Idealization and Isolability: Alternatives to the Machine Paradigm

debarib

The successes of physics are often in the form of invariance principles, which characterize many disparate phenomena independently of context, and are derived by studying isolable systems. Such systems are largely insensitive to context, and particularly useful for the science of mechanics, which underwrites virtually all of our technological advancement. The success of mechanics often compels us to assume its genericity - that mechanics is fundamental to all natural phenomena. Consequently, science sees the natural world as essentially mechanical, including even the biosphere. As it is argued, organisms (and other natural phenomena) are not isolable mechanical systems, but are instead composed of mutually supporting dissipative processes that span system-environment boundaries. The life sciences nevertheless implicitly or explicitly treat organisms as machines, leading to problems from mathematizing complex phenomena to interrogating mental processes. Organisms are members of a class of systems ontologically distinct from machines, dissipative structures; self-organizing, far from equilibrium systems. Some such systems are intrinsically end-directed, adaptive, and flexible - properties that typify life. The science of these non-isolable systems may not be reducible to mechanics, and may be embodied in what others have called a new physics. Our current scientific and technological paradigms stem from the historical sucesses of studying isolable systems. If we pursue a science of non-isolable systems not only will we better understand biology and other natural systems by fitting them into a more proper ontological category, but we may develop new technologies which are intrinsically flexible, adaptive, and autonomous.

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Stefan Weckbach

debarib

Well-written essay. I too think it would be worth to think about the possible differences between examining isolated systems and examining non-isolated systems. The study of fundamental particles was an endevour of studying isolated systems, particles (or whatever these particles are in isolation). Then the model of particle physics was extrapolated onto arbitrary complex systems, without the chance to ever experimentally confirm that extrapolation. It was Quantum Mechanics that allowed to nonetheless probabilistically handle those complex particle systems – independent from what's the real ontology underlying QM. That independence is astonishing to me, it is similar to the independence of Newtonian physics' ontology to work at large distances, whereas at shorter distances Einstein's equations are needed. But both theories make utterly different ontological assumptions.

Thinking about the fact that reality does allow one to construct different ontologies whose mathematical and physical outcomes coincide under certain constraints leads me to the question of how the real ontology of the world must look like to at all allow such coincidences. One may say that it must be pure maths, but pure mathematics can't be considered a physical ontology, it is somewhat immaterial and non-local. Here the circle closes, since the standard model of particle physics assumed what it has discovered to be physical in nature. But the term physical only means that something can be measured and predicted – it can be of arbitrary ontology!

cristi marcovici

@[deleted] your name matches in a way the essay you wrote, imagine an octopus that has special tentacles that can be broken and rejoined , except that you are a human and you use arms and objects

i have learned and enjoyed reading , it is a lecture for the profane/ layman

An act as simple as opening and closing the door of a car it is also a dissipative process that involves using a single hand. If als gedanken experiment the door would have been designed to involve using both hands or even going further instead of a single hand or even two you have eight or 100 little baby hands- like some kind of field or grabbing forest (for a mutant human), and also the door of the automobile is broken in to many little individual openings, that are overall in a way equivalent to a single hand and a single door in the normal life , and in order to enter the car ,every single hand must execute the action in the right way for the right little door . Differently phrased the car entrances have not been designed to take in to account -low margin-specific amount of effort to enable access inside, if the hands were hypothetically tiny the degrading would have happened differently or perhaps less. Wait what degrading ? , you are opening and closing the door of a car , in this example the degrading happens at a rate way slower rate then the actual life time of all the parts that can be called to make the car object, or the human that use it . elaborating more the car of the future would open entrances automatically with no human input, if the human touch it a little while opening, the opening mechanism should break like a f1 race car ,ideally, on the finish line . The human is not mutant he doesn't want to use a perishable -easy to break- high attention demanding- opening car- door . That would be like a ritualistic religion , what if this is something good and desirable with potential evolutionary advantages, but not accessible via -the normal societal behaviors selecting -fashion.

