November 17, 2022
Things made by humans are called artifacts. Artifacts can be generalized to anything made by a biological population. An ants nest or a beehive or a termite mound is an artifact made by populations of ant, bee, or termite colonies. The space of artifacts is part of what Dawkins called the extended phenotype or what Lewontin saw as the various feedback loops of adaptation between the environment and a biological population.
The term tool has many different definitions but all tools are artifacts. A chair by most definitions is not a tool but it is definitely an artifact and part of the human extended phenotype. Only humans are known to make tools to make tools.
Chairs have a history, purpose (to sit on,) and a life span. Chairs are replicated (built) and then selected (bought.)
What is the information content of a chair?
November 29, 2022
A chair is what is called an embodied artifact, an extension of the human body. The idea of a chair is a design, a set of instructions, and a period of training and experience, partly held in human memory, partly offloaded to other storage. Animals create and use artifacts/tools also. How are the ideas of these artifacts stored by animals?
Smardzewski, Jerzy. “Antropotechnical Aspects of Furniture Design.” Drvna Industrija 60, no. 1 (2009): 73.
December 03, 2022
Occasionally I run into a paper that links ideas together to form new associations and opens up new levels of inquiry. As a bonus, it introduces an exciting technology that I may have heard about before but never realized its usefulness. My interests are running more and more into the general theme of complexity more specifically the information structure of complexity. I have been influenced greatly by the work of Dr. Sarah Imari Walker at ASU. What does this have to do with chairs? Stay tuned, I will end this thread with a written article.
St Clair, James J. H., Zackory T. Burns, Elaine M. Bettaney, Michael B. Morrissey, Brian Otis, Thomas B. Ryder, Robert C. Fleischer, Richard James, and Christian Rutz. “Experimental Resource Pulses Influence Social-Network Dynamics and the Potential for Information Flow in Tool-Using Crows.” Nature Communications 6, no. 1 (November 3, 2015): 1–8. https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms8197.
December 04, 2022
Starting the book: The Social Logic of Space by Bill Hillier and Julienne Hanson. Written in 1984, it has a few comments that are dated and some that have been proven wrong but a couple of important statements.
“… The structured information on which the system runs is not carried in the description mechanism but in reality itself in the spatio-temporal world. The programme does not generate reality. Reality generates the programme, one whose description is retrievable, leading to the self-reproduction of the system under generally stable conditions. Thus in effect reality is it’s own programme. The abstract description is built into the material organization of reality, which as a result has some degree of intelligibility.”
“… Every society invests a certain proportion of its material resources not in the biological perpetuation of individuals, but in the reproduction of the global society by means of special biologically irrelevant behaviors which are aimed purely at the enactment of descriptions of the society as a whole...”
Hillier, Bill, and Julienne Hanson. The Social Logic of Space. Cambridge University Press, 1984. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511597237.
I don't agree that these behaviors are "biologically irrelevant" and the notion of how humans perceive space has been turned on its head since he wrote this but I would call this book an early classic in using complex systems to understand human culture.
December 11, 2022
Does Nature abhor a vacuum? Called horror vacui in Latin, the idea originally came from Aristotle. If you put a cylinder with a plunger in water and pull back the plunger, the cylinder will fill with water. According to Aristotle, the water follows the plunger because it is afraid of creating a vacuum. The Italian mathematician, Evangelista Torricelli 1606 - 1647 showed this is not true with the following experiment. Take a glass and put it underwater in a basin until it fills up. Turn the glass over and pull it up out of the water’s surface so that the bottom of the glass is just below the surface of the basin water. There will be an empty space at the top of the glass. Called at the time, “Torricelli’s Emptiness” it is a real vacuum. The reason for this emptiness is pressure, formalized around the same time by Blaise Pascal. So Nature does not abhor a vacuum, Nature creates a vacuum. So why do we still say this? Is it more correct to say that human nature abhors a vacuum?
“A History and Philosophy of Fluid Mechanics” G.A. Tokaty, Dover, 1971
December 17, 2022
Leaves have surfaces that have a degree of wettability, water will either stick to a surface or it will flow off depending on the ecological needs of the leaf. Nonwetable leaves have complex surfaces that modify the surface pressure of the water so it forms droplets and flows off. The reasoning and mathematics of this are explained in this video:
My question: The complex surface looks fractal, is there a scaling law going on here?
