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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Sep 11, 2015 - 09:36pm PT
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There has got to be a formula, damnit!
there isn't...
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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Sep 11, 2015 - 10:07pm PT
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there isn't...
I'm tellin' ya Jeremy Engalnd's working on it. Check it out on Scientific American.
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MikeL
Social climber
Seattle, WA
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Sep 12, 2015 - 07:36am PT
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Ed: you have a definition for both "complexity" and for "uniqueness," beyond the refrain "I know it when I see it"?
As I understand it, the results of complexity (versus those phenomena which are merely complicated) are too dynamic and interactive for consequences to be accurately determined. “Uniqueness” is singular: no phenomenon replicates another phenomenon. (All supposed similarities or categorizations are the result of premature closures.)
I personally see nothing being replicated or repeated. It just looks that way because we are not being careful in neither our observations nor our articulations.
Making distinctions between what is complex and what is complicated may be gross.
I’d suggest looking at punctuated equilibriums, for example. Evolution seems intuitively graspable if we think of punctuated equilibriums as plodding incremental shifts. (Things change just a little bit at each jump.) Broader, larger discontinuous jumps, from one equilibrium to another, however, appear more difficult to grasp. However, the same analytical problem arises.
Any movement is difficult to explain when looked at closely. (An infinite series of acts cannot be completed in finite period of time—see Zeno). Russell recognized that certain paradoxes are exceedingly subtle, even downright profound.
When people like me claim that *everything* is inter-connected to everything else infinitely (a systems approach), we imply a Reality that is difficult to parse or bracket experimentally. We CAN talk, . . . provisionally, intuitively, generally, even productively, but (I’d argue) not on an exact one-to-one basis. We cannot truly predict exactly what will happen. We seem to come to close approximations (even very very close ones) only.
Close approximations and generalizability bothers almost no one but people like me. I don’t take anything all too seriously or concretely. A sense of ease allows me to slip around in Reality conventionally. Nothing is really quite what we make of it. That includes me. That’s how the “slippage” occurs.
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WBraun
climber
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Sep 12, 2015 - 07:42am PT
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Out of the "One" comes the many = complexity.
Acintya-Bheda-Abheda = "simultaneous oneness and difference"
Thus complexity arises out of the ultimate source and always remains simultaneously simple and complex eternally .......
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Bushman
Social climber
Elk Grove, California
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Sep 12, 2015 - 09:41am PT
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Breathing is Underrated
How often have you had the moment when you think that this is it, your life is flashing before your eyes, you have only seconds to live, and you're not sure if you're going to make it?
Several times in the last few years I have had a strange occurrence of acid reflux which would wake up me up in the middle the night while I'm choking on my bile as I lunge to roll over and out of bed to catch my breath, and at the same time, thinking to myself that this is it, I don't know if I'm going to survive. At that moment I know I have to inhale air into my lungs and catch my breath between involuntarily exhaling while coughing or else.
It's a frightening experience and it reminds me of the times in the past when I have almost fallen in a bad place while climbing, or crashed my car, or went down on my motorcycle, or other times when I came just seconds from death.
One time in particular that I remember was when I was trimming a tree with a 25 foot extension ladder and I was tied to the tree and standing on the top rungs and felling some limbs with a harness and flip line around the tree holding me to it, but I unclipped for a moment to be ready to climb down when got distracted and forgot that I had my flip line off. As I began to lean backwards at of the moment of balance before falling backwards off the ladder, I reached out and grabbed the tree. I experienced a rush of adrenalin accompanied by a sound mental dressing down, and was sick with the realization that tumbling down a ladder backwards for twenty five feet to the deck with no helmet would have probably been fatal.
Of course I have fallen that far out of a tree and hit the ground another time when a damaged tree I was safety trimming broke off unexpectedly with me in it half way up, but it happened so fast and the whole top of the tree took me with it so violently that I had no time to react. I could only deal with the consequences afterwards of lying on the ground, writhing in pain injured, and accepting the humility of having to take my first ambulance ride as a victim.
In particular I am addressing the times when we think that these are our final moments, that's all she wrote, life is done, goodbye cruel world, adios, sayonara, Hasta la vista baby, and the end is near.
-bushman
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Sep 12, 2015 - 10:47am PT
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complexity is most often described by example, which leaves a lot to be desired... for instance, in the Wiki article the Solar System is given as an example of a system that is not complex.
This illustrates the problem of having a limited set of examples, the "Solar System" refers to the Sun, the eight planets and the variety of other stuff gravitationally trapped by the Sun. All sorts of theories have been developed to explain why it is so planar, why the masses of the planets are what they are, etc...
