm attempting to present. It's that consciousness problem: people don't see the organization of the things of life, and, apparently, developing such necessary perceptions will entail a major, revolutionary paradigm shift in consciousness for the human species.

This is also a "science problem." Marxists who are stuck in place have failed in their revolutionary duty to engage the revolutionary new sciences of organization, and will remain stuck until they "get scientific" or capitalism extincts us all. Whichever comes first. It'll be one or the other, and capitalism is way ahead.

There is also a "materialist dialectic problem." Marx and Engels and the dialectic work with the relations of life and society, while current "Marxists" have abandoned dialectics for the "certainties" of reductionist philosophy.

Marx, Engels, the materiaist dialectic and the Hegelian philosophy in which it is based, anarchism, socialism, democracy, community, communism, the organization of life, the new sciences of the organization of life, and Capra's triangle constitute a theoretical unity. They all work with the organization of "nature, human society, and thought" (Anti-Duhring) as organic, systemic processes.

And all living systems are organic, systemic processes. They are all the products of the self-organization of matter, and their universal pattern of organization is modeled by Capra's triangle.

What the hell, let's get organized!!! Have I mentioned a triangle ...?

My red-green best.

[ckaihatsu]

ckaihatsu, Thanks much for your generous offer. My computer inexpertise continues to get in the way, though. For instance, my e-mail, which I seldom use, just dropped three straight e-mails from the screen and existence once I had typed a certain amount. Then I typed short e-mail and I don't believe it was successfully sent.


You may want to start using a text editor so that you can compose and save locally, before copying and pasting the content to the web -- no more lost work that way.

Please keep in mind that *any* kind of computer use is a skill, and requires developing, just as with anything else. We all had to start at the beginning at some point.





Your excellent thumbnail designs were among the first posts I viewed when I joined Revleft.


Good, glad to hear it, thanks. (Technical note: They're not 'thumbnails' -- 'thumbnails' means small, postage-stamp-sized versions of the actual images.)





Here's a really, really imortant point: your thumbnails portray the details of the various levels of the phenomena of life, such as consciousness.


I guess I tend to think of them as showing the *generalities*, rather than the details, of various aspects of social reality.





What I'm trying to present--and it does challenge all human thinkers with a revolutionary paradigm shift in consciousness--is the simple, universal pattern of organization that underlies and births the levels and the details of life. A simple cell has the same pattern of organization as the body that emerges from cellular organization, and a neuron has this same pattern of organization as does the human brain formed by neurons and the consciousness that results.

These are almost unbelievably radical concepts, and so far, no one believes them. I don't believe anyone has yet "seen" what I'm attempting to present. It's that consciousness problem: people don't see the organization of the things of life, and, apparently, developing such necessary perceptions will entail a major, revolutionary paradigm shift in consciousness for the human species.

This is also a "science problem." Marxists who are stuck in place have failed in their revolutionary duty to engage the revolutionary new sciences of organization, and will remain stuck until they "get scientific" or capitalism extincts us all. Whichever comes first. It'll be one or the other, and capitalism is way ahead.

There is also a "materialist dialectic problem." Marx and Engels and the dialectic work with the relations of life and society, while current "Marxists" have abandoned dialectics for the "certainties" of reductionist philosophy.

Marx, Engels, the materiaist dialectic and the Hegelian philosophy in which it is based, anarchism, socialism, democracy, community, communism, the organization of life, the new sciences of the organization of life, and Capra's triangle constitute a theoretical unity. They all work with the organization of "nature, human society, and thought" (Anti-Duhring) as organic, systemic processes.

And all living systems are organic, systemic processes. They are all the products of the self-organization of matter, and their universal pattern of organization is modeled by Capra's triangle.

What the hell, let's get organized!!! Have I mentioned a triangle ...?

My red-green best.


Yes, and you know I'm sympathetic.





What I'm trying to present--and it does challenge all human thinkers with a revolutionary paradigm shift in consciousness--is the simple, universal pattern of organization that underlies and births the levels and the details of life. A simple cell has the same pattern of organization as the body that emerges from cellular organization, and a neuron has this same pattern of organization as does the human brain formed by neurons and the consciousness that results.


If you do ever want to present this graphically, feel free to contact me -- it's a standing offer. Take care.

[Greg Michaelson]

Mr Natural: You ended your last post involving me with "I'll now leave our "discussion" ..." which I assumed was you saying you did not wish to debate with me any further. So I am also flummoxed...

