Re: The reality of entity

Haines,

I suspect this is the nub of the issue. Scientists are empirically
oriented, as indeed they should be, and so naturally focus on objects
and measurements.

It wouldn't be so bad if they would police their own extrapolations.
Since our world is possessed of conscious beings, how do you exclude
consciousness when proposing hidden dimensions? Ghosts anyone?

Not sure I get your point. Is it that we necessarily make inferences,
but too often do so in an undisciplined manner? If so, that concerns me
as well.

On the other hand, you may be objecting to any acceptance of
unobservables as being real. That is, you don't accept the central point
of scientific realism. Well, there are some who would agree, but it
seems the scientific consensus is shifting toward that view. Good
evidence of that is the text that is often considered the best
introduction to the philosophy of science for classroom use, Richard
Boyd, Philip Gasper and J.D. Trout, eds., _The Philosophy of Science_
(Cambridge 1991). Since the issue is still debated, one can't say that
one position is right and the other wrong, but we adopt one or the other
for reasons we can hopefully justify. I happen to take a realist
position, but I hope I can offer some justification for my doing so. The
critique of "entity" with which this thread started was in fact part of
that effort on my part.

There are many scientific methods. That deductive inferences represents
the only one is an old schoolroom canard. What interests me is that
scientific realism tends to rely on the abductive method (to infer from
outcomes the conditions that had made it possible). Perhaps the best
defense for such an approach is that it (arguably) actually explains
change, while covering law explanations do not (a classic issue in the
philosophy of science).

I have no trouble with inferring unobservables. I do have a problem
when they become effectively canonized, as Big Bang Theory has, so
that when problems do arise, the institutional tendency is to accept
whatever it takes to preserve the original theory, such as Inflation
Theory, which shoe horns observations of a spatially flat and
effectively infinite universe back into a finite model, rather than go
back and reassess the original conclusions. Another would be the
concept of spacetime. As I may have pointed out previously, we could
use the same logic to argue temperature is a parameter of volume
space, as we use to say that time is a dimension of distance space and
the math would be just as precise. If the math adds up, it's proof the
model accurately describes reality and it becomes canon. If something
is off, "renormalizations" are introduced. Science is infested with
humanity.


Does the acceptance of real unobservables open the door to ghosts? Good
question, and one that must be addressed. However, I don't think it
does. The reason is that the unobservable is posited in scientific
realism as being merely a dimension, aspect or property of processes. It
is not a self-contained reality in itself, as I presume ghosts are. A
causal potency, for example, only exists as a property of matter, which
ghosts do not, for they are non-matter almost by definition. I suppose
one could say that causal potency cannot exist without the observable
(empirical), and the observable cannot exist without an unobservable
causal potency or relation (i.e., all things are processes).

Why would ghosts be self contained? Presumably they haunt the living
because they have unfinished business or can not otherwise let go. Not
that I'm arguing for ghost, just taking issue with your point.
Consciousness isn't exactly understood, physical reality is as much,
if not far more a function of relationships, as any hard and fast
physical beingness/particles, so if you are going to postulate hidden
dimensions, how do you logically limit what might occupy these dark
corners?

Let me just interject here a minor point to avoid confusion. The real
aim is to suggest that all things are causally connected with their
environment and this causal connection is not external to them, but much
a part of their basic nature, so that the basic unit of analysis in
though is the process. Thus the basic conceptual unit is not mentally
closed, but remains open as in Koestler's "holon". However, this
"environment" cannot be presumed to be known and is always imperfectly
known in fact. If everything is connected, things necessarily become
empirically undefinable and vague.

I certainly agree with the first point. As for the second, we are
always trying to expand our sphere of knowledge, but what is known
will always be by definition, finite, while that isn't will always be
equally infinite. Not that many people haven't gone to their grave
convinced the circle of knowledge will shortly be closed.

I believe "causal potency" is a reduction, a hypothetical isolation of a
system in thought, so that we might say something about it even though
its nature really depends in part on its environment about which we are
ill-informed. I.e., everything else being the same, here's how the
system would work if it were in isolation. Only with scientific realism,
as opposed to empiricism, it is represented as a process and present is
a driving force for change. If there are any lurkers who are into such
matters, I'd sure appreciate a criticism of this point.

Controlling the environment is an obsession which extends far beyond
the sciences, but "The more we know, the more we know we don't know."