The foundations of these planetary theories all rested on one example, our own "Solar System." The successful observation of extrasolar planets dates back to the late 1990's. As the observational capabilities improved the categories of "solar systems" increased. Not too surprisingly, our notions of what constituted a "solar system" changed dramatically.
Apparently the Wiki article hasn't even caught up with all the interesting complexity that seems to involve extrasolar systems, and the fact that these types of systems are much more diverse than was thought of before... how could that no be.
So our notions of "complexity" are tempered both by our experience and by our aesthetic.
What MikeL infers above in the phrase, "the results of complexity (versus those phenomena which are merely complicated) are too dynamic and interactive for consequences to be accurately determined" sounds more like "chaos theory" then "complexity theory." Chaotic dynamical systems are well defined: such systems are determinant, but the time evolution of the system depends on the initial conditions so strongly that those initial conditions can never be specified to sufficient precision to allow accurate prediction of that time evolution.
Simple dynamical systems, such as the double pendulum, have a set of initial conditions that lead to very predictable behavior, and a set of conditions that lead to chaotic behavior...
[Click to View YouTube Video]
in the video the pendulum starts swinging in the regime of chaotic behavior, then as the energy dissipates through bearing friction and aerodynamic drag, settles into quite predictable behavior, actually all the behavior is predictable, but to predict the wild motion we'd have to provide the various important state conditions to a precision much better than we ever could in order to track out the trajectories.
Such systems are not "complex" in the manner we are talking about in this part of our conversation.
But that begs the question (or DMT has begged, "give me an equation!"), what is complexity?
There isn't an equation, or even an answer, yet, in spite of decades of work and the promise of a non-reductive science of complexity...
A productive place to start is Kolmogorov Complexity, which comes from algorithmic information theory... this is not a physical theory but perhaps we might start to get hints as to how such a physical theory might be defined.
Kolmogorov Complexity actually has a precise mathematical definition, but the examples seem to capture the essence of complexity.
Consider a string of characters (we'll take the Wiki example):
abababababababababababababababab
this is a 32 character string, Kolmogorov complexity of this string is defined by the length of the string that describes it:
ab 16 times
which has a length of 11 characters. The complexity of the original string is not considered to be large because its description is short.
If you continue to develop these ideas formally, the complexity of any string is never more than a bit bigger than the string itself.
This is a starting point because it incorporates many important aspects, including our ability to describe the object. For instance, you might think we could write down π:
3.1415926535897932384626433832795028841971693993751058209749445923078164062862089986280348253421170679...
here are 105 characters, our description might be:
the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter
which is 58 characters, a naive application of this definition of complexity would be that π isn't complex because it is a string of infinite length while our description is very finite, but we left off the formal description of the "..." at the end, which describes how we truncated the calculation of that ratio, which would make the complexity of the string greater.
But that is exactly our sense of "complexity." Note also that we cannot write down π in its entirety as the string would be infinitely long... we might also not be able to write down a description of an algorithm that could calculate that infinte string, such an algorithm could be considered infinitely complex.
So this avenue of thinking might be useful in describing physical systems.
The complexity of biological systems behave in a similar manner. If we consider the description of the biochemical mechanism of protein production in cells, the mechanism itself may be concisely described, but the network of all such interactions cannot be so simply described.
This is the field of "protemics."
But in terms of complexity as defined in the sense of Kolmogorov Complexity, let's start with a list of all proteins produced in a cell.
Now let's consider our description of how that the cell produces that list of proteins. It is vastly longer than the actual list... we'd say this system has a large degree of complexity.
The modeling of the protein production is an open research topic which has seen progress using network modeling.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metabolic_network_modelling
I consider this very exciting, though there are many unresolved issues with the model base assumptions. But basically one can use the genome and a linear network model of the protein production to predict the protein production in a cell under various conditions.
In this way one can actually predict the cell's response (in terms of protein production), where rare metabolic processes are revealed that may be very difficult to find by just subjecting the cell to many different environments. There are so many possible environments that it is impossible to map all of them out by "brute force" (which is jargon for trying all of possible combinations)...
