Meaning in Formal Systems (was Final cause and software-life)

Cliff Joslyn (joslyn@KONG.GSFC.NASA.GOV)
Tue, 29 Aug 1995 16:24:00 -0500

>> Therefor, it is at least conceptually possible for a non-formal
>> system to be completely closed to efficient cause (have final cause
>>within the
>> system). This is because the "meaning" of the stuff is retained.
>> In a formal system (in which meaning has been stripped), you can never
>> get efficient cause to close...you always need extra unentailed
>> structure (code) to compensate for the stripped meaning.

I agree very much with Bruce's reply here, and wanted to say more.

Here you're trying to distinguish "real" (non-formal) systems like
organisms, which "have" meaning, from "formal" systems like computers, from
which the meaning has been "stripped". In the systems theory literature
there's usually an equivocation on the difference between the concept
"system" and the concept "thing". Purists (Gaines, Ashby, Klir) want to
separate them completely, making "system" an idealist concept of a set of
interpretations or distinctions drawn on the real world by a community of
observers. Thus, for them, "real system" is an oxymoron. Most of us lose
this distinction, talking about systems interchangably as objects (like the
sun as a system) and abstractions drawn on objects or sets of objects (like
the solar system as a system).

What you can't forget, and what Bruce is pointing out, is that COMPUTERS
ARE REAL THINGS. They dissipate, they have mass, occupy space, etc. In
particular, COMPUTERS ARE NOT FORMAL SYSTEMS. Arithmetic is a formal
system. A computer "does" arithmetic, in some sense, but IS not arithmetic.
It's not that there are two classes of things, formal and non-formal. There
ARE no "formal systems" in that sense. Rather, some real things like
computers MANIFEST formal systems in some sense, and others do not.

So I agree that formal systems (not things) like computer languages etc.
have no inherent meaning, but they never HAD any, it wasn't "stripped" of
it. Tokens acquire meaning only by their becoming embedded in an
interpretative context, that is, by being taken for something else by an
interpreter, itself (a computer, a cell, a human) a real thing. Whether bit
patterns or codons, it's all the same.

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| Cliff Joslyn, NRC Research Associate, Cybernetician at Large
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