However, any scientific practice is theory-laden, and this theory in
part shapes the reality of the objects we observe and
measure. Usually the implicit theory is left un-inspected, but when
there are "scientific revolutions" or when a science probes an
unknown where the dominant theory is not well established,
philosophical speculation leading to a new theoretical orientation
can really change the whole direction of the science.

Basing ones view on mental models also extends far beyond the
sciences, or even humanity. I would argue that not only do words
connote mental models, but even such phenomena as Pavlov's whistle
became a mental model for food to his dogs. Obviously the evolution of
these models go through periodic re-inventions and mutations.

Paradigm shift. Phase transition. Punctuated equilibrium. Systemic
failure. Revolution. When they blow theoretical bubbles upon
theoretical bubbles, sometimes they all pop at once.

The structural changes you catalog here (except the first, which doesn't
belong in your list) represent a change in the structure of a system,
and thus a change in an unobservable. What does this have to do with
"theory"? Well, we first need to agree on what the word theory
means. Informally, perhaps it means a) a mental representation of
reality rather than a practice, b) A conjecture or hypothesis rather
than what is proved true, c) the general or abstract principles of a
science, d) a philosophical explanation of phenomena, such as the theory
of relativity.

So by theory do we mean a well-substantiated explanation of the world,
merely a hypothetical explanation or representation, or something that
is real and abstracted from the world? Today, in the sciences anyway, we
reject any reality abstracted from the world (for a long time science
has adopted a materialistic monism), but the other two are fundamentally
different: hic rhoda, hic salta. The first represents theory as real and
explanatory; the second is a representation of the world in thought that
might or might not be explanatory and looks to criteria external to the
object by which to establish its truth (such as in operationalism, etc.).

Only in the second sense of theory (hypotheses) are we in danger of
constructing imaginary castles subject to collapse. It is possible, and
too often happens, that hypotheses are built from hypotheses. In the
former meaning of theory (explanation which entails unobservables), the
theory is always constrained by empirical observation and so can't get
very far out on the fragile limb.

Sometimes the limb gets re-enforced, rather than letting it bear the
full weight of observation, such as with Inflation Theory. Sometimes
the theory lacks any weight at all and can be supported by the most
insubstantial of branches. I think String Theory is a grasping effort
by particle theorists to avoid the possibility that there is no there
there. That at its most fundamental level, reality might really be an
illusion constructed out of the interaction of pure opposites, with no
monolithic core. I don't know, so lets wait and see if they actually
do find the Higgs particle, or if it's just static all the way down.

Consider that if time is a consequence of motion and the only
absolute is like absolute zero to temperature, the complete absence
of it, then there is no such thing as a specific defined point in
time.

I don't know that time is simply a consequence of motion (of
change). Of course, we impose a time scale, but the reality of time
is a hotly contested issue. Time itself may be associated with
motion, but to suggest it is a consequence of motion, of that I'm not
at all convinced. A good discussion of the time issue is D.H. Mellor,
_Real Time II_, London, 1998.

I think if you really follow through the consequences of this
proposition, it doe make some sense. As Newton pointed out, "For every
action, there is an equal and opposite reaction." Now apply this to my
observation that to the hands of the clock, it's the face going
counterclockwise.

Yes, but I don't see that you really address my concern. Let me try to
rephrase it. What do we mean by "change"? I suppose it means the
empirical difference between two states of a system in time. For
example, I observe a system at time A, and then again at time B and note
the empirical difference. I decide that despite the observed
differences, that this remains the same system rather than another
because I employ in thought conceptual categories based on empirical
persistence. Therefore, if a system is reduced to its empirical
qualities we find ourselves in a tautological conundrum, for we define
the system by its persistent qualities, and define changing qualities as
a change in the system. But putting that issue aside, what is its
relation with time? Mere change (as opposed to change that entails
entropy) has no direction. Without an appeal to entropy you can't
observe that state A comes before or after state B; you also can't
observe how much time separates those two states.

Change between A and B constitute digital points of an unobserved
timeline. Lets go with a more analog model; Say an egg. The chicken
moves forward, consuming chicken feed and out the back pops an egg.
Much like my analogy of a production line that moves toward raw
material, expelling finished product.