If you do wish to debate further, then please do me the honour of responding to my point about the Higgs Boson. Which was that when something hypothetical acquires empirical evidence, or, if you prefer, fails to be falsified, does its status change from "emergent" to something more concrete? Or does the "emergence" somehow push down a level?

To put it another way, in the 20th century lots of processes that appeared to be "emergent to 19th century dialecticians acquired detailed scientific explanations. So does that effect their status as "emergent"?

[Mr. Natural]

ckaihatsu, We appear to be alone in this thread now. I'll wrap my comments up in a simple "picture" and statement of Capra's triangle of the universal pattern of organization of life and community.

Draw a triangle and place the categories of Pattern, Matter, and Process at its angles. All life is in the network Pattern of organization; Matter refers to the physical stuff; Process is a living system's "life activity": what it does, how it "earns its living." Pattern/Matter/Process constitute an inseparable unity that we have reductively separated in order for our reductive minds to deal with the organizational unity of life.

So Capra's triangle says all life consists of living systems that are self-organized material systems network-patterned with their life activity. Capra's triangle says that we can learn to design myriad forms of community by merging the parts of a system with what the system does. Capra's triangle simply but profoundly says that the workers of a workshop need to self-organize themselves in an arrangement that efficiently produces their product and maintains communal relations.

A termite's body parts are organized in the pattern that accomplishes what it does. A termite's organization automatically generates internal and external "community," and humanity must learn to arrange its "body parts" in forms that create internal community and communal relations with the rest of life.

Life is community; your body is a community; communism is a community; Capra's triangle models the universal pattern of organization of the communities of the communal life process.

My red-green best.

[ckaihatsu]

All life is in the network Pattern of organization;




All life is in the network Pattern of organization; Matter refers to the physical stuff; Process is a living system's "life activity": what it does, how it "earns its living." Pattern/Matter/Process constitute an inseparable unity that we have reductively separated in order for our reductive minds to deal with the organizational unity of life.


MN, we've been over this point in the past -- you're obviously being inconsistent if you're emphasizing *both* the three-part nature of this construction, *and* only the network / pattern aspect of it.

Ironically, by doing so, you're falling into the very idealism / dualism that you so rail against.

[Mr. Natural]

ckaihatsu, No, I'm not being inconsistent. The "inconsistency" is that we are at the stuck point of human consciousness. Consciousness is reductive (life as a collection of separate things), while the life process constitutes an inseparable unity of those separate things. We see the separation, but not the organizational unity. And the left must learn how to organize.

I clearly stated that Pattern/Matter/Structure constitute a reductive modeling of life's inseparable organizational unity. To "see" this inseparable organizational unity we must reductively break it down into "parts" our minds can grasp, and then we run into the apparent paradox--or "inconsistency"--of an inseparable unity having parts. But that's life. Life is a bootstrap of self-organizing material systems possessing the same pattern of organization. Life is thus a differentiated unity, and Capra's triangle models the organization of this unity and potentially makes it visible and usable to the average person.

But I can't get past that human blindness to organizational relations problem. The Nobel laureate and co-founder of the Santa Fe Institute, Murray Gell-Mann, refers to life as "surface complexity arising from deep simplicity." Capra's triangle successfully models that "deep simplicity," but damned if I can figure out a way to bring this to the minds of others.

I'll keep on trying, of course. I am, indeed, a red-green Marxist revolutionary attempting to bring the revolutionary organization of life to revolutionaries who need to organize, despite considerable personal limitations. I'm really fucked, in other words.

My red-green best.

[ckaihatsu]

ckaihatsu, No, I'm not being inconsistent.


Okay, excuse me then. Perhaps my point could be seen as nitpicking, but I just wanted to clarify that you're treating the three aspects with *equal weight*. I don't think / agree that "All life is in the network Pattern of organization" -- it 'competes' with the other two aspects.





All life is in the network Pattern of organization; Matter refers to the physical stuff; Process is a living system's "life activity"





The "inconsistency" is that we are at the stuck point of human consciousness. Consciousness is reductive (life as a collection of separate things), while the life process constitutes an inseparable unity of those separate things. We see the separation, but not the organizational unity. And the left must learn how to organize.

I clearly stated that Pattern/Matter/Structure constitute a reductive modeling of life's inseparable organizational unity. To "see" this inseparable organizational unity we must reductively break it down into "parts" our minds can grasp, and then




[W]e run into the apparent paradox--or "inconsistency"--of an inseparable unity having parts.


Yes, I certainly understand -- you're very repetitive. And I agree.

