Supermodelling

I still have some rather obnoxious and academic preliminaries to slog through before I feel comfortable moving on to the specific technology of applied philosophical engineering. Even though this process is both abstruse and fumbling, it is necessary and I can only hope somebody somewhere thinks it’s as interesting as I do.

In an earlier post, I marveled at the thinginess of the universe. But what does it mean to say that things exist? I don’t mean to question the existence of the water molecules making up an excellent tubular ocean wave; I am wondering about the existence of the wave itself as a thing. The purpose of this essay is to answer that question from what I hope will eventually turn out to be a highly practical and useful perspective.

Let’s call the appearance of thinginess emergence.

Now that word (emergence, emergence, emergence!) has a rather poor reputation these days, especially among those with a reductionist world view — what good does it do to hide actual causal compositional mechanisms behind such a mystical and impenetrable label?

Emergence, because it’s slippery and interesting, is debated academically by Philosophers, who view the concept from several different perspectives. Alas, in my view (as I have been explaining), most of the things in the universe (including concepts such as emergence itself) are fuzzy enough to defy such fine description, and so detailed philosophical analysis of this type boils down to ultimately meaningless distinctions between subjective viewpoints. Not to say that all non-mathematical analysis is worthless… but I think it usually can only go so deep before it diffuses into a cloud of imprecision and personal preference. Your mileage may vary, though, and if you’re interested, there are some relatively well thought-out and detailed modern philosophy papers on emergence. Here’s one.

Emergence could be said to be the core of the interdisciplinary science-ish field of Complex Systems because typically emergence is characterized as a difficult-to-predict result of nonlinear interactions between components. From that perspective, the most sexy and interesting sort of emergence involves the creation of “complexity” from simplicity — for example, auto-catalysis and evolution producing complex living creatures from boring chemical soup. John Holland has written an excellent book on this subject, and there are many other researchers justifiably fascinated by the complexity-generating aspect of emergence.

For me, the idea of emergence, beyond the peculiar fact of its ubiquity, is important because it is central to the way I look at minds and modelling. I don’t think this view is particularly uncommon, but I will try to explain my take on it as carefully as I can because many essays to follow will rely (usually implicitly) on this basic viewpoint:

The usual way of thinking about emergence revolves around the idea of irreducibility — for example, even though life is certainly in one sense nothing more than molecules banging together, it is impractical, impossible, or just silly to express the interesting concepts about living creatures in terms of bouncing chemicals, which makes one question the feasibility of reductionism as an ultimately fruitful methodology.

I personally am not so hung up on this point, though: “Prime number” is a perfectly valid bit of emergent structure even though it is completely and simply reduceable to specific “lower level” elements. The important thing is usefulness of the description — that is, the existence of a productive ontology, not so much the peculiar details of specific ontological properties.

Going back to some examples from previous essays, when an asteroid smashes into the moon, the crater that is formed is an emergent entity. When gravity causes interstellar glop to gather into a huge ball which gets so dense and hot that nuclear fusion commences and a star is born, that star is emergent. Democracy as a social structure is emergent from human nature and other aspects of our world.

Going further, all of the things in the universe — from bees to thunderstorms to love to death to money to the category we label “coffee cup” — are emergent.

It might seem that if (literally) everything is emergent, there is no point to the concept. But there is no emergent structure in uniform randomness (maximum entropy) nor in uniform invariance (minimum entropy). For something to fall between these extremes, it must be possible to capture the thinginess of a bit of emergent structure with a description — that is exactly the sense in which things exist: by virtue of their describability.

These descriptions are also things. That the universe can reflect itself in this way is glorious and astonishing. The fact of it is the basis for minds, and that’s why it matters.

We “see” the universe through our own descriptions — sensory descriptions, conceptual descriptions, linguistic descriptions, mathematical descriptions, logical descriptions. But the descriptions available to us through inbuilt capability and training are only a subset of the possible descriptions that could be applied to the universe. I wonder how much of the “real” emergent structure of the universe we can “see” — and how much we miss, hidden in plain sight by the limits of our descriptive ability.

I will call a description of an emergent thing a model. This leads me directly to the next steps in elaborating modelling:

• What is the nature of the relationship between the “terms” of a description and the thing being described? (the problem of reference, or intention)
• What types of descriptions (models) are usefully realizable in computer programs?
• What types of descriptions are generated by brains? Does it make sense to call these conceptual models?
• How do sensory modalities relate to intentionality and model structure?
• What aspects of things can and should be described by a model?
• What a priori and empirical features make for good models?