While I don't necessarily agree in detail with the list which appears in the Wiki article, you can see that concepts like Kolmogorov Complexity might be suitably generalized to produce a definition of complex systems that have the characteristic attributes:
"
 The number of elements is sufficiently large that conventional descriptions (e.g. a system of differential equations) are not only impractical, but cease to assist in understanding the system. Moreover, the elements interact dynamically, and the interactions can be physical or involve the exchange of information
Such interactions are rich, i.e. any element or sub-system in the system is affected by and affects several other elements or sub-systems
The interactions are non-linear: small changes in inputs, physical interactions or stimuli can cause large effects or very significant changes in outputs
Interactions are primarily but not exclusively with immediate neighbours and the nature of the influence is modulated
Any interaction can feed back onto itself directly or after a number of intervening stages. Such feedback can vary in quality. This is known as recurrency
Such systems may be open and it may be difficult or impossible to define system boundaries
Complex systems operate under far from equilibrium conditions. There has to be a constant flow of energy to maintain the organization of the system
Complex systems have a history. They evolve and their past is co-responsible for their present behaviour
Elements in the system may be ignorant of the behaviour of the system as a whole, responding only to the information or physical stimuli available to them locally"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_adaptive_system#Characteristics
However, we find that this set of characteristics may be more representative of the difficulty to resolve the behavior of these systems than of the systems themselves. As we thought that planetary systems were relatively simple until we actually saw many more examples.
Similarly, while cellular protein production would seem a perfect example of a complex adaptive system, there are many features of our description of that system that are susceptible to "conventional description" (see the first bullet point above and note that network theory is also a relatively new field of study growing from statistical mechanics in the last 30 years, and while it borrows techniques from the much more mature linear control theory in engineering, expands the domain of that discipline far beyond the engineering use).
To conclude...
Oddly, we make progress in the traditional "reductionist" manner while the promise of a new "holistic" paradigm for understanding "complex" systems has yet to emerge. This emergence has been anticipated for a long time, and many people have devoted their careers to that end, but as yet there are no successes in explaining physical systems, complex or otherwise, in those terms.
The importance of quantitative prediction of observation in defining successful scientific theories is not likely to be relaxed, and "complexity science' doesn't have any successful predictions. And I don't see that happening (as I survey the literature) anytime soon.
It isn't enough to say things that "sound good" and "resonate with ancient wisdom" or are "congruent with our gut feelings." You have to calculate, put all your cards on the table, and see what comes from the observations...
...harsh, perhaps, but the evolution of physical theories is as "harsh" as the evolution of species... and amazingly similar in description.
(To note, this thread has a lot of my own thinking and speculation involved and doesn't represent the scientific consensus on complexity, of which I am probably not aware of anyway... so please take it as my own view and not representative of all of science. This is an active and exciting part of what is happening now... I'm sure Largo could get a lot of comments from his "car pool" on the topic.)
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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Sep 12, 2015 - 12:35pm PT
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How is complexity not simply the outcome of a relationship of matter to energy within an open system? Doesn't matter reorganize itself in its relationship to energy in the natural entropic effort to dissipate that energy? Doesn't an open system mediate the process of entropy? And in the reorganization of matter don't we find complexity? Wouldn't the advent of life be a natural outcome of such reorganization and an inevitable state within the laws of thermodynamics?
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BASE104
Social climber
An Oil Field
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Sep 12, 2015 - 01:04pm PT
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Carl Sagan wrote a book before he died that is essential for anyone remotely interested in either science or "fring" types:
The Demon Haunted World.
It isn't really about religion vs. science. It is about poor science and beliefs as opposed to good science.
It does, in a general way, include religion, as a belief system, but it is basically just a damn good book if you are a scientist or even interested in an aspect of science.
Of course there is bad science being done. It has been occurring ever since the first human had a sense of wonder about anything in the physical universe. He happily skewers many examples of shoddy science, and more or less teaches how to spot it.
Everyone here should read it. It isn't anti-religion. It is about doing good science, and what is required for it to be good.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Sep 12, 2015 - 01:07pm PT
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1 How is complexity not ... the outcome of a relationship of matter to energy...? RESPONSE Who says it is not? This is basic principles.
2 Doesn't matter reorganize itself in its relationship to energy in the natural entropic effort to dissipate that energy? ANS Yes.
3 Doesn't an open system mediate the process of entropy? RESPONSE I suppose depending on what you mean my "mediate." Same with a closed system, no?
4 And in the reorganization of matter don't we find complexity? RESPONSE Of course.
5 Wouldn't the advent of life be a natural outcome of such reorganization and an inevitable state within the laws of thermodynamics? ANS It sure has been in our neck of the woods thanks (a) to the complexity generator we call natural selection and (b) the right ingredients in our neck of the woods.
Pretty much basic principles of physics through biology here, no?
Now what?
But I have a feeling this ain't what you were after.
.....
re: Largo's "car pool"
That's a metaphor, ain't it?
