Cells and people: emergent phenomena vs control

CSGnet Archive CSG1993
1

[From Bill Powers (930616.1230 MDT)]

Oded Maler (930616 II) --

I mean entities like the US, the scientific community, the
belief in a single god/theory, the white race, communism, etc.

So do I. These are ideas in people's heads. They have no
objective existence. To make them exist, you have to get people
to AGREE that they exist -- i.e., individually believe it. As
soon as everyone stops agreeing that they exist, they disappear.
That makes them quite different things from what we mean by "the
planet Mars" and "peanut butter."

In fact, what you suggest is sociological reductionism: "every
social-historical phenomena can be explained in terms of
individual humans". As if you could analyse the information-
processing PCT using the underlying bio-chemical or physical
terms. A perceptual signal in your theory is a huge abstraction
step -- no molecule in the body has any "evidence" concerning
the existence of perceptual signals, not to mention whole
persons/hierarchies.

I didn't say that every social-historical phenomenon can be
explained in terms of individual humans. I said that every
social-historical phenomenon of CONTROL is so explained. Many
phenomena are not control phenomena: I mentioned pressure, which
is a phenomenon arising out of the behavior of collections of
molecules. The molecules, through their properties and
interactions, produce a stable phenomenon called pressure. The
pressure doesn't cause the molecules to move as they do; it's the
motion of the molecules that gives rise to the phenomenon of
pressure. The molecules are not caused to move because something
in nature wants pressure to appear (unless you count human
intentions). But pressure is a perfectly real phenomenon: anyone
who knows how can observe it.

Conflict is a social phenomenon that arises when two independent
control systems with incompatible reference levels interact.
Following, avoiding, leading, and gathering are also emergent
phenomena. These phenomena are completely explained by the way
control systems with certain reference levels interact. They are
not in themselves control phenomena, because they are not
established by any higher system that perceives them and adjusts
the reference signals in the participants to make sure the result
appears as desired. A leader may want to lead, but success
depends on the existence of followers who want to follow. Nobody
is creating both the leaders and the followers in order to
produce the social phenomenon of following or leading. That
social phenomenon results from the fact that some people want to
follow and some people want to lead; when they get together, they
each get what they want. There's no superordinate control system
that sets one person's reference signals to "follow" and
another's to "lead" in order to create the phenomenon of
following/leading.

In the internal organization of an individual, there ARE
superordinate systems that establish reference levels for
subordinate systems, precisely in the way assuring that their
combined actions result in the perception that the higher system
wants to experience. The higher systems are not just emergent
phenomena that can be seen in the interactions among lower
systems. They are physically distinct systems which, by sensing
and acting, impose coordinations on collections of subordinate
systems through directly adjusting their reference signals (and
sometimes their properties). This relationship simply does not
exist between organisms.

A perceptual signal in your theory is a huge abstraction step
-- no molecule in the body has any "evidence" concerning the
existence of perceptual signals, not to mention whole
persons/hierarchies.

Not so. A perceptual signal in my theory is in principle, and
often in practice, an observable signal in a physical pathway. It
is defined as a perceptual signal because of the way it is
generated. The subsystem itself doesn't know about perceptual
signals, of course; that knowledge ABOUT the subsystem must
always be formulated from an external point of view. But that's
what a theory is, as various contributers to CSG-L have been
pointing out: an external view of a behaving system (but residing
in the brain of each viewer).

I don't think that physical reductionism is any more profitable
than sociological-historical reductionism.

When we talk about evidence, we mean to ask for descriptions of
perceivable situations like those on which we normally base our
conclusions. If there are social CONTROL systems, we should be
able to see evidence that they exist, evidence that refutes the
claim that apparent social CONTROL phenomena are simply emergent
consequences of interactions among individual control systems.

···

-------------------------------------------------------------
Best,

Bill P.

