Ierrellus

Terms:
structure as any human-devised set of criteria
for distinguishing order from chaos

My piano is structured to produce tones. Its structure is a prerequisite for its tone possibility. Mathematical progressions determine which tones produce melody and which combinations of tones produce harmony. Is my gap between inspiration and execution of inspiration due to structural rigidity?

PAX

[ October 26, 2002: Message edited by: Ierrellus ]</p>

Kim o' the Concrete Jungle

Do you experience very much of a gap between the inspiration and the execution?

I have found that, after a decade or so of writing on the one instrument (guitar), that my inspiration is adaptive. It has adapted to work within the structure and limitations of my instrument of choice. This adaptation has been so complete that I find it difficult to write on a different instrument with different limitations.

But there is also the structure of the brain, and the strucure of ideas held within it (though these structures are not well understood). And there is the totally different structure of what music is as physical entity, made from sound waves bouncing around a room. So at some level, there is always going to be some mismatch between inspiration and execution, as you try to translate one into the other.

Mr. Sammi

Ierrellus,

You seem to rest upon the idea of structure being the human contribution to ordering. What is the human contribution to structure?

The prerequisite for the structure seems only to be the structure of the mind. This is the limitations the mind has due to itz current state of development.

If I were you I would apply determinism to this sort of activity. This may help you to decide where the free will exists within the rigidity of your structures. Eventually you may derive a few degrees of freedom BUT then again you may not derive anything through the application of determinism.

Sammi Na Boodie (i hope this helps)

Kim o' the Concrete Jungle

Personally, I'm not too bothered by the idea of determinism, because it's just plain wrong. I'm not saying that the Christian position -- "God granted us freewill" -- is right either, but there is definitely something missing from the deterministic explanation of behavior, because human behavior is not completely predictable. The very fact that social psychologists must study human behavior statistically is proof of this. Whether variations in human behavior can be accounted for by chaos theory or something else, the fact remains, human beings are not as totally predictable as a purely deterministic model would demand.

Determinism doesn't fit the facts, and if a theory doesn't fit the facts, then the theory is wrong (not the facts).

Another thing I would like to point out is that the structures we human beings create are not always binding. Even the most rigid structure (provided that it is not somehow fundamental to the way human beings think and understand things) can be replaced with something else. If Ierellus doesn't like the structure imposed upon him by his piano, he could always swap it for a button accordian, or a cello (which is fretless, so doesn't even necessarily have to conform to the 12 note western music system).

Maybe some of the things I've said here are controversial, but that's only because I have thought a lot about these sorts of issues, and because I have found the standard deterministic explanation to be somewhat lacking. Determinism may be true, up to a point, but it is nowhere near the whole explanation.

Feather

This is wrong on many levels. "Deterministic" does not equate to "predictable." Predictability requires precise knolwedge of the boundary conditions. This is never actually the case in practice because of error bars. But the laws of nature that particles follow are all deterministic as far as observation goes.

A stastistical system can be (and in nature often is) deterministic.

John Page

Ierr:

Hi!

Surely structure is something we perceive, so when we "impose" order then we are merely structuring something in a way that is pleasing to us.

Now, I suppose our "sense of structure" is something that has evolved and likely useful to us in manipulating or using features of reality to our competitive advantage.

IMO aesthetics is the refinement of such senses, hence aesthetic appeal may belie underlying functions/utility, of which we do not necessarily have any conscious notion.

In turn our bodies reward our brains with drugs for thinking such graceful thoughts, thereby causing pleasureable sensations. In summary, the sense of order arising from our philosophic prognostications gives all us infidels a high.

Just a thought.

Cheers, John

Kim o' the Concrete Jungle

The thing about human behavior is that it's not like the usual sort of deterministic process. Planetary orbits are deterministic, because you know that, up to a point, planets will behave according to the inverse square law that Newton discovered.

In contrast, human behavior (and thought) is more like the weather. It is an emergent property of a complex system. Like any emergent property, it cannot be reduced to a simple cause and effect relationship, and that's what I mean when I say human behavior is not deterministic.

Feather

You know, just what exactly is an "emergent property." I keep seeing people write it as though it were some final assertion.

The closest definition I can come to based on context is this "an emergent property is a property that is more than the 'sum of its parts'" or "an emergent property is a property of a system that cannot be explained entirely even by explaining fully every part of the system itself."

Am I too far off here?

It seems rather silly, but I want to be entirely sure of the concept before I attack or defend it.

galiel

Why silly? Emergent properties are not predictable by the properties of their constituents. They are epiphenomena of the system. For example, no property of the individual sodium or chlorine atoms that make up salt predict its salty taste.

Life is an emergent property, and so is intelligence. The principle is not new, it was first formalized in general systems theory decades ago, but it is one of those self-evident phenomena that seem obvious in retrospect, but not before someone articulates them..

IMO, it is an essential principle to understand how unpredictable, organized behavior can emerge from seemingly random processes.

What about it do you find worthy of attack?

[ October 31, 2002: Message edited by: galiel ]</p>

Feather

Well, it's silly because it asserts without proof that some supernatural phenomenon is at work in any given system. In other words, given the Laws of Physics for the individual components of a given system, the system can behave external to these Laws somehow.

Your "salty taste" example seems bogus. The word "taste" is simply another label or shorthand for describing the electrical impulses sent about the nervous system when the sodiumchloride contacts the molecules that form the taste buds, resulting in a reaction.

You might argue that the phrase "salty taste" was unpredictably applied to the particular reactions, but this seems a rather lame attempt at attaching objective value to a rather subjective concept (language). As well call the taste "blooblflitz" or "green." It's the same thing either way.

Otherwise it seems to provide some mystical, supernatural cause/effect play regarding what "taste" is.


I have not heard the phrase one time in over five years of physics classes ranging from the most basic through Space Physics, Astrophysics, and currently graduