Hey, thanks again! I am aware (and fascinated!) by the quantum eraser experiments. I have not yet read, however, Carlo Rovelli's "Relational Quantum Mechanics" paper. I'll go through it, and then come back to you. I will then also answer the comments you posted at your essay, which I found very thought provoking. More soon!
inés.
Hi, Tommaso, thanks for the detailed and insightful comments!
1. The mess left on the ground by Menelaus for achieving his objective was indeed enormous, but in this example of goal achievement it is not immediately clear to me, as an observer in charge of 'creating' agents, where entropy reduction took place.
The entropy reduction of the bacterium is instantiated by the fact that no matter how nucleotides are arranged in the initial state, they become tidily arranged for DNA replication in the final state. The entropy reduction of Menelaus is larger. He manages to achieve DNA recombination not only irrespective of the initial spatial arrangement of molecules in Helen's womb, but also, irrespective of the initial location of Helen herself (Troy). Both he and the bacterium are able to circumvent obstacles, but his require an even more complex strategy. We are the observers of them both, and we evaluate the complexity of their strategies (I do not mean to say that complex strategies are always virtuous). Anyway, the need of all these explanations probably demonstrates that the example was far from optimal, I just meant to say that evolution makes goal-seeking agents increasingly complex.
2. You write: "In this essay, the distinction between micro and macro-states is not emphasized, because the phenomena we deal with are not always divisible into separate scales." But immediately after this sentence you write: "The notion of goal-oriented behavior that is used here always brings about an entropy reduction." Being used to definitions of entropy that are fundamentally based on the distinction between micro- and macro- (levels, variables), I find these sentences as potentially contradictory.
Sorry, I should have clarified that I am speaking of Shannon entropy (negative sum of pi log pi), which does not require a distinction between microscopic and macroscopic. I like to think of Shannon entropy as the mean number of binary questions (and answers) required to specify the state of the system. In the football example, the initial state is described by a probability distribution that is fairly uniform throughout the stadium, and the final state has a peak at the goal. This description does not require us to think at a more microscopic level, for example, of the atoms composing the football players, or the grass of the stadium, etc.
3. I am afraid I found this passage (and its follow up) a bit obscure: "Once observers are in play, even if they might have never intended it, it turns out that the computation they perform is liable to iteration." Are you suggesting that the observers at level k decide to partition level (k-1) smartly enough as to let agents emerge within level (k-1), and that these (k-1)-agents produce the order used as fuel by the observers at level (k), which are in turn seen as agents by the observers at level (k+1)?
Not really, it is not the process of arrogating agency that I meant to iterate at different levels, but rather, the agents created by one single observer (let us think of him/her as outside of the world that he/she observes). Nested agency is an effective and economic description of the world at different levels, because the same concept is applied repeatedly. The agent "prokaryote bacterium" is an effective representation to describe the biochemical processes that take place when one such bug is around (metabolism, replication, displacements, etc). It is also effective because there are many such bugs, so the same concept can be applied repeatedly at the same level. And finally, it is also effective because prokaryotes keep replicating, and the offspring become the fuel for higher-level bugs. The observer can then envision the "eukaryote bacterium" as the association of two prokaryote cells, one inside the other. In turn, the definition of the agent "eukaryote" is not only a compact description for what this bug does in its environment (metabolism, replication, etc.), but it is also a good fuel to construct multi-cellular organisms, and so forth. A smart detection of agents, hence, is not only useful to describe what happens at one single level, but also to construct a whole edifice of levels. Observers tend to search for descriptions of the world that are compact and efficient at the grand scale. Of course, my comments in the essay were way too short to make this idea explicit.
4. "Here, noise is defined as the degrees of freedom that are irrelevant to predicting those features of the environment that affect the observer's fitness." This passage resonates with Rovelli's meaningful information (correlation between internal and external variables), as you may have already noticed. Another contact point with Rovelli: "Only if the initial location has proven to be arbitrary, and the traffic conditions variable, can goal-directed behavior be arrogated." A similar idea is pointed out also by him in his closing discussion on the modality of science.
I was very fond of Rovelli's essay, so all such connections make me happy. His merit, however, was to nail all this down in just a simple formula.
5. As you pointed out, I agree that also our essays are aligned on some aspects (e.g.: "We need an economic description, so we assign agency" is also a central point in my essay, where the economic description is referred to the 'goal').
Yes, indeed, I was happy to see we had many points in common.
Thanks again!
Inés.