Now for the egg. Entropic arguments usually scramble the egg and say
its order cannot be returned to its original state. In fact this is
probably only partially true, knowing anything about modern industrial
farming, it's probably safe to say that many broken eggs end up mixed
back in the chicken food. The fact is though, that many eggs don't get
scrambled, but hatch out as baby chicks and grow into even more
complex order then the egg. Still though, they do die and their energy
continues toward other uses, usually further up the food chain. So
again I argue there are opposing directions of time. The energy
proceeds from one unit of time to the next, in this case through
various organisms as it moves through the food chain, but even
minerals and other non living forms of energy proceed through series
of shapes, as these units go from being in the future to being past.
So as the system consumes energy, its order continues to grow and
evolve, but when this order breaks down, its constituent energy goes
on to other uses. Note I said "direction," not "dimension," of time.

In fact, can we always infer that time has passed at all? All
observations entail "observational hypotheses" (Lakatos, again), or
frames of reference, and so empirical difference may not be related to
the passage of time. A simplistic example. Suppose I'm on the phone with
someone in another town and we are describing the sunset. The atmosphere
where I live is clear, but cloudy for the person I'm speaking with. We
observe the same system, but his empirical description will differ from
my own. That difference is not the result of time, but the conditions
under which the two observations are made. If I'm in a party of tourists
photographing a redwood tree in California, and doing so at the same
time and from the same vantage point, my companion's photo will differ
from mine if he used a filter on his camera. All observations are
encumbered by theoretical filters.

So? Time is a description of effects, not the cause of them. A fairly
basic and universal concept, but not an absolute standard.

But let's get back to a simpler scenario. I photograph this tree in May,
and then again in October and observe that the color of the leaves has
changed. I know there is change because on an artificial time line I
know the first photo was taken in May and second in October. That is,
our mental world constructs time, past, present and future, and the
relation of events in that time frame. We attribute change in a given
system to the passage of time, but the standard view today is that time
is not a property of the system, but of an arbitrary frame of reference.

The physical reality that is the system of you and the system that is
that tree have gone from May, through all the events which constitute
your particular paths, until you meet again in September. May no
longer exists, but it went from future potential to past circumstance.
It is that "arbitrary frame of reference" which goes from future to
past, because the physical reality creates it and then replaces it. So
if time is only that "arbitrary frame of reference," it doesn't go
from past to future, but the other way around!!!

Rather than time being a consequence of motion, it seems the more
conventional view is that time is inferred from the memory or traces
(such as the photo of the tree I took last May) of had once been and is
now past and gone, and of possibilities for a different future. That is,
neither the past or the future actually exist independently of the
present (and even the "present" is not a time), so there can be no
change "in time", but only change. This may be contrary to our useful
assumptions in daily life, but I believe it is required by a scientific
outlook that often must grapple with reality in a way quite different
than what is useful in daily life.

That is why I argue time is a measure of motion, similar to
temperature, rather then the basis for it.

It's not quite my point. What I'm saying is that you cannot freeze
time at an exact point, as that would effectively require a cessation
of motion and if all motion were to stop, reality would effectively
vanish, even to the sub-atomic level, since everything is mostly empty
space occupied by wave particle relationships that function as motion.
So since you can't stop time or motion to measure it, objects do not
have an exact location. It's the fuzziness that ties it all together
and makes it real. Without the fuzziness, there is nothing. When
physics tries to measure "position," it does so by directly impeding
the particle to narrow its location to the smallest degree of
fuzziness and this obviously does change the momentum, but that's not
the central thrust of my argument.

Yes, but it seems a point a bit different than the one you raised
before. If all things are processes, all empirical observations are
fuzzy. The problem comes, I think, when this fuzziness is said to be the
result of time passing during the observation rather than the fact that
what is being observed is a process. The difference is over whether the
fuzziness arises solely from the limitations or uncertainty of the
observational process or whether the object observed is itself actually
fuzzy. This issue is parallel to that of problem of observations that
have statistically distributed outcomes. The old view was that these
statistical outcomes are an artifact of our ignorance. There are
presumably hidden variables of which we are ignorant because our
knowledge of the state of the system can never be absolutely
complete. This was the view of Einstein when he suggested that god does
not place dice. However, the scientific consensus has long been
convinced that Einstein was wrong, and that probabilism is a real
property of all real systems. Radioactive decay is random, not because
we are ignorant of the trigger that caused it for a particular molecule,
but because the decay is inherently a random.

Reality is fundamentally wholistically analog, not reductionistically
digital. As measurement functions digitally, it can never fully
describe reality, only provide a limited map of it.