Here's a similar construction, for a different topic, that's structurally identical:


http://weblogs.foxite.com/photos/1000.257.8478.ctc_01.jpg

http://www.lifetransitioncounselor.com/blog/uploaded_images/cost-time-quality-708424.jpg





But that's life. Life is a bootstrap of self-organizing material systems possessing the same pattern of organization. Life is thus a differentiated unity, and Capra's triangle models the organization of this unity and potentially makes it visible and usable to the average person.

But I can't get past that human blindness to organizational relations problem. The Nobel laureate and co-founder of the Santa Fe Institute, Murray Gell-Mann, refers to life as "surface complexity arising from deep simplicity." Capra's triangle successfully models that "deep simplicity," but damned if I can figure out a way to bring this to the minds of others.

I'll keep on trying, of course. I am, indeed, a red-green Marxist revolutionary attempting to bring the revolutionary organization of life to revolutionaries who need to organize, despite considerable personal limitations. I'm really fucked, in other words.

My red-green best.


How *dramatic* of you...

(= /

[Paul Cockshott]

When you say the whole is greater than the sum of the parts what do you actually mean.
Clearly the mass or energy content of a cell for example is not greater than the mass or energy of the sum of its components. What is it that is greater. Saying that something, call it x, is greater implies that you have some way of independently measuring the x component of the parts and the x component of the whole. What is this something, this x, which is greater in the whole?

The problem is that you are using a prescientific metaphor to try to represent things about which we have scientific theories. Arguably, the opposite of what you say is true. Organised systems like cells have less of something than their independent components - less entropy and thus less information. They have fewer degrees of freedom than an unorganised system.

To take another instance, when a pre-solar nebula collapses into a star, it ends up with less gravitational potential energy than the sum of the gravitational potential of the isolated hydogen molecules that existed before the collapse.

So the idea that the whole is more than the sum of its parts would have to be defined rather carefully to come up with instances where it made any measurable sense.

[ckaihatsu]

Not to speak for anyone else here, but here's my take on this classic life-vs.-entropy argument:





When you say the whole is greater than the sum of the parts what do you actually mean.


Any observation or investigation, as the beginning of a scientific inquiry, is necessarily constrained in *scope*. If we want to know how the universe began, for example, there are some kinds of empirical information that are simply beyond our reach -- if only for the time being, perhaps.

Likewise, any scientific inquiry is constrained by *subjectivity* as well -- if everything in the universe can't be actively considered as causative factors in what's being examined, then who made the decision as to what factors *would* be validated, and *how* was that decision arrived at?

If predominantly *lower-level* elements are being examined, then the *scope* -- and probably the conclusion as well -- is *also* going to be lower-level as well. Someone learning a game or a kind of sport for the first time may not be able to appreciate the nuances and entertainment aspects of what they're seeing, because, for the time being, they're only able to see, and must focus on learning, the rudimentary *mechanics* of it all. If asked to describe what they saw they would probably provide a very mechanistic and empirical account of their experience -- certain players, how they were behaving, etc.

But, with prolonged exposure and experience, and newfound facilities for the observation of whatever, a person will be able to discern more-general patterns -- like that of a storyline -- from the basic interactions of what they're seeing. They will *habituate* to the lower-level dynamics and, through our natural seeking of novelty, will become more interested in the higher-level aspects realized from intelligence.





Clearly the mass or energy content of a cell for example is not greater than the mass or energy of the sum of its components. What is it that is greater. Saying that something, call it x, is greater implies that you have some way of independently measuring the x component of the parts and the x component of the whole. What is this something, this x, which is greater in the whole?


The 'something' is clearly *functioning* -- life self-assembles into higher-level, more complex and sophisticated assemblages, precisely because there *are* gains to be realized on the whole, for participants, from organizing. (One technical term for this is 'reducing transaction costs', among others.)





The problem is that you are using a prescientific metaphor to try to represent things about which we have scientific theories. Arguably, the opposite of what you say is true. Organised systems like cells have less of something than their independent components - less entropy and thus less information. They have fewer degrees of freedom than an unorganised system.


This is just a trade-off, and anyone could bemoan the characteristics lost from the process of generalization, in whatever context.





To take another instance, when a pre-solar nebula collapses into a star, it ends up with less gravitational potential energy than the sum of the gravitational potential of the isolated hydogen molecules that existed before the collapse.

So the idea that the whole is more than the sum of its parts would have to be defined rather carefully to come up with instances where it made any measurable sense.


So by focusing on the lower-level phenomena in these systems -- primitive cells or proto-star material -- you're only taking into account lower-level characteristics *lost* as potential was used-up in the formation of more-complex assemblages -- evolved modern cells and gravitationally dense stars, in these examples.

