Idealization and Isolability: Alternatives to the Machine Paradigm

@[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.

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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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I beg to differ. Has one looked at the two volume set of Morse and Feshbach,
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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
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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

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!