Dear Ines Samengo
I invite you and every physicist to read my work "TIME ORIGIN,DEFINITION AND EMPIRICAL MEANING FOR PHYSICISTS, Héctor Daniel Gianni ,I'm not a physicist.
How people interested in "Time" could feel about related things to the subject.
1) Intellectuals interested in Time issues usually have a nice and creative wander for the unknown.
2) They usually enjoy this wander of their searches around it.
3) For millenniums this wander has been shared by a lot of creative people around the world.
4) What if suddenly, something considered quasi impossible to be found or discovered such as "Time" definition and experimental meaning confronts them?
5) Their reaction would be like, something unbelievable,... a kind of disappointment, probably interpreted as a loss of wander.....
6) ....worst than that, if we say that what was found or discovered wasn't a viable theory, but a proved fact.
7) Then it would become offensive to be part of the millenary problem solution, instead of being a reason for happiness and satisfaction.
8) The reader approach to the news would be paradoxically adverse.
9) Instead, I think it should be a nice welcome to discovery, to be received with opened arms and considered to be read with full attention.
11)Time "existence" is exclusive as a "measuring system", its physical existence can't be proved by science, as the "time system" is. Experimentally "time" is "movement", we can prove that, showing that with clocks we measure "constant and uniform" movement and not "the so called Time".
12)The original "time manuscript" has 23 pages, my manuscript in this contest has only 9 pages.
I share this brief with people interested in "time" and with physicists who have been in sore need of this issue for the last 50 or 60 years.
Héctor
Dear Ines Samengo
Hi Ines,
So first of all you have a lovely sense of langauge and if English is not your first langauge then that is really all the more impressive.
The basics of thermodynamics and information theory we cleary agree on, and you do a great job with Maxwell's demon. I might steal some of your phrases next time I teach about it!
OK and then you go and say something truly interesting and obviously true but just in a way that had never occurred to me before. Of course I knew that metabolism involves reducing entropy by exporting it to the environment, but I had never taken that additional step of noticing that this reverses our standard view of the relationship between information gains and enropy losses before, and the second I read that I started having lots of thoughts about how our minds operate, many of which you also discuss because it follows so naturally from that simple point.
Would you agree with this heurstic assesment: it's as though open systems can gain information, paradoxically(?), by ignoring things. Abstracting, coarse-graining, tossing out details, assuming spherical cows and all the other kinds of approximations we make are information losses in one sense, but what we are really doing is tossing things out so that our internal possibilities are reduced, hence increasing the probabilities of certain 'rare' states from the perspective of our own phase space and thus constituting information increases for ourselves. Animals "pay attention" to the world, but in order to be good at this, they also actively ignore an immense amount of information available in their environment. For example, species in the jungle hear the mating calls of their fellow creatures like a siren above the din of all of the other noises that other species are using to transmit information through their environment.
I always thought of that as being a result of the greater degree of mutual information between the two species, and that is another way to see it which should be mathematically identical. But I like this thought very much, that it is also a way for an open system to reduce it's entropy by selectively ignoring the much larger amount of meaningless information which pervades its environment. In a sense, the ability to hear the mating call above the rest of the noise can equivalently be seen as the ability to ignore the "noise." I mean, actually even in calling it noise I have already done that--it is all information, the "signals" and the "noise", so differentiating signals from noise is how open systems reduce their entropy.
Is this a fair characterization of your point about "observers"? And finally, I think you would agree with this but some of the langauge in your essay left me wondering: anything that can perform a "measurement" is an observer, right? For example, as long as molecular recognition driven by nothing but thermal noise and structural mutual information is an act of "observation" just as much as when I read your writing is, then I agreee with literally everything you say.
Great work!
Joe
Hello Inés,
Thanks for a challenging and intricately reasoned paper, which is also well-written. My question is about the extent to which agency exists objectively in nature, before an observer imputes it to an entity. I understand that in your view "the interesting part of agency is the observer." Nonetheless, you do indicate on page 6 that entropy in the world does not increase uniformly. Rather, there are local areas where entropy decreases. This fact, as you say, "allows observers to create agents." Perhaps, however, in at least some cases the peculiar local conditions mean that the world itself is creating agents, independently of what observers do, and even in the absence of observers. This looks like an interesting question, whatever the answer might be.
Laurence Hitterdale
Joe, I agree with every word you say, and you phrase it all crystal clear - you are surely a good teacher! - so I am afraid there is little I can add. Apart from saying I'm happy to receive these comments from someone who can write so well, and who produced such an excellent essay himself.
So good to know we are tuned!
best!
inés.