2

[From Oded Maler (930622)]

[Bill Powers (930616.1230 MDT) and other anthropocentrist entities :-)]

···

*
* >I mean entities like the US, the scientific community, the
* >belief in a single god/theory, the white race, communism, etc.
*
* So do I. These are ideas in people's heads. They have no
* objective existence. To make them exist, you have to get people
* to AGREE that they exist -- i.e., individually believe it. As
* soon as everyone stops agreeing that they exist, they disappear.
* That makes them quite different things from what we mean by "the
* planet Mars" and "peanut butter."

Does a "living cell" has an objective existence?

*
* >A perceptual signal in your theory is a huge abstraction step
* >-- no molecule in the body has any "evidence" concerning the
* >existence of perceptual signals, not to mention whole
* >persons/hierarchies.
*
* Not so. A perceptual signal in my theory is in principle, and
* often in practice, an observable signal in a physical pathway. It
* is defined as a perceptual signal because of the way it is
* generated. The subsystem itself doesn't know about perceptual
* signals, of course; that knowledge ABOUT the subsystem must
* always be formulated from an external point of view. But that's
* what a theory is, as various contributers to CSG-L have been
* pointing out: an external view of a behaving system (but residing
* in the brain of each viewer).
*

A perceptual signal is observable in your theory because of the type
of measurements instruments you have, and because of your own set of
conceptual categories. If instead of elecrodes that can record nerve
pulses at some temporal and spatial granularity, you only had
instruments that could detect properties of single atoms and molecules
for very short periods, you would never deduce the existence of
reference and perceptual signals, and not even the existence of cells.

I think that as a human you are in a similar situation toward social
and historical entities.

Concerning emergence, You admit, I think, a transition from dead matter
to living systems. Some organization of matter, although still governed
by physical and chamical laws, made possible the emergence of such things
as (chemical) reference and perceptual signals. Further developments,
such as neurons, provided for more complicated emergent phenomena, etc.,
culminating in human beings. There is no reason, in principle, except
the fact that we, the theorizers and observers, are humans, that further
developments such as agriculture, language, cars or e-mail, furnish
the way to higher order organisms, for which human beings are like
(complicated) molecules inside a cell. I don't say such organisms are
control systems in the PCT sense; The very fact that we are what we
are, prevents us from giving a scientific "evidence" for their existence.

Concerning collective reference signals, I think some participants
don't get the point. Take a CROWD-like demo that will always settle in
a circle. The circle IS a reference signal for the higher-order
systems. The circle is meaningless for each individual who can only
percieve its relation to his neighbors (this point is also related to
the resistance of some to the idea of distributed representation of
signals). If you deny this, and try to be consistent from the bottom
up, you will deny the existence of "normal" reference signals, because
when you look close enough, they constitute a set of purposeless measurable
quantities. Try to think of the simplest instance of a control system,
than look one level (*) below and you will see that the theorizing step you
perform is not better than the step involved in hypothetizing
collective socio-historical signals.

Best regards

--Oded

(*) "Level" is the sense of organizational level: Atoms - molecules -
cells - organs, not in the sense of the hierarchy.

p.s.

Rick said somewhere that Zoroastrian religion is not practiced anymore
(btw, I think it is somewhere in Iran) and that is a an evidence that
the existence of higher-order entities depends completely on the free
will of individuals. This is not so, due to the following reasons:

1) I didn't say that such entities, (like other living systems..)
cannot die. They can.

2) The limitation of human language and categorization system prevents
us for seeing the continuity when the name and the details change.
For example the, the middle-age knighthood can be transformed into
the 20th century motor-bike skinheadhood. Catholic inquisiton into
scientific program committees. And the idea of people chosen by god
to show the light to the rest of the world, can also be transformed
into various forms...

--

Oded Maler, LGI-IMAG, Bat D, B.P. 53x, 38041 Grenoble, France
Phone: 76635846 Fax: 76446675 e-mail: maler@imag.fr