Think of it in terms of how our eyes function. Obviously there is far
more visual information than we can conceivably process and it is
traveling at the speed of light, so our mind breaks it down into
flashes of perception and then ties it together into a narrative. Sort
of like frames of a movie. Like a movie, much gets edited out as well.
Our minds digitize reality. As our minds go from past perceptions to
future ones, these perceptions that are the essence of our self recede
into the past.

But my question is what his has to do with energy. Up to the last
sentence, I'd agree. We process our perceptions, and that obviously
requires the expenditure of energy in the brain, but I don't think that
was your point.

The last sentence looses me. We made a perception in the past, and that
is embedded in memory, which is the mental record or trace of that
perception. The mind can't "go from a past perception" to a subsequent
perception because the past does not exist, only its memory. Did you
mean the mind goes from the memory of a past perception to...? Hopefully
you did.

The only thing which exists is physical reality, moving about,
imprinted with evidence of innumerable events.

And then, of course, there are no future perceptions, either, for the
future does not yet exist. Sure, it eventually will exist, but then it's
no longer the future, but a future present ;-). How does the future
exist in the mind? I suppose it exists as a set of the possibilities
inherent in the present. Even science fiction, which makes no claim that
it describes a reality, is a function or extrapolation of the present.

I've always found interesting the attitude toward money in the various
TV series that represent the future. In the original Star Trek the
attitude was that we won't need any money in the future, but from each
according to their abilities and to each according to their needs. As
one series replaced another, increasingly greed comes in and the need
and desire for money. The earlier series was Utopian, but nevertheless a
theoretical construct based on a negation of the existing world; the
late series are an affirmation of the existing world, with a bit of
exaggeration. (Any students lurking out there? This, and its
explanation, would make a nice term paper). But my point here is that
the future is always constructed in terms of the present.

To go completely off subject, here are some thoughts I've been
batting around as to the future of the monetary system;


Money is a medium of exchange, store of value and accounting device.
The first two work at cross purposes is because as a medium of
exchange, money functions as a public utility, while as a store of
value, it is a form of private property. By and large it is as private
property that most people think of it, due to its historical origin as
an accounting device of personal property, yet the reality is that
modern monetary systems are fundamentally a medium of exchange and
only as a function of that are they a store of value, as they have no
real backing other than faith in the issuing institution and must be
invested for the system to function and maintain value. If this
understanding of money as a form of public utility, or commons, were
to be broadly considered, it would have definite repercussions in the
context of the current crisis. The monetary system, with its broad
connectivity, is similar to a road system. You own your car, house,
business, etc., but not the roads connecting them. Money is in many
ways identical to the road system. Money is not private property,
since you cannot print what you want, as the government retains
copyrights, but effectively loans it out to the private banking
system. Its value is based entirely on public faith in the institution
issuing it, so the taxpayer is ultimately responsible for guaranteeing
its value.

I think the concept of abstract wealth as a store of value is
actually socially and environmentally destructive. Given the human
tendency toward intellectual reductionism, that ability to distill out
abstract wealth from ones social interactions and environmental
situation is profoundly corrosive to both society and the environment.
It is similar to processed sugars, and other forms of distilled
ingredients which then must be diluted to be palatable. Consider how
society would function if money were to be considered entirely as a
public medium of exchange, similar to a road system. For one thing, in
most circumstances, it simply wouldn't be a factor, as outside of the
financial system, most money is in circulation and wealth is stored as
tangible assets. Even in situations where one might be selling and
buying a house, or a business, it functions as a medium of exchange.
Similar to a road, where large vehicles need more space and smaller
vehicles naturally give them more room. Now consider the situation of
storing value. The overwhelming problem with capitalism isn't that
there are poor people in the world without recourse to income, as
poverty has always been a problem. No, the problem with Capitalism it
that by focusing on money as a store of value, it has created a large
surplus of capital. Since the demand for money is so large, as
everyone thinks they must have enough to personally insure their own
security and health, as well as viewing it as proof of success to
accumulate as much as possible, a savings glut, as Bernanke put it,
has been produced that cannot be effectively invested. This encouraged
ever more lax lending standards as a way to absorb savings and sustain
further growth of the money supply. Now that bubble is bursting and
this evaporating wealth is panicking and driving up commodity prices,
I think the very basic question of whether we should even have a
system of stored abstract wealth needs to be re-examined. If people
cannot suck value out of their social connections and environment to
store in a bank as a form of ego gratification and social status, they
would have to resort to putting their efforts and desires to increase
status and build security directly back into restoring and
strengthening their social and environmental health. So I don't think
there needs to be a currency for storing wealth, but only currency as
a public utility for exchange. Not only are the enormous pools of
personal wealth that it enables an excess the planet can no longer
afford, but more importantly they provide an destructive role model
for everyone else.