Sure, no one can "counter" anything about these statements, but at the same time, the *content* of what's being said is rather glass-half-empty and doesn't look beyond the "glass" to see what the half-glass of water is being *used* for, to extend the metaphor.

[Mr. Natural]

ckaihatsu, Am I being dramatic? Perhaps so, but I'm watching humanity destroy itself/be destroyed at the hands of its capitalist Frankenstein monster without any response. That's "dramatic," and I believe I manage to maintain a rather level emotional keel in these life and death discussions. This is also ostensibly a revolutionary site, and that's a bit "dramatic," too.

Have you asked yourself why you get pissed when I present the triangle? That's the history of our discussions, which seem to proceed along worthwhile lines until I present Capra's triangle.

The two triangles you presented are "dead," closed, mechanical, reductionist systems. The Process element of Capra's triangle (its life activity) dynamically integrates it into the life process and relations. Life is a bootstrap of such systemic, organizational relations I treat the triangle's "3 aspects with equal weight" because they form an inseparable unity. So our triangles may be structurally similar, but Capra's triangle models living relations while yours is a closed system that does not reach out to dynamically engage other systems but stays within itself.

Marx's materialist dialectic views life and society as organic, systemic processes, as do the new sciences of organization that culminate in systems-complexity science, and Capra's triangle models the organization of life and society as organic, systemic processes.

This is revolutionary beyond belief, and I can't find any revolutionaries who can see it or believe it. I've been at this for a dozen years, though, and I constantly check the science as well as my own psychological, intellectual, and political sensibilities for error. In the more than a year I've been at Revleft, no one has raised a valid objection to the science and concept of Capra's triangle.

It would really be difficult to get too "dramatic" concerning Capra's triangle. It offers the ability to develop viable revolutionary processes and a realized human future to a human species that is about to be cashed in.

My red-green best.

[Mr. Natural]

Paul Cockshott, That I'm having a lot of difficulty replying to your simple request to better define "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts" as a simple statement of emergence is related to the problem everyone has with emergence, self-organization, Marx's materialist dialectic, Capra's triangle: they work with unseen, "mystical," "magical" organizational relations. Human sensory relations and the consciousness and mind that emerge do not "see" the organizational relations that gave birth to them.

Living "things" have organizational relations with emergent properties. The cells of an elk's body have developed intercellular relations that create emergent organs with new properties not present in the cells, these organs develop relations that form an emergent body, and elk form herds that also have emergent properties and behaviors. A pile of rocks is, indeed, a sum of its parts, while elk herds have emergent properties that arise from the relations of their parts.

Here's a statement made by a philosopher-scientist whose name I have forgotten: "We think we understand 'two', for we know 'one', and one and one are two. But we must also understand and."

Take genes. By themselves, they are bits of dust. Place them in an organized genome, though, and they provide the parameters for individual and species development. These are emergent properties arising from the organizational relations of "things."

Life emerged from the self-organization (autocatalysis) of organic molecules in Earth's primordial atmosphere into living systems, the weather emerges from the interaction of countless physical elements (and as an emergent, complex phenomenon cannot be predicted accurately longterm), and the human mind emerges from the activity of its "individual" neurons. Simply "add" those neurons and you have a heap of decaying matter; integrate those neurons and you have the emergent living system of a brain and emergent consciousness and mind.

There has been some discussion in other threads of the Higgs Boson. Does anyone think that you could add up all the Higgs Bosons (assuming their validity) and you would have the universe? No, of course not. We would be missing their organizational relations and the universe that ostensibly emerges from them.

It really angers people to read and hear that humanity has a reductive perception/consciousness that misses the emergent relations of life, but that is our dilemma. But Capra's triangle goes a long way toward a resolution of what is at present a human perceptual deficit that guarantees our destruction by capitalism.

Emergent communist revolutionary processes would arise from the self-organization of individuals into revolutionary groups and practices. Simply bring a bunch of people together without any organization, though, and at best they would "add up" to a riot.

We humans have come to see that the Earth is not flat as it appears and that the sun does not orbit the Earth as it seems. Darwinian evolutionary theory then revealed that life's things have an organized developmental history, and Marx and Engels jumped all over this science.

Are current Marxists ever going to investigate the new sciences of the emergent organization of life in order to bring organizational life to communism and revolutionary processes thereto?

I don't know where this reply leaves us, Paul. Where do you stand on the simple, deeply radical observation that humans are blind to the organizational relations of life? That we have a reductive perception/consciousness that we must make whole?