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BASE104
Social climber
An Oil Field
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Sep 12, 2015 - 01:13pm PT
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How is complexity not simply the outcome of a relationship of matter to energy within an open system? Doesn't matter reorganize itself in its relationship to energy in the natural entropic effort to dissipate that energy? Doesn't an open system mediate the process of entropy? And in the reorganization of matter don't we find complexity? Wouldn't the advent of life be a natural outcome of such reorganization and an inevitable state within the laws of thermodynamics?
I have a buddy who got born again. Big time, hard core Christian evangelical type.
He brought up Entropy in an argument against evolution (he had double majored in both Chemistry and Biology in college).
Entropy, in the long run, rules. However, when he pointed this out, I pointed at his new truck. Raw materials were assembled into a complex thing, a big ass pickup truck.
Entropy doesn't really affect life very much. Just look at a tiny Sequoia seed and compare it to the adult.
We can now observe new stars being born. Surely this is a violation of entropy, eh? Well, no. Stars will continue to be born, run out of fuel, explode or die a slow death as a brown dwarf, until the entire universe is dark, but particular instances of natural processes create complex features all around us, every day.
Pulling out the entropy card for a ruse against evolution is false. The biggest mistake lies in defining "complexity." How do you define that? A bacterium is certainly more complex than a star, which is basically a large ball of gas.
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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Sep 12, 2015 - 01:42pm PT
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But I have a feeling this ain't what you were after.
Actually that's exactly what I was looking for. If life is an inevitable occurrence by virtue/result of the laws of physics then it would be logical to conclude that consciousness is also inevitable and like life is written into the very fabric of what is. That is the structure of consciousness enjoys a preexistent inevitable state as an inevitable outcome of the structure of the universe and like being is an inevitable outcome of the laws of thermodynamics. And finally evolution must be mediated by this structure.
Isn't it fascinating that the "new Darwin" is an Abrahmic believer, an orthodox Jew!
Look him up: Jeremy England. So Ironic!
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Sep 12, 2015 - 01:42pm PT
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talk is cheap
there's a lot of work to sus out the details and do the calculations...
and (that having been attempted) likely that the particular calculation is not in agreement with observation...
for starters, what is entropy? and what is it's relationship to complexity? the answer depends on definitions. provide them... and then and their relationship and you're pretty far along to answering your question.
further, life cannot be deduced from thermodynamics, it will take more than that to understand the non-equilibrium system.
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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Sep 12, 2015 - 02:00pm PT
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Here's some cheap talk:
"Popular hypotheses credit a primordial soup, a bolt of lightning and a colossal stroke of luck. But if a provocative new theory is correct, luck may have little to do with it. Instead, according to the physicist proposing the idea, the origin and subsequent evolution of life follow from the fundamental laws of nature and “should be as unsurprising as rocks rolling downhill.”
From the standpoint of physics, there is one essential difference between living things and inanimate clumps of carbon atoms: The former tend to be much better at capturing energy from their environment and dissipating that energy as heat. Jeremy England, a 31-year-old assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has derived a mathematical formula that he believes explains this capacity. The formula, based on established physics, indicates that when a group of atoms is driven by an external source of energy (like the sun or chemical fuel) and surrounded by a heat bath (like the ocean or atmosphere), it will often gradually restructure itself in order to dissipate increasingly more energy. This could mean that under certain conditions, matter inexorably acquires the key physical attribute associated with life."
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Ward Trotter
Trad climber
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Sep 12, 2015 - 02:01pm PT
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To give a satisfyingly complete account of the increasing complexity of biological systems found in the evolutionary record the biological sciences have from time to time sought to deal with their unique problem in a way that might go beyond natural selection as the garden-variety explanation.
This statement from Complex Systems Biology wiki page:
A complete definition of complexity for individual organisms, species, ecosystems, biological evolution and the biosphere has eluded researchers, and still is an ongoing issue.[3][8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_systems_biology
Also I am reminded of the once well-known theory of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin , who as a paleontologist was of course confronted with this increase in complexity in the paleontological record and therefore attempted to advance an accounting of sorts with his Law of Complexity-Consciousness
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Complexity-Consciousness
-----------------------------------------------------------
Over the years a few physicist have become interested not so much in the question of complexity,per se, but in the thermodynamics at play in what are known as dissipative systems:
A dissipative system is a thermodynamically open system which is operating out of, and often far from, thermodynamic equilibrium in an environment with which it exchanges energy and matter.A dissipative structure is a dissipative system that has a dynamical régime that is in some sense in a reproducible steady state. This reproducible steady state may be reached by natural evolution of the system, by artifice, or by a combination of these two.