This isn't socializing wealth, but understanding what money is in the
first place. The effort to privatize Social Security is a good example
of the disconnect between assumption and reality, since there is
simply no place to invest this amount of additional personal savings
and would only be a boon to the brokers given the responsibility for
handling it. We invest in our old age by investing in our parents old
age, so that our children might continue the practice. It is a clear
example of investing in the larger community as a viable form of
savings.

Obviously we would have personal savings accounts, but what sets the
amount of viable savings isn't the cumulative desire for wealth, but
what can be productively invested. So there has to be some regulatory
method for distributing the potential to invest as broadly as
possible. The logical method is to reinstate higher tax rates, but
there might be a whole range of ways to encourage those able to
accumulate large amounts of wealth productively to be able to invest
in ways that benefit aspects of society and or the environment in ways
they chose, much like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett are currently
doing. Wealth is a convective cycle of rising assets and precipitating
benefits. Stopping this process only creates large storm clouds of
marginally productive wealth hanging over a parched economy, much like
we have now.

Currency did originate as a store of wealth, because it started as a
accounting of specific assets, but political power also started as a
projection of individual influence and evolved into a very complex
corporatization of personal power called monarchism before the
inherent instability and corruption drove society to devise methods
for making political power a public trust. It has come time to make
economic power a public trust as well. Money lubricates the economy,
rather than fuels it. Ideas, labor and resources are the real economic
fuel.

An effective financial system must express the dichotomy of bottom up
process and top down structure that is the basis of nature, from
ecosystems and the organisms which inhabit them to the political model
of the democratic process constantly revitalizing the republican
state. How to do this is to make the currency a national function to
provide broad stability and accountability, while the banking system
would be a function of local and regional government, with the
necessary profit, generated by interest rates required to make
investment decisions be based on viability, a form of public income to
support the healthy social infrastructure necessary for a healthy
economy. Since money would be view as a form of public utility, the
desire to accumulate large quantities would be curtailed, since it
would be viewed as infringing on the health of the society in which
one exists and this wouldn't have the desired effect of raising ones
social status, or even ones economic position, as it couldn't be used
to generate the increasing returns which wealth currently aspires. If
hoarding wealth lost its cultural standing, inflation wouldn't be
necessary to maintain circulation of currency, so accounting values
would be more stable.

The basic paradigm shift is from money as private store of wealth to
public utility, but this isn't a change in fact but perception, as
that is what it has already evolved into. The resulting change in
practice would be to make banks a function of government and by the
time the debt bubble finishes collapsing, this won't be as impossible
as it might currently seem.


I've no idea what "essence of the self" is, unless you are making a
theological point. And I've no idea how it can recede in the past when
in fact the past does not exist, unless you only mean that the traces of
the past that exist in the present tend to become corrupted in
time. But according to the Second Law, while things do disspate, that's
not because of time, but because the probability of moving toward a
higher entropy state is greater, given that there are more paths to it
than to a lower entropy state (a quaint old explanation, but it
should do here).

As someone who is chronically sleep deprived, I've developed a
knowledge of the difference between awake and the dream state. An
example was an incident some years ago when I was waking up very
gradually and not the usual alarm clock. The dream state manifested
itself as a dark room of small creatures scurrying about and waking
consciousness was like an opening door with light streaming in. Those
creatures the light shown on, stopped scurrying and lined up in the
light, while all the others ran off into the shadows. That is how our
memory of dreams function, those we wake up to get stored in the
memory and the rest run and hide. Our conscious mind is like a
government or other organization, where everything lines up, or gets
out of the way. This is very effective for motivation and direction,
but the larger reality isn't so linear. It's more like all those
little animals scurrying around in the dark. So while we form these
top down structures, they march along in this relativistic context and
build up reactive forces, which eventually dissolve them. We really do
contain the seeds of our own destruction. So the node of the self is
like that beam of light, while the network on which it is based is
much more shadowy and undefined. People without a strong sense of self
have trouble focusing or use tools and organizations to do so. Just
like all those little creatures.