I hope this post has been of some service. My red-green best.

[Paul Cockshott]

Ckaihatsu, you talk about higher level and lower level systems. This is a common metaphor, and derives perhaps from the old idea of higher and lower level animals with human beings representing the highest level. But that view has been criticised as anthropocentric.
What is the standard by which you judge something to be high level or low level?

I can see that as a rough and ready terminology we often know what we mean when we use it, but there is a danger in putting too much credence in such metaphorical language.

I thing the whole idea of the whole being greater than the parts confuses properties of reality with properties of our theories. If you look at a system for which we only have a very simple theory - a gas in equilibrium, we characterise it by its temperature, pressure and volume. The gas laws give us a good fit to the gas behaviour in terms of these macroscopic variables. But for each state described by these macroscopic variables there are a huge number of micro states that we do not distinguish.

As soon as you start to try do describe gases in detail, as is done with weatherforecasts, the problem becomes immensely complicated.
If you just model the atmosphere of a planet as a single volume with the average insolation, you may get a rough idea of the mean temperature on the surface. Once you split it into a large number of sub volumes, say 1km on a side, then you start to be able to model all sorts of weather phenomena.

But are these emergent phenomena in reality, or are they just a growth in the informational complexity of your computational model?

Take another example, if you have petri dishes with a sterile growth medium, and to one you introduce a bacterium of a known strain, the other you leave alone. You can predict that in the one with the bacterium introduced, a colony will form about which you can predict all sorts of things that you can not predict about the sterile medium. If you knew the genetic code of the initial bacterium, you could predict with a high degree of accuracy the chemical composition of the DNA extracted from any of the bacteria in the colony. One way of looking at this is to say that this is a complex emergent behaviour of the bacterial cell. Another way of looking at it is to say that the presence of the bacterium reduces the degrees of freedom of a portion of the organic molecules in the growth medium to have the exact chemical composition of the introduced DNA. In this sense the configuration space of the molecules has become much more constrained and less complex than it was before, but our knowledge of its configuration is much richer - assuming we had sequenced the dna beforehand.

I suspect that people who think that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts are confusing the growth of our knowledge of the system with the complexity of the system itself, the complexity of models with the complexity of the real.

[ckaihatsu]

ckaihatsu, Am I being dramatic? Perhaps so, but I'm watching humanity destroy itself/be destroyed at the hands of its capitalist Frankenstein monster without any response. That's "dramatic," and I believe I manage to maintain a rather level emotional keel in these life and death discussions. This is also ostensibly a revolutionary site, and that's a bit "dramatic," too.


Sorry, I don't mean to begrudge you your expressiveness.





Have you asked yourself why you get pissed when I present the triangle? That's the history of our discussions, which seem to proceed along worthwhile lines until I present Capra's triangle.


I disagree -- you're emotionalizing our past exchanges. I made clear that I *take issue* with your presentation:





[I] just wanted to clarify that you're treating the three aspects with *equal weight*. I don't think / agree that "All life is in the network Pattern of organization" -- it 'competes' with the other two aspects.





The two triangles you presented are "dead," closed, mechanical, reductionist systems.


No, I disagree here. They are *frameworks*, like the one you champion, and are structually identical in how they present their respective concepts. The reason for *any* use of a triangular shape is to indicate a common space of *overlap* among the three main conceptual elements.





The Process element of Capra's triangle (its life activity) dynamically integrates it into the life process and relations. Life is a bootstrap of such systemic, organizational relations




I treat the triangle's "3 aspects with equal weight" because they form an inseparable unity.


Okay, so noted.





So our triangles may be structurally similar, but Capra's triangle models living relations while yours is a closed system that does not reach out to dynamically engage other systems but stays within itself.


Neither of the two triangular frameworks I presented are "mine". I included them for the purpose of aiding discussion.





Marx's materialist dialectic views life and society as organic, systemic processes, as do the new sciences of organization that culminate in systems-complexity science, and Capra's triangle models the organization of life and society as organic, systemic processes.

This is revolutionary beyond belief, and I can't find any revolutionaries who can see it or believe it. I've been at this for a dozen years, though, and I constantly check the science as well as my own psychological, intellectual, and political sensibilities for error. In the more than a year I've been at Revleft, no one has raised a valid objection to the science and concept of Capra's triangle.

It would really be difficult to get too "dramatic" concerning Capra's triangle. It offers the ability to develop viable revolutionary processes and a realized human future to a human species that is about to be cashed in.

My red-green best.