Finally:
Examples in everyday life include convection, turbulent flow, cyclones, hurricanes and living organisms. Less common examples include lasers, Bénard cells, and the Belousov–Zhabotinsky reaction.[1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissipative_system
Life does not violate the second law of thermodynamics, but until recently, physicists were unable to use thermodynamics to explain why it should arise in the first place
Enter Jeremy England.A quote of his:
“I am certainly not saying that Darwinian ideas are wrong,” he explained. “On the contrary, I am just saying that from the perspective of the physics, you might call Darwinian evolution a special case of a more general phenomenon.”
LOL.
You can read the article here:
https://www.quantamagazine.org/20140122-a-new-physics-theory-of-life/
Here is a paragraph towards the end :
Having an overarching principle of life and evolution would give researchers a broader perspective on the emergence of structure and function in living things, many of the researchers said. “Natural selection doesn’t explain certain characteristics,” said Ard Louis, a biophysicist at Oxford University, in an email. These characteristics include a heritable change to gene expression called methylation, increases in complexity in the absence of natural selection, and certain molecular changes Louis has recently studied.
Here is another excellent article worth reading in this connection:
The Surprising Origins of Life's Complexity
https://www.quantamagazine.org/20130716-the-surprising-origins-of-lifes-complexity/
The best of luck to all these scientist who can hopefully turn these interesting theoretical forays into new scientific truths.
Otto says:
January 22, 2014 at 2:24 pm
Nice. Now it’s time to test this and gather data to support it.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Sep 12, 2015 - 02:03pm PT
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Ed wrote,
The modeling of the protein production is an open research topic which has seen progress using network modeling.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metabolic_network_modelling
I consider this very exciting, though there are many unresolved issues with the model base assumptions. But basically one can use the genome and a linear network model of the protein production to predict the protein production in a cell under various conditions.
..............
You might also like to check out this then. I thought it was awfully exciting as well. It is a classic in molecular biology and biochemistry and is written and illustrated very plainly but not simplistically...
A Genetic Switch, by Ptashne, 3rd Edition
It analyses phage lambda, a simple bacteriophage, via a systems approach, in terms of its behavior, inputs and outputs, and also genetic regulation and protein manfr.
I've mentioned before years ago but it didn't get much traction as this is a climbing site, not a strong science type arena let alone serious mol bio lab.
http://www.amazon.com/Genetic-Switch-Third-Lambda-Revisited/dp/0879697164/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1442091415&sr=8-1&keywords=genetic+switch
http://www.supertopo.com/climbing/thread.php?topic_id=1155984&msg=1156152#msg1156152
Also, Ed, you mentioned control theory and network theory above. Ever more works like these are proving useful...
Systems Biology
http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Systems-Biology-Mathematical-Computational/dp/1584886420/ref=pd_sim_14_2?ie=UTF8&refRID=04TSVS4AD7V4VFYAM9HF&dpSrc=sims&preST=_AC_UL320_SR220%2C320_
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Sep 12, 2015 - 02:08pm PT
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^^^well that's uplifting!
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Sep 12, 2015 - 02:16pm PT
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I did ask my car pool friends about complexity and they also chucked in time as a bonus. Briefly, they mentioned that various complexity and "a really long time" arguments have been busted out to try and explain everything from DNA self-organizing to the emergence of consciousness - if consciousness did emerge from some thing, as common sense dictates. Apparently neither the complexity nor the long-time angles have yielded much fruit. But they didn't go too far into it so I have little more to add.
Right now they seem to be more interested in the so-called threshold issues. Sparked by the basic fact that the subjective is not reducible to the objective, they are wondering if the problem is that we tend to look at phenomenon as a single order, that we start out with perhaps nothing, from which quantum stuff arises, then macro forms, and on up the ladder from there. One friend in particular is wrangling with whatever is involved - a law, a mechanism, a graviton - that limits a fluid reductionism all the way down to no-thing, or that which has no physical extent. Or if your mind melts from that idea, down to a quark.
If reality exists in a single order, from no-thing on up to Milky Ways, what is it that impedes a fluid reductionism, such as the barrier that seemingly exists between no thing and something, between the macro and the quantum, between subjectivity and objectivity.
Curiously enough, my one friend began the thought experiment by asking a simple question: Why can nobody ever find an actual dream inside of the brain (NOT the material processes believed to "create" the dream)? The obvious answer he says is that the brain and an actual dream are not the same things - if they are things at all. The next question he asked is a whopper: While we can postulate a dream by way of a causal arrow from matter up to the dream - or subjective experience - how might the arrow of causation run in the other direction, and if it cannot, why?
There are even more out-there questions but I didn't have enough time to get much of a feel for them. But the interesting thing I think is that he is not looking at threshold that are bridged, rather that various orders that simultaneously exist in the same time and place, and that are somehow interdependent on each other.
JL
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