Vladimir Rogozhin

cristi marcovici
You draw very important conclusions:
<<The mechanization of the natural world underwrites a common worldview that separates humanity from nature, that commodifies ecologies as natural resources.>>

<<But this dominion over nature, which holds humanity as ontologically distinct from the natural world, is intimately dependent on the natural world – we are embedded in an ecological web of mutually maintaining processes.>>

An excellent, extremely relevant and profound essay with questions that force seekers of truth to look for ways to overcome the modern a conceptual - paradigmatic crisis of the metaphysical/ontological basis, which manifests itself as a "crisis of understanding" ("J. Horgan "The End of Science", Kopeikin K.V. "Souls" of atoms and "atoms" of the soul : Wolfgang Ernst Pauli, Carl Gustav Jung and "three great problems of physics"), "crisis of interpretation and representation" (Romanovskaya T.B. "Modern physics and contemporary art - parallels of style"), "loss of certainty" (Kline M. "Mathematics: Loss of Certainty"), "trouble with physics" (Lee Smolin "Trouble with Physics").
Fundamental science and philosophy "rested" in the understanding of space and matter (ontological structure), the nature of fundamental constants, the nature of the phenomena of time, information, consciousness.
To overcome the crisis, the Big Synthesis is needed, a critical look at the entire path of philosophy and science.
Today it is necessary to rethink more deeply and critically the entire dialectical line in philosophy, from Heraclitus to Whitehead and Losev.
The nature of consciousness can be "grasped" (understood) by developing the ideas of Whitehead's "philosophy of process", the entire dialectical-ontological line in philosophy.
More than a quarter of a century ago, mathematician and philosopher Vasily Nalimov set the super-task of building a "super-unified field theory that describes both physical and semantic manifestations of the World" - the creation of a model of a "Self- Aware Universe"
In the same direction, the ideas of the Nobel laureate in physics Brian Josephson (which are not very noticed by mainstream science), set forth in the essay "On the Fundamentality of Meaning"

We need a new view of matter, developing the idea of Plato, his "celestial triangle", the ideas of Bergson ("Matter and memory"), Whitehead's metaphysics of the process, taking into account all the problems in the foundations of physics and the modern information revolution. Matter is that from which all meanings, forms and structures are born. New constructive ontological ideas are needed, plus the development of the dialectic of "coincidence of opposites" (N. Kuzansky) to build a primordial (original, ontological) generating structure ("missing structure" by W. Eco), ontological framework, carcass, foundation of knowledge. Ontological (structural, cosmic) memory, "soul of matter", its measure is the semantic core of the "superstructure". "New physics" is Ontological physics. This requires a Big Ontological Revolution in the foundations of knowledge, building in the foundations of knowledge of the New Expanded Ideality.
The great minds of the past give us good philosophical precepts:
John A. Wheeler: “We are no longer satisfied with insights only into particles, fields of force, into geometry, or even into time and space. Today we demand of physics some understanding of existence itself."
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: "The true physics is that which will, one day, achieve the inclusion of man in his wholeness in a coherent picture of the world."
A.N. Whitehead: “A precise language must await a completed metaphysical knowledge.”
A.Zenkin: "the truth should be drawn..." (SCIENTIFIC COUNTER REVOLUTION IN MATHEMATICS)

Pavel Florensky: “We repeat: worldunderstanding is spaceunderstanding."

