> Agreed, both selection and choice are anthropomorphic terms. However, the
> real point that you make is that you should distinguish between
> deterministic processes (those were there are no alternatives, where there
> is no "choice") and indeterministic ones (the rest). As I said, I consider
> determinism a red herring. You say that there are no alternatives because
> in your model you cannot conceive of any: its dynamics is determinate.
> However, if I kick your nice, determinate self-organizing system, chances
> are great that it will end up in another attractor than the one it "had" to
> enter according to the dynamics. There is always noise, fluctuations,
> variation, unexpected events in every physical (as opposed to formal)
> system. The selectionist point of view merely notes that whatever the
> variation, the system is biased to end up in an attractor, and thus there
> is "selection" for attractors.
As I said earlier at some level there may be selection of attractors
(selected self-organization) but does not make selection
self-organization or vice-versa.
>
> I agree that as long as you can trust your deterministic, formal model,
> there is no NEED to speak about variation and selection. However, there is
> no need to speak about self-organization either, since the deterministic
> model in principle already answers every question you might ask. Selection
> or self-organization are higher-order, abstract concepts that we use to
> better understand why certain phenomena appear, not to make detailed
> predictions.
I agree that both concepts are higher-order. Self-organization refers to
a higher order reduction of variety (as the system converges to smaller
volumes of the state-space), often manifested by the (higher-order)
observation of recurring patterns.
>I (and Ashby) prefer to use the selection concept even when
> describing deterministic, dynamic systems, since these deterministic
> systems are merely a "degenerate", limit case where the unpredictable
> fluctuations have probability zero.
>
>
> I am afraid we are getting back into the same discussion we had when
> comparing cultural and biological evolution, where I argued that they are
> both based on variation and selection, while you emphasised that they were
> eseentially different. Any two phenomena are both similar and different,
> depending on what aspects your focus on. I agree that there are important
> differences, but what I am interested in is in catching their fundamental
> commonalities.
The argument may have a similar flavour but it is important. You (and
Ashby) are of course free to use the term selection to refer to
attractor behavior in dynamical systems. What I strongly disagree with
is using this term in one sense, and then hijacking a whole edifice of
evolutionary biology thought, which relies on an entirely different
definition of selection (statistical bias on rates of reproduction), as
if the two notions, just because both are known by the same term
(selection), were equivalent.
I like to find commonalties as much as the next guy (I am a systems
scientist after all), but we must restrain from this vernacular
hijacking so that we may be taken seriously by those in the particular
fields we wish to theorize generalize about.
> I agree that Ashby's notion of "adaptation" in this paper is very
> simplistic, since there are very few (or no) degrees of freedom in the
> system he conceives. However, that does not forbid him to use the
> "adaptationistic stance", and describe deterministic systems as if they
> were adapting. On the other hand, I don't see why you would NEED
> description-based reproduction for open-ended evolution (see my example of
> autocatalytic molecules above).
That would indeed be going back to previous discussions. I have repeated
many times why I (following Pattee following Von Neumann) think we need
description-based reproduction for open-ended evolution. I discuss that
in detail (including why autocatalytic molecules can't cut it) in the
papers I sent the URL's of earlier.
Cheers,
Luis
P.S. The previous papers and my web site may be momentarily unavailable
at the usual address: http://www.c3.lanl.gov/~rocha) because it moved
monday behind a firewall. The new (outside the firewall) address is
http://wwwc3.lanl.gov/~rocha (no dot between www and c3), though an
automatic redirection from one address to the other should be up
tomorrow...
______________________________________________________
Luis Mateus Rocha
Complex Systems Modeling Team
Computer Research and Applications Group (CIC-3)
Los Alamos National Laboratory, MS B265
Los Alamos, NM 87545, USA
T: 505-665-5328
e-mail: rocha@lanl.gov or rocha@santafe.edu
www: http://www.c3.lanl.gov/~rocha