I agree, the world provides the conditions for agency to be arrogateable. That is what I meant, in the essay, by "merits are shared". Indeed, the world has the merit of producing subsystems where entropy decreases. Moreover, those subsystems are repeated in space and time, and are nested in space and time. For example, if we choose a certain subsystem and declare it "prokaryote cell", it turns out that many such bugs exist. And they combine/evolve into other subsystems that can be called "eukaryote cell", that are also numerous. These, in turn, combine/evolve into multicellular organisms, and so forth. So not only entropy sometimes decreases locally, but does so following certain patterns, that are nested. All these are merits of the world, without which no observer could arrogate agency.
Can we say agency exists without observers? This reminds me of the question "if a tree falls, and nobody hears it, does it make a sound?". Maybe yes, maybe no. The waves are there, the atoms are moving, but if nobody interprets them, I feel dubious. Agency only exists if we choose the right subsystem. Of course, the right subsystem can be detected by a brain, by a robot, by a computer program. Or by nobody: it exists in nature, even if nobody observes it. I surely admit its existence, and by all means, its existence is also an interesting topic, in fact many essays discuss the conditions required for its existence.
I just decided to focus on the role of the observer, because I believe there are three interesting points to make. 1) arrogating agency is a compact and computationally efficient way to observe the world and make predictions, so observers actually benefit themselves of their observational powers (2) the ability to perform this computation can be understood as the product of evolution, and (3) the acquisition of this ability can be thought of, in turn, as a goal directed behavior itself (2 and 3 are very close to each other).
I guess I just chose a sub-topic that was limited enough for me to develop a story that could fit in 9 pages :-)
Thanks for your interest! best!
inés.
Thanks for your comments,
Dear Inés,
this was enjoyable to read. I think my analysis largely parallels yours -- plus, you framed it nicely! -- and we come to similar conclusions. You say "Goal-directed behavior does not exist if we do not define our variables in such a way as to bring goals into existence." with which I agree -- it's a matter of at which scales we describe the world. I'd add that in order to make sense of the macroscopic world, we have not much choice but to use these "variables" which "bring goals into existence". You turn the latter into a statement about our brain, its purpose and how it evolved, which also makes sense. In this last step I also see connections between your essay and Sofia Magnúsdóttir's contribution.
Good luck, Stefan
Thanks, Stefan, I've just read your essay and liked it a lot (comments there). And I was also very fond of Sophia's, I'm happy to see other people value her ideas too. Best!
inés.
Dear Ines,
I estimate you essay exelent. Excellently written.
You are one of the few who directly answers the question put by the contest.
In my opinion, the "Maxwell's Demon" considered by you has an analog, in the form of a classical parametric resonance in a soliton wave, which operates on the principle of the action of a heat pump.
You might also like reading my essay .
Your essay allowed to consider us like-minded people.
Kind regards,
Dear Vladimir, thank you so much for your comments. Sure, I will read your essay carefully, hopefully soon. Looking forward!
inés.
Very vividly written, I especially like the use of the verb "arrogate". (The comparison of Menelaus to a bacterium on the other hand failed to enlighten me, I'm afraid)
I like the idea that something like metabolism, as a continuous redefinition of the boundaries of "self" helps agents rise above the determinism of the physical level. I guess the redefinition can sometimes be more discontinuous as well, like when a lizard detaches and discards its tail to escape a predator.
Hi Ines,
Are you trying to hide! Your abstract is terrible....it confused me to the extent that I needed to return to your essay after two weeks recuperation.
May I redo your abstract: "The main conclusion of this essay is that the interesting part of agency is the observer. Physics does not make sense, observers make sense of it. Life does not have a meaning, we give it a meaning."
Several essays mentioned Maxwell's demon as a place for agency to creep in. However, Your analysis of Maxwell's demon describing agency is so insightful I will repeat it here:
Arrogating purpose, in this case, is to assume that the gas--who takes the role of the agent--wants to shrink. Other verbs may be used (tends to, is inclined to, etc.), but the phrasing is irrelevant. Maxwell's demon hid the initial conditions of the gas in its memory. As uncanny as it may seem, arrogating purpose to the gas is a rather accurate description of the gas' phenomenology. Purposeful agents, hence, only emerge from sub systems that eat up order like Maxwell's demon.
There are a lot of good essays in this contest, this essay is monumental (IMHO). Please excuse me for being in a loop of delayed recursive narcism.
