Re: the machine/organism duality and practical considerartions

Don Mikulecky (mikuleck@HSC.VCU.EDU)
Thu, 24 Jun 1999 12:43:10 -0400


Bruce,
As usual you get tot he heart of it with the car example. however the
situation gets lets messy if the thought is put back into context with the
modeling relation. The question is what are you doing to model the car?
Are you satisfied with its xzsimple system characterization or do you need
more? As soon as you need more, the foist model is no longer adequate.
That is why car(1) is not car(2) and neither of them is the real world car.

Respectfully,
Don Mikulecky

Bruce Edmonds wrote:

> Normon wrote:
> > So perhaps we ought not to try so hard to classify all macro
> > physical objects as "either" machines "or" organisms. These
> > divisions are questions of logical typing. They are also
> > relative to both context and level.
>
> I agree. A strict Artistotelian dichotmy is not always helpful - of
> course, it depends what how you want to *use* the classification.
> Consider some examples:
>
> 1. A CAR
>
> A car is clearly both a machine and a complex system, although in
> slightly different senses. Can the complex car and the simple car be
> associated - clearly yes, they may refer to the same object. This does
> not mean that the car-as-complex and the car-as-simple are the same,
> merely that they are related.
>
> In Artistotelian (i.e. absolute terms) the car `is' a complex system
> (being an object of the natural world). However it is designed to act
> as a machine - and it does (for a period of time and to a reasonable
> approximation).
>
> There is no stronger test than real interaction with the world - the car
> (within certain bounds) is a machine. That is what it is to be a
> machine, nothing more.
>
> So what is one saying when one says "A car is not a machine"? One is
> saying that our picture of the car as a machine is necessarily a partial
> model of it - it only holds within certain bounds. But this is true of
> *all* knowledge, including statements like "an object either has
> property A or it does not".
>
> 2. THE BOUNDED HALTING PROBLEM
>
> Consider the problem, given a natural number n, the task of deciding
> whether a Turing Machine of index less than n and an input of size less
> than n will halt. Given any particular n this is decidable, i.e. there
> exists a purely formal procedure for deciding this fact. However there
> is no uniform procedure for any n (otherwise we could solve the general
> halting problem).
>
> The general halting problem is a purely formal one - yet there is no
> combination of the bounded sub-views (the procedures for deciding the
> bounded halting problem for each n) into the total view (a procedure for
> solveing the general halting problem). Hence according to Don's
> criteria it is a complex system - complexity (in Don's sense) streaches
> into the purely formal. It does not only occur in the natural world.
>
> CONCLUSION/MORAL
>
> The simple/complex dichotomy itself is (inevitably) a partial view of
> the world. It is necessarily not the whole story - in a sense it is a
> fiction. Its purpose is to point out that the reductionist approach has
> its limitations. These absolute `fictions' have thier uses (as do other
> fictions, e.g.: absolute time, reductionism, etc.), but they also have
> their limitations.
>
> Yet they are more than fictions, for what we call `knowledge' consists
> of nothing more than them.
>
> Regards.
>
> --------------------------------------------------
> Bruce Edmonds,
> Centre for Policy Modelling,
> Manchester Metropolitan University, Aytoun Bldg.,
> Aytoun St., Manchester, M1 3GH. UK.
> Tel: +44 161 247 6479 Fax: +44 161 247 6802
> http://bruce.edmonds.name