[ckaihatsu]

Ckaihatsu, you talk about higher level and lower level systems. This is a common metaphor, and derives perhaps from the old idea of higher and lower level animals with human beings representing the highest level. But that view has been criticised as anthropocentric.
What is the standard by which you judge something to be high level or low level?


How about 'animal, vegetable, mineral' -- ? (Also see diagrams, attached below.)





I can see that as a rough and ready terminology we often know what we mean when we use it, but there is a danger in putting too much credence in such metaphorical language.


'Higher-level' and 'lower-level', and 'animal, vegetable, mineral', are not merely metaphorical -- they are real, *material* designations.





I thing the whole idea of the whole being greater than the parts confuses properties of reality with properties of our theories.




I suspect that people who think that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts are confusing the growth of our knowledge of the system with the complexity of the system itself, the complexity of models with the complexity of the real.


No, you're saying that we're only *projecting* our own *subjective* predispositions of characterization onto the objective material world, and this is not the case. Acknowledging the increased complexity and abilities of higher-level assemblages is being *scientific*, not simply willful.





If you look at a system for which we only have a very simple theory - a gas in equilibrium, we characterise it by its temperature, pressure and volume. The gas laws give us a good fit to the gas behaviour in terms of these macroscopic variables. But for each state described by these macroscopic variables there are a huge number of micro states that we do not distinguish.

As soon as you start to try do describe gases in detail, as is done with weatherforecasts, the problem becomes immensely complicated.


You're making my case *for* me here.





If you just model the atmosphere of a planet as a single volume with the average insolation, you may get a rough idea of the mean temperature on the surface. Once you split it into a large number of sub volumes, say 1km on a side, then you start to be able to model all sorts of weather phenomena.

But are these emergent phenomena in reality, or are they just a growth in the informational complexity of your computational model?


You already answered your own question, as you've presented it in your model-based scenario.





Take another example, if you have petri dishes with a sterile growth medium, and to one you introduce a bacterium of a known strain, the other you leave alone. You can predict that in the one with the bacterium introduced, a colony will form about which you can predict all sorts of things that you can not predict about the sterile medium.


I'll take that bet -- my predictions about the guaranteed-sterile medium will be better than yours about the bacterium colony.





If you knew the genetic code of the initial bacterium, you could predict with a high degree of accuracy the chemical composition of the DNA extracted from any of the bacteria in the colony. One way of looking at this is to say that this is a complex emergent behaviour of the bacterial cell. Another way of looking at it is to say that the presence of the bacterium reduces the degrees of freedom of a portion of the organic molecules in the growth medium to have the exact chemical composition of the introduced DNA. In this sense the configuration space of the molecules has become much more constrained and less complex than it was before, but our knowledge of its configuration is much richer - assuming we had sequenced the dna beforehand.


Yes, the DNA-determined configuration of molecules is much more complex ("richer"), by spatial area, than plain, non-organic groupings of molecules.


History, Macro-Micro -- Political (Cognitive) Dissonance

http://postimage.org/image/35rsjgh0k/


[1] History, Macro Micro -- Precision

http://postimage.org/image/34mjeutk4/

[Mr. Natural]

Paul Cockshott, ckaihatsu, We're wrestling here with the devil of a human consciousness that misses critical organizational relations to seize upon the "things" that emerge from the relations. This is an almost intractable problem: human consciousness is intrinsically reductive and conservative. Capra's triangle, though, models life's organizational genius and potentially makes it available to ordinary human consciousness and to the creation of revolutionary processes out of the cancer of capitalism into a human future.

I haven't made any progress in enabling comrades to "see" the triangle and organizational relations, though, despite the growth of sciences, culminating in systems-complexity science, that work with the organization of the emergent complexities of life and the universe.

That I see this and no one else does has to do with some special circumstances of my life and psychology and does not reside in any towering personal intelligence nor is it the product of an invalid theory.

You made some remarks concerning entropy, Paul. Well, the living systems of life overcome entropy with their organizational relations. These organizational relations keep living systems and the life process going; these living organizational relations overcome the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Living organisms have self-organized into systems able to generate the energy necessary to maintain their being. What are those organizational relations? See Capra's triangle, which models the universal pattern of organization of the living systems of life.

Global capitalism is now a closed, entropic system. Its triumph (globalization) means that its values and institutions now constitute the human ecosystem within which we live and think. Its triumph means that its relations now significantly shape its people-parts and their thoughts. Consider the current impoverishment of the left as Exhibit A. There is no negation of the negation within capitalism now: its organization, ideas, and institutions rule. The left has been reduced to go-nowhere sectarianism and a sterile rummaging through old Marxist classics. "Culture" overall has become a barbaric reflection of capitalist values, and new ideas and intellectual stimulation are rare everywhere.