Do visit my essay,
Don Limuti
Hi, Miles, thanks for reading and commenting! The entropy reduction of the bacterium is instantiated by the fact that no matter how nucleotides are arranged in the initial state, they become tidily arranged for DNA replication in the final state. The entropy reduction of Menelaus is larger. He manages to achieve DNA recombination not only irrespective of the initial spatial arrangement of nucleotides in Helen's womb, but also, irrespective of the initial location of Helen herself (Troy). Both he and the bacterium are able to circumvent obstacles, but his strategy is more complex. Anyhow, it was obviously not a good example, having to explain it once and again is a bit like explaining a joke (!).
I liked the lizard idea! Looking forward to reading your entry,
in[es.
That's the dilemma, right? Should I write a fancy abstract, and later bore readers to death? Or better a very obscure one, and later deliver an essay above their flattened expectations? Same as when choosing a photo for one's web page. Should we look good, and then disappoint people when they meet us? Or look terrible, and give some relief to the brave ones that dared to come anyway?
Anyhow, thanks so much for the help, your version of my abstract was very much improved. I'll keep it in mind for next time! And thanks also for the support.
Feel free to loop as much as you want, that's the whole point of consciousness, isn't it?
best!
inés.
Hey Inés,
Thank you very much for your detailed brainstorm, and I must apologize for my tardy reply. (I was fully expecting the website to let me know when my questions are answered on forums. That should teach me!) I agree with what you are saying.
As regards your question at the end, "Is it not surprising that relativity, and QM, and thermodynamics all point out to an active role of the observer in what we so far had regarded as objective reality?":
It does beg the question about just how fundamental observers are in the physical world. It can be argued from the plethora of information that is distributed by a-biological processes (such as red-shifted spectra of galaxies to name one example), that all of that would be useless if not for observers who can process such information to make sense of the universe.
I also think the issue of time is intimately related to all of this, though my thoughts on it are far from developed. But I do like the perspective of if we can adjust the rate of time, so the rate at which information is transported, all the way to zero, then nothing would exist. So time, no matter how we look at it, is as fundamental as energy conservation itself.
I'm digressing, but I also believe that a few choice essays in this contest would provide the seeds of progress on the question that was originally asked - mindless math leading to intention - and take us a step forward in that direction.
Once again, my apologies for replying so late.
Regards
Robert
Hi Ines, (I also posted on my blog)
1. Thanks for you review....much appreciated.
2. You say "I myself argue that there are no goals per se, but that we choose to see them. Not exactly because their existence makes us happier, but rather, because their detection allows us to make predictions, and thereby, to be more fit to pass on our genes."
Yea, Darwin and Dawkins have highly regarded points about how genes foster evolution and are selfish respectively. I will not argue with Darwin, however, Dawkins is wrong. Genes are both competitive and cooperative (see Yaneer Bar yam's work on complexity).
Instead of using the words goals I will substitute "choice" and rephrase your sentence: ""I (Don L) argue that there are no goals per se, but that we (humans but perhaps not all life) choose to see them. These choices are made because they satisfy us emotionally, (in healthy individuals they tend toward happiness), and thereby, to be more fit to pass on our genes."
About Choice and Emotions: I posted on one of mad max's minion's blogs "your emperor is totally nude (in Italian)". This minion was a determinist but his emotion (aka greed) caused him to delete my post (followed by my score plummeting). Was his choice determined by mathematics? This minion was much less fit to pass on their genes than someone like yourself.
In spite of my stated intention, ha ha. I hope you win this contest.
Don Limuti
Hello Inés,
The reference to "if a tree falls, and nobody hears it, does it make a sound?" clarifies matters for me. I understand why you say, "Maybe yes, maybe no." The subsystem exists independently of external observers, but for the subsystem to exist as an agent in a full sense, it must be detected, observed, or interpreted as such.
On another issue, I might say that at some point it would be interesting to think about the relationship between your understanding of arrogating agency and what Daniel Dennett calls "taking the intentional stance." Of course, Dennett is also concerned to show that entities which take the intentional stance and those entities to which intentionality is attributed can both arise in the course of evolution.
Best wishes.
Laurence Hitterdale
THank you for commenting on my essay. I read your essay and really liked it. You make some very novel points.
Thank you.
Noson
Ines, you say:
The main conclusion of this essay is that the interesting part of agency is the observer. Physics does not make sense, observers make sense of it.
I say in my essay:
Our vision (and knowledge) of the different scale LANDSCAPES is always from our own scale spectra (our LANDSCAPE: Newtonian Landscape). And from there we try to understand everything that
happens in the others scale landscapes.
But, what would happen if we could observe these same LANDSCAPES from their own scale?
It could give us a completely different point of view that we have now, and it would surely help us to understand better many concepts and phenomena that now we do not fully understand.