Andrew Beckwith

quote
The successes of physics are often in the form of invariance principles, which characterize many disparate phenomena independently of context, and are derived by studying isolable systems. Such systems are largely insensitive to context, and particularly useful for the science of mechanics, which underwrites virtually all of our technological advancement. The success of mechanics often compels us to assume its genericity - that mechanics is fundamental to all natural phenomena. Consequently, science sees the natural world as essentially mechanical, including even the biosphere. As it is argued, organisms (and other natural phenomena) are not isolable mechanical systems, but are instead composed of mutually supporting dissipative processes that span system-environment boundaries. The life sciences nevertheless implicitly or explicitly treat organisms as machines, leading to problems from mathematizing complex phenomena to interrogating mental processes. Organisms are members of a class of systems ontologically distinct from machines, dissipative structures; self-organizing, far from equilibrium systems. Some such systems are intrinsically end-directed, adaptive, and flexible - properties that typify life. The science of these non-isolable systems may not be reducible to mechanics, and may be embodied in what others have called a new physics. Our current scientific and technological paradigms stem from the historical sucesses of studying isolable systems. If we pursue a science of non-isolable systems not only will we better understand biology and other natural systems by fitting them into a more proper ontological category, but we may develop new technologies which are intrinsically flexible, adaptive, and autonomous.
end of quote
I beg to differ. Has one looked at the two volume set of Morse and Feshbach,
Quote
Methods of Theoretical Physics, Part I (International Series in Pure and Applied Physics)
by Philip McCord Morse (Author), Herman Feshbach (Author), G. P. Harnwell (Series Editor)
4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars
It also has VOLUME 2
end of quote
What we had was due to the introduction of FLIGHT, a need for dramatic codification of fluid flow problems for aircraft which were initially NOT developed, and also the advent of the Atomic bomb, which indirectly lead to the Particle accelerators.
The dichotomy the author purports simply does not have a historical foundation. It is no accident that Julian Swinger worked on Radar, and the like in WW2 which influenced his QED formulation.
Feynman got his start due to the Manhattan project
I.e. an explosion of technology, in unheard of ways lead to modern physics.
Now we have that many of our NON LINEAR problem solvers are old work horses, which seem astonishingly reasonable. But what happens if we do space travel for real to say Mars or the Asteroid belt and then have to floor it as far as determination of our present NON LINEAR equation solvers ?
Going into outer space in a serious way will be the acid test as far as a shake out of many of our present approximation methods. That will change physics and science immensely if we do it.

debarib

Andrew Beckwith

Thanks for reading!

If I'm understanding your counterexamples correctly, the idea is that we've developed technologies from the study of messier "non-isolable" systems. Flight is a compelling example because fluids are notoriously challenging for mathematical description, although of course there is an incredibly succesfull domain of fluid mechanics.

I do, however, think that the way we've developed flight and related technologies is still applying isolable-thinking to non-isolable systems. (Pardon the following incomplete understanding of flight). The basic principles of flight seems to depend on neatly separating processes in an isolable way, for example by decomposing it into separable forces of lift, drag, stiffness, etc. And the technology we get out of it - airplanes - are mechanical systems that necessarily have isolable/neatly decomposable properties. Organisms can fly, and to a certain extent the basic principles apply - generate lift - but the architecture that produces flight is nothing like the neatly decomposable machinery of airplanes.

For a better argument along the same lines I'd recommend Robert Rosen's Essays on Life Itself. He discusses flight and the differences between natural/artifical wings to highlight a similar ontological split between organisms and machines.

debarib

Stefan Weckbach

Thanks for reading!

I agree, it's challenging to think of what the science of non-isolable systems looks like. Our current science always depends on defining system boundaries and neatly differentiating the different kinds of influences on the system.

I certainly can't speak to the true ontology of the universe, but I agree that it's remarkable we can use different frameworks to describe reality, and maybe more remarkable that some of them even work to predict/control things!

marcovici alexandru

never saw this argument (explicitly in this form) before with this details namely (for global warming /heating debate)

people not wearing the right clothes waste heat,
the- i'm not sure how- thermoregulation works in human i remember readings something about inner brain and kidney hormonal / circuits, if people sense better the temperature with the skin around the abdomen than having a thick cloth could mess up with the sensing of the surrounding

in big cities this could be a problem imagine all the people taking a bus for example and having more clothes than needed this adds up to the kilograms of weight carried /displaced

-
lets say since the early universe patches of universe are connected /entangled and can offer an instantaneous way to "communicate" with extraterestrials, is this a far fetched idea ? asuming superdeterminismtic reality , than little behaviors like: what outfit(clothes) did you put on yourself when going outside, or did you consciously saw or did something in a specific order, might have a relevance.

i have made a comment a few months ago about encouraging people to pause , think and recapitulate often.

still , if ET exists or not , maybe does not exist, so
this could be called -living, making decisions, by composing with elements of the consciousness experience

doing a jump returning to ecology, i would even say that,
an organization like a space exploration agency , in my opinion , can have the authority and make happen, social experiments that say : we try to reduce this datapoint in a flowchart by 0.7 if you do this and that the following next years we will be paying attention., doing close monitoring