January 14, 2023
There is an idea in biology called folk biology. Ordinary people know what things are. They know what a dog is although dogs come in a wide range of sizes, colors, and shapes. Hunter-gatherer societies know what a species is to the level of any trained naturalist yet defining the term species in biology is an ongoing struggle. So to with other terms like gene or even individual. There is a problem with meaning, we know what objects are but when we delve into meaning all sorts of issues appear. So we drop meaning and look at knowledge. How do we have knowledge of an object?
February 11, 2023
I continue to hear from scientists and non-scientists alike that biological life evolves through more complex forms. I would argue that the bacterial assemblages in a biogel are at least as complex as any organism. An alternative is not to think about how life has changed but what it has done. Life survives, it continues, 4 billion years and counting. It does this by constantly expanding into and modifying new environments. This is accomplished by budding out new states of complexity, the major transitions of life are real but there is no goal of more, there is no goal, the result, however, has been survival.
March 04, 2023
In biology, there is the concept of constraint, what physical and chemical laws impose on the possible direction of evolutionary change. Adam Smith came up with the idea of “the invisible hand of the market.” Using ideas from statistical mechanics, models have shown simple rules of exchange to be a possible valid constraint in economics. Unfortunately, it has nothing to do with a so-called “free market.” A simple model always reaches an equilibrium of inequality in income distribution. One can argue that this is a toy model of a very complex system. Yet toy models can reveal underlying structures. The current and historic wealth distribution data show a similar structure but even worse inequality. One takeaway from this is that an individual will win or lose in a market, not because of any latent talent but just dumb luck. This is an equilibrium model and any complex system will be far from equilibrium and complexity can perhaps mediate this dismal condition. A fair market would require a fair distribution of income which also favors individual human autonomy and heterogeneity. How to build this fair market? I have found nothing that touches on this, perhaps the writings of the late David Graeber are a start.
Chakrabarti, Bikas K., Anirban Chakraborti, Satya R. Chakravarty, and Arnab Chatterjee. Econophysics of Income and Wealth Distributions. 1st edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
Shout out to https://mastodon.social/@marshall_0i for turning me onto Dan McShea. Rosenberg, Alexander, and Daniel W. McShea. Philosophy of Biology: A Contemporary Introduction. Routledge Contemporary Introductions to Philosophy. New York, NY: Routledge, 2008.
April 16, 2023
Stephen Jay Gould once stated that human cultural evolution is Lamarkian rather than Darwinian. Lamarkian can be a trigger word for some biologists so I will refrain from defending it. There are differences. Cultural transmission is much different than genetic transmission and the method of transmission is different, not discrete like genes, there is no evidence of memes like Dawkins has suggested. In addition, there are no lineages as such. Darwin had no idea of transmission either. Dawkins’s attempt at memes is based on the fact that humans are biological entities subject to Darwinian evolution and culture is a human phenotype and thus is subject to Darwinian evolution. This idea has been accepted and rejected at different times by the social sciences, mainly because of the stigma of Social Darwinism and the failure of Darwinian Evolution to provide coherent answers. Yet, culture is still a biological artifact, like an ant hill is a biological artifact so somehow this conceptual gap needs to be closed.
Lewens, Tim. “Cultural Evolution.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, 2020. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2020/entries/evolution-cultural/
April 30, 2023
"History is a pack of tricks we play on the dead" Voltaire
Tobler's First Law of Geography is: "... everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things." In spatial statistics this is formalized in the notion of correlation, near objects in space are more correlated than far objects. This applies to time also, near events in time are more correlated than distant events in time. Using Steven Jay Gould's famous "tape of Evolution" thought experiment for human history, rewind the tape back a week and then replay history. Would we notice much difference? Rewind it a thousand years? We might notice a difference. certain things correlate further back in time than others. Evolution gives us correlations going back billions of years. Species millions of years. Human cultures are much shorter, "Western Culture" as a global culture only goes back a few hundred years and for the most part was violently imposed upon the world. Archeology has returned to listening to the stories of remaining native peoples and in North America it has been shown that these peoples are direct ancestors to the peoples of the great pueblos of the southwest and the mound builders of the eastern woodlands. The concerns, participation, support, and stories of native people are now an important part of archeology. One critique of ethnographic studies is that it is difficult to tell just how far back current beliefs, stories, and practices can go, the past is a foreign country even to those whose ancestors lived it. This is a reasonable critique. It is hard for a society that has downloaded its knowledge first into writing and now onto silicon, to understand passing cultural knowledge strictly through memory. Any trial lawyer will tell you about how fallible human memory is yet cultures survived and thrived without writing. Just how was this accomplished?
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