Energy is what is conserved. The information it records isn't always
preserved. So energy is what goes from past information to future
information, while the information goes from being future potential to
past circumstance.

You really loose me here. Yes, energy is conserved, although of course
its form is not. While it takes a dissipation in the form of energy to
create and record information, and while it is possible to represent
information in terms of an energy equivalent, surely you are not saying
that the information _is_ energy. The work of my old teacher, Norbert
Weiner, and that of Claude Shannon, et al., showed that thermodynamic
entropy was analogous to information processing, but no one has shown
why.

No. One is form and the other is content.

The words you are reading now, we would agree represent
information. When I assembled them, I was putting the words (hopefully)
into a meaningful relation, and that required a decrease in entropy, a
dissipation of the form of the free energy in my brain to that of
heat. But once on the "paper", the words are in a state of
equilibrium. Unlike the BIOS in your computer, the information does not
require the processing of energy to maintain its far-from-equilibrium
state. Of course, as you read these words to extract their meaning (if
any), you also must put heat into the environment. But between their
creation and their interpretation, the information does not entail any
processing of energy (well, not quite true in the case of computer
communications, but you get the point).

A meteor flying through space doesn't process much energy either, but
it does have potential energy. Just as your words have the potential
to keep me up past my bedtime.

Again, there is no past information, but only information about the
past, which of course is necessarily subject to corruption (Second Law).

As the energy of which it consists is disrupted.

Oops. The "traces" of the past that exist in the present are, of
course, not the past, but mere empirical effects.
You are modeling time as a dimension in which the past is somewhere
back there and the future is somewhere up there.

Not at all and quite the opposite. I'm saying the past exists only as
traces (empirical effects) that can exists only in the present. These
traces were created in the past, but really exist only in the
present. There is no time dimension outside our consciousness. There is
no "back there", and there is not really a "now", either, for there's no
absolute time reference frame by which to say the present is now. What
we mean by the present is not a point along a time continuum, but is
defined rather by action (some would say, by experience, but I think
that amounts to the same thing, since no experience is entirely
passive - short of death, the termination of all activity).

I wasn't disagreeing, just pointing out the narrative structure of
thought is hard to escape.

If you think of time as a consequence of motion, then reality is like
a rope being woven out of threads pulled from what had been previously
woven, so as the energy is recycled, past information is constantly
being absorbed and incorporated.

I don't think of time as a consequence of motion other than that our
sense of time results from our activity in the world. We know that one
event was earlier or later than another, but that does not create a time
frame of reference except in our consciousness. That is, "motion" is a
word for process or change, but most change occurs beyond our awareness
of it. Such change does not create time; only the change of which we
become aware does that. If motion created time, and since all things are
in motion, then all things would have a time property or dimension, and
this is to what I'm objecting. I believe it runs contrary to the
scientific consensus today, and so your point stands in need of some
justification.

As I pointed out, as motion goes through series of configurations,
one is replaced by the next.

Energy and information are like two sides of a coin, as energy
manifests as form/information and information doesn't exist if it
isn't physically manifested.

To say that two things are mutually convertible does not make them, I
believe, into aspects of one thing. I can purchase a coffee pot,
converting cash into a commodity of equivalent value, but cash and
coffee pot are not the same thing. While one can say that the cash and
coffee pot are simply two different manifestations of value, that does
not mean they cease being different things. Classical political economy
(Adam Smith, for example) sought to define value because it wanted to
create an economic science, and so picked up on the traditional labor
theory of value. Marx continued this approach in a certain sense, but
capitalist political economy dropped it as it ceased being a science to
become a kind of economic engineering. To say that economic value can
used as a measure of both cash and the coffee pot does not reduce cash
and coffee pots to the same thing (all this a big subject I don't want
to explore here).

I'm not saying they are convertible. I'm saying they are two sides of
the same reality.

To say that information has an energy equivalent is not to say that
information is energy. Free energy is energy available for doing work;
information cannot do work. Not all energy expenditure is manifested as
information. The usual dissipation of energy in a system actually
implies less information in that system (information increase in the
system requires that system energy be dissipated into its environment).