Capitalism has also systemically captured/killed the new sciences of the organization of life that oppose capitalist organization. Nothing new has come out of systems-complexity science in more than a decade, and the Santa Fe Institute has become respectable and boring.

Thinking of systems in terms of "higher" and "lower" levels presents problems in that it lends itself to thoughts of "better." Life, though, does indeed have lower levels of organization that give birth to emergent higher organizational levels. Living systems must establish these higher levels of organization as complexity increases beyond a certain point or they cannot coordinate their being. Thus cells become multi-cellular and as this complexity of organization and relations increases they develop emergent neural structures (brains). But all of this developing complexity just serves to keep the life organization and process going. It's the bootstrap of life running in place, keeping itself going.

The SFI has a term for the emergent levels of life: Local rules generate global order. In other words, the organization of the elements at one level births a "higher," emergent global control. Sound mystical? Well, the components of a cell self-organize into relations that generate the global order of the cell that then keeps its components and the life process perking. Revolutionary people would generate relations that emerge into global agencies, parties, and a movement. A communist revolutionary movement's levels would necessarily be integrated, though. Any "vanguard party" would be radically grassrooted, just as a lion is grassrooted in the organization of its cells, and lion prides are grassrooted in the relations of their individual lions.

All of this sounds "mystical" and "magical" and nonsensical because we can't see the organization. We see the things that result from the self-organization of matter. That life's things emerge from their self-organization runs counterintuitively to our reductive human perception/consciousness.

All of this is also highly interdisciplinary, ecological, and holistic, too, in an era of entropic capitalist fragmentation and compartmentalization. Capitalism is a quantitative, reductive system. Pertinent examples of these systemic capitalist disconnections from living relations are the extreme sectarianism evident in the left's mini-tendencies, and the hostile compartmentalization of academia into warring departments that do not communicate despite the overarching unity of the life it studies.

Astoundingly, in yet another of The System's contradictions/paradoxes, it is the field of biology that is most heatedly opposed to investigating the organization of life. Benoit Mandelbrot is a highly interdisciplinary scientist and the go-to guy on fractals. Here is his experience as he tried to discuss life with experts in different scientific fields, as quoted in James Gleick's Chaos (1987), p. 113: "Looking back, Mandelbrot saw that scientists in various disciplines responded to his approach in sadly predictable stages. The first stage was always the same: Who are you and why are you interested in our field? Second: How does it relate to what we have been doing, and why don't you explain it on the basis of what we know? Third: Are you sure it's standard mathematics? (Yes, I'm sure.) Then why don't we know it? (Because it's standard but very obscure.)"

I'll leave this post with Doyne Farmer's observations on the whole being more than a sum of its parts, from Waldrop's Complexity (1992), p. 288: "First, says Farmer this law [tendendy of matter to organize itself] would have to give a rigorous account of emergence. What does it really mean to say the whole is greater than the sum of its parts? 'It's not magic', he says, 'But to us humans, with our crude little human brains, it feels life magic.' Flying boids [computer simulations] (and real birds) adapt to the actions of their neighbors, thereby becoming a flock. Organisms cooperate and compete in a dance of coevolution, thereby becoming an exquisitely tuned ecosystem. Atoms search for a minimum energy state by forming chemical bonds with each other, thereby becoming the emergent structures known as molecules. Human beings try to satisfy their material needs by buying, selling, and trading with each other, thereby creating an emergent structure known as a market. Humans likewise interact with each other to satisfy less quantifiable goals, thereby forming families, religions, and cultures. Somehow, by constantly seeking mutual accomodation and self-consistency, groups of agents manage to transcend themselves and become something more. The trick is to figure out how, without falling back into sterile philosophizing or New Age mysticism."

I insist that Capra's triangle models the organization of all of this and is the revolutionary mental tool we all need. My red-green best.

[Paul Cockshott]

Yes, the DNA-determined configuration of molecules is much more complex ("richer"), by spatial area, than plain, non-organic groupings of molecules.

I think the inverse holds, to make it simpler lets just consider a mixture of the dna bases as monomers as compared to the bases in a DNA molecule that comes from a known strain of bacterium. The fact that it comes from the bacterium puts a constraint on the relative positions of the bases in that case which does not exist in the case of the monomers, so the conditional information ( or log degrees of freedom ) of the dna bases is lower than that of the monomers.

Information is tricky it is easy to get the sign wrong when thinging about it.

[ckaihatsu]

I think the inverse holds, to make it simpler lets just consider a mixture of the dna bases as monomers as compared to the bases in a DNA molecule that comes from a known strain of bacterium. The fact that it comes from the bacterium puts a constraint on the relative positions of the bases in that case which does not exist in the case of the monomers, so the conditional information ( or log degrees of freedom ) of the dna bases is lower than that of the monomers.

Information is tricky it is easy to get the sign wrong when thinging about it.


Paul, again you're simply asserting a lower-level, more-microscopic viewpoint on a particular scenario. If you want to emphasize the entropy side of a trade-off, or reaction, that also yields a higher-level, more-complex result, then I'm sure you'll find endless examples to bring forth.

I've already noted the actual existence of inert materials, vegetation, and animal life as being counter-entropy developments of increasing complexity -- Mr. Natural has contributed arguments as well along similar lines. It's downright daft for *anyone* to ignore such blatant examples, preferring to continue to make tangential, sidelong points. I'd say we're already talking past each other.

[Lynx]

Please define "life". Living things have mechanisms to decrease entropy (not Shannon entropy).

[ckaihatsu]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life

[Lynx]

There are several definitions of life in that article. Select one that is consistent.

It's difficult when everyone is working with different definitions.

[ckaihatsu]

There are several definitions of life in that article. Select one that is consistent.

It's difficult when everyone is working with different definitions.


Be my guest. Make it your own. Run with it.

[Lynx]

Okay..........Life: A system capable of negative entropy.

[Paul Cockshott]

entropy is the defined as minus the log of a probability and as such is always positive.

[Lynx]

Negative entropy has its own definition (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negentropy).

[Mr. Natural]

Life: the organic, systemic process generated by matter self-organizing into dynamically interdependent networks. Life is a bootstrap of such living systems maintaining themselves and the life process. Life is a self-generating, systemic network.

The preceding definition of life is in accord with the new sciences of the organization of life and the cosmos and with the Marxist materialist dialectic. For conclusive evidence of the former see Fritjof Capra's Web of Life (1996); for an understanding of the Marxist dialectic's materialist organization see Bertell Ollman's Dance of the Dialectic (2003).

It should be of the greatest significance to Marxists that life and the materialist dialectic have the same general organization, for this means that the new sciences of the organization of life can potentially be employed to bring the dialectic into popular understanding and praxis. It also means that the dialectic is "for real."

Both life and the materialist dialectic appear as "mysticism" to human perception/consciousness, but they are rooted in real material relations that the dialectic expresses philosophically and the new sciences now illuminate and confirm.

[ckaihatsu]

I think much of the blind-spot-edness comes from the formal technical training that most students are familiar with, from physics. While the axiom regarding entropy in a closed system is not incorrect, it is too often applied formulaically, as though anything can simply be "boxed" with it and examined validly.





Second law of thermodynamics: The entropy of any isolated system not in thermal equilibrium almost always increases. Isolated systems spontaneously evolve towards thermal equilibrium -- the state of maximum entropy of the system -- in a process known as "thermalization". Equivalently, perpetual motion machines of the second kind are impossible.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_of_thermodynamics


This reductionist approach has the side effect of orienting one towards a kind of stilted worldview, or internalized paradigm -- the simplest empirical facts of concentrated energy supplies, larger elemental atom sizes, organic life, and societal sophistication necessarily remain outside such reductionist treatments because they are *distributive* and cross-context in being.

"Thinking outside the box" even became a pop phrase a decade or so ago, probably as a popular cognitive rebellion against conventional conservative compartmentalization. Fortunately I think the inherent structure of the Internet and its now-widespread availability and usefulness serves as a leading example of how *distributed*, *massively parallel* systems work, and it's often compared to a mass-brain in its structure.

As a comment I'll note further that much closed-off-mindedness can be seen, particularly, in ingrained attitudes about energy and how to supply it. The boxed-off mentality does not conceive of ready conversions of energy from one type to another, instead invoking the fallacy that any such practical approach would be "perpetual motion" -- never mind that a constant flow of electricity, for example, enables "perpetual motion" from a clock.





Equivalently, perpetual motion machines of the second kind are impossible.





Drinking birds, also known as insatiable birdie[1], and dipping birds,[2] are toy heat engines that mimic the motions of a bird drinking from a water source. They are sometimes incorrectly considered examples of a perpetual motion device.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drinking_bird

[Paul Cockshott]

Ok a difference between two entropies is well defined, but both entropies are positive.