These and other questions will focus the ongoing project of understanding and applying modelling, and in so doing perhaps advance the miraculous history of the universe reflecting itself in the mirrors of mind.

Postscript:

Altnough I think of emergence in this way myself, it is probably not smart to broaden the definition of a perfectly good word in this way for the purpose of conversation. Therefore I use the more standard-style defintion of with no currently-apparent tractable reductionist theory when talking to others.

1. 
   Ken Gendrich said...
   7:23 pm - June 6th, 2009

   Eloquently written, concise, yet thought provoking.
   Ergo: I’m now interested…

   As humans, we seem to always want to know how the universe “works”, especially in terms of how the human mind processes and perceives this “universe”

   For me, where these intersect is the reality (outside our minds) and our perception of reality (within our conscience and sub-conscience minds). My personal belief is that our conscience mind can perceive simple systems quite well, but when they branch into a sufficiently complex system or network, we can no longer follow. This is where I feel our sub-conscious or intuitive minds take over and can perceive some of these complex systems.

   Take for example “beautiful”
   Can we accurately describe beautiful? not me
   Can we consciously perceive beautiful? somewhat
   Can we model it with computers? Fractals seem to approach this, but only superficially…
   But, do we “KNOW” what it is when we perceive it? Yes
   Can we agree that it’s “emergent” Probably…

   So, what’s my point? Emergence seems (philosophically) to be a convergence of human subconscious thought and conscious perception.

   I’m no professional philosopher, but I would like to know more about how it works…. more importantly, how I can perceive it better and get in touch with it.

   To Derek:
   What then is the practical use of modeling to model emergence?

2. 
   Derek said...
   8:38 pm - June 6th, 2009

   Hey Ken, thanks for the thoughtful and detailed comment.

   I think your example of beauty is a particularly interesting case of emergence. As you say, it seems to be the machinery of our subconscious minds (which nobody yet understands as far as I know) that is primarily responsible for the conceptual models comprising “beautiful.” Whatever they are exactly, it’s really complicated and tied to lots of other mental machinery. I expect there is no useful approximation to it from other modelling methods (no math equations or statements in logic). Yet, despite the messiness it’s so useful and universal to our minds that we stick a short label on the concept and use it all the time.

   For this reason I expect that poetry and other “nonrational” means are more effective than computer programming or other formal methods for helping further our understanding of these wonderful idiosyncratic aspects of humanity, and building mechanical minds with models of beauty that match ours in deep ways is likely to be quite difficult, I think. We might have to replicate the brain in considerable detail to achieve that.

   As for practical uses, in the view I am expressing here, emergent is the same exact thing as modelable and although modelling some things (like beauty) in comprehensive and useful ways might be beyond our current grasp, there are lots of things that are not beyond our ability to model. In fact, that is one of the most practical and effective uses we have for computers. After I work through a couple other topics I’m planning to do a little essay on exactly that subject pretty soon.

3. 
   Abram Demski said...
   9:28 pm - June 18th, 2009

   Derek,

   I’d stopped reading this blog, because you said you were done!

   Nice post. It caused me to write up some ideas I have in a semi-related direction:

   http://dragonlogic-ai.blogspot.com/2009/06/importance-of-uncomputable-models-i.html

4. 
   Derek said...
   5:30 pm - June 19th, 2009

   Hi Abram!

   Yeah, I’m unable to stop thinking about this stuff, and the fact that there is no “clear answer” about the mysteries of mind actually just makes it more attractive — until I get tired and discouraged, then I guess I need a break for a while. It help that there are other folks like you out there who are also trying to think about these problems.

   I will give your entry a careful reading later; I tend to get highly confused by implications of computability and similar abstractions, which unfairly biases me toward concluding that they are unimportant. At first glance, your ideas about convergence seem to be saying that there is a meaningful sense in which emergent macro-objects exist in an objective way, beyond the descriptive capabilities of observers — if a viewpoint of that type ends up being useful, I’d certainly rather not overlook it! If I have some thoughts about your approach I’ll continue on your blog. Unfortunately, most times I end up with questions about the meaning and applicability of terms, in order to take underlying intuitions about fundamental concepts and make them compatible enough for real understanding — which is an exhausting and involved process. It’s amazing how much each of us is like an island.