I would argue all energy is manifested as information. Information
isn't necessarily order. Energy may be chaotic, but that is a form of
information. Radiation may not be informationally deterministic and
ordered, but its effect on ordered systems can be measured to
determine how much energy it contained. Loss of energy from a system
means that energy created additional information outside the system.
It is because information and energy are two sides of the same coin
that energy loss corresponds to information loss. It is the increase
of order that causes a system to lose energy, because using energy is
required to order it.

think of reality as the intersection order and energy. Both intimately
bound, with the past trying to control the future and the future
constantly breaking down the past.

Well, yes. The cosmologist Lyser made much of this point. But the past
exists only as empirical traces in the present, and empirical traces
can't do work, such as "controlling" the future. Or at least, the way
you put it makes me uncomfortable. A more conventional way would be to
suggest that the empirical aspect of the present, which is the product
of history, constrains future possibilities. The future, which does not
yet exist, obviously can't "break down", for what does not exist cannot
break down. Nor can the past, which no longer exists "control" anything,
for all real action is present action.

Put it this way, if those traces didn't exist, there would be no
concept of past events. It is these traces which constrain future
events, either actively or reactively.

By definition, but not completely. We think of the past as
unchangeable, but it is dissipating.

We think of the past as unchangeable for good reason: it does not exist
;-) We cannot change the past, only the future. What changes is not the
past, but the empirical effects of the past that happen to exist in the
present, at which time they become subject to change. In some
hypothetical future time, these empirical effects of the past will seem
to have dissipated because we construct a time frame into which we
inject a succession of system states, and from them we infer a past
dissipation. However, all action (including dissipation) can only
occur in a present.

What does exist is the energy and its form is a consequence of past
events. In order for change to occur, this information must be
altered.

While I've been addressing the issues you raise from what I hope was a
fairly conventional perspective, I can't help but remind you that I'm
inclined to put the whole affair in stronger terms that are not so
conventional. That is, the "past" _is_ the empirical dimension of the
present; the present is not defined by a moment in time, but by the
interdependency of this empirical dimension and of a causal relation
with the broader world (or more conventionally with causal potency), and
this relation constrains the probability distribution of possible
futures; the "future" is simply the probability distribution of possible
outcomes that exist as well only _in_ the present.

No idea what you mean by energy accumulating elsewhere.

It tends to be reactive to order. Ordered systems absorb less
information/energy, but tend to lose it and decay. Often as a
consequence of interaction with outside processes.

Think in terms of generational change. Growing up is like grass
pushing though the concrete. Then one day you wake up and you're the
concrete and there is this damn grass trying to push you out of the
way. As we grow up, we consume energy and information, but it builds
up and we slow down. Then the next generation is growing up and they
are running around like mad and using lots of energy, but since we are
old and cranky, they react by occupying the mental and physical spaces
we have left or can't fill.

Sorry, I still have a problem following you. Yes, when we grow up we
process energy flow so that we might develop, and this development can
be represented as an information increase. I've no idea what you mean,
however, by saying that the energy we process "builds up", unless you
mean that with maturation we have more free energy. That is, when we
are about twenty, we may be able to do more physical work than before or
after. However, as we mature and get wiser, that also represents an
information increase of a different kind, and this conceivably does not
necessarily diminish.

It may be that you are thinking of a point raised in general systems
theory that systems can "mature" and lock in to ever more narrowly
defined patterns of behavior. This locking in we think of as valleys in
the probability landscape, and once settled into a probable state, it
takes a purturbation to jump the wall to settle into another (putting
aside the issue of tunneling).

However, there is here no necessary reason why the minimal-entropy
probability "valley" implies an end to that structure. Why this rigidity
means death, in my mind at least, clearly requires the introduction of a
further consideration - specifically "contradiction". That is, in a
far-from-equilibrium system that is organic (the whole develops its
parts), the system depends on processing energy to maintain its
structure. Everything else being the same, the system will eventually
dissipate its environment to the point that is less able to decrease its
entropy and so it can no longer sustain the system's improbable
structure. This would usually represent an evolution toward stasis, but
in some (organic) systems, the development of the system also develops
its parts in empirical terms, and so this development opens the
possibility for a new kind of structure that is based on these developed
qualities. Hence we encounter the alteration of evolution and
revolution. But this is not developed (as far as I know) in general
systems theory, and it applies only to specific kinds of situations and
probably only to human history.

Such bottle necks are a natural function, as structures tend to
contract, compressing energy, until it breaks down, as my ability to
stay awake is doing. Got to go to bed....


Regards,

jbmjr.
.

Relevant Pages

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