October, 1999
Dear Chris,
Thanks for your thoughtful reply, Chris. I sat here smiling as I read it because you 'got' what I was trying to say, even as you were claiming there was nothing to 'get' and that it isn't useful.
I'll mention them in reverse order, working back toward the top.
"Inertia" is more than the shorthand, it's the behavior ... the triple-net activity that covers things in all aspects of motion ... moving or not, changing motion or not.
My point was two fold. First, don't 'choose' which description system is 'better', 'right', 'correct', 'useful', etc. Rather, TRANSLATE among them. See that each has a context and range, apropos to other ways of associating with them (the information). They are valid alternative views.
I'll tell you right off the bat that it doesn't make a tinker's damn whether you can track where a specific particle or wave form is at any one moment ... and I do want to inspire a new theory about these behaviors. I want the computational specialists to appreciate the 'aliveness' of their calculations ... they "mean something" in the context of where they happen .. "metabolisms" are the emerged product of massive couplings of individual computable atomic dynamics.
But if we're to comprehend how the levels of organization relate among one another, then it has to be just as valid to apply one descriptive set as another. There are logarithmic equations that describe the distribution space of subatomic particles AND are as equally as applicable to the distribution spaces of animals and species in ecological studies. The invariance of being able to use singular
equations in these and even other diversities of subjects points to the underlying uniformity that exists in the world. So, the inverse is indicated as being equally true: even though we're given to seeing that more fundamental levels of organization are significantly simpler in numbers of parameters, and so are easier to define the components and compute ... doesn't imply that the 'behavioral' pictures no longer apply at these levels.The old-line standard 'reductionist' approach would say, yes, break a process connection and you lose all benchmarks that 'process' even exists, or what the process is or might look like when the 'pieces' get reassembled.
This is just the Waterloo of current Complexity thinking .. which has allowed old reductionist ideas to set the criteria. In point of fact, though, we have the skills to project all sorts of decriptions of what will emerge, when and how, because we have "pictures" of applicable behaviors spaces and relations ... that work very nicely at all various levels of organization. Just because they haven't been used or applied before, doesn't mean they can't be, or that it's wrong to.
I am NOT saying 'junk the computation'. I'm saying that the computation 'means' something more significant than, "computable is our baseline criteria". Chaitin's Omega Function, Zadeh's Fuzzy Logic, my own Integrity Paradigm, Pribram's Holographic Brain, many other renderings of PERFORMANCE ... some geared computationally, others focussed on processional descriptions ... are severally VALID.
We have to be so comfortable with our own specialties and fields that we're comfortable - not challenged or threatened - when expected to be able to shift into another thinker's mode of description. And definitely DEFINITELY do not write the other system or mode off as invalid or unworthy.
Feel better computing the whereabouts and trackability of wavefunctions? That's fine. It's also fine to see a molecule flex and chelate (capture/release) passing atoms ... operating like little claws.. and know that if too many of these chelations form and lock in my body, that my skin tone etches into age lines and some plastic surgeon will get some money from me ... if my vanity supercedes my sense of self worth. :-) (ehhh, not likely, he'll have to find another patient. I like how I'm aging!)
To express what I'm really after here .. it's to encourage everyone to be open to seeing what other people (friends, researchers, et al) see, not just what we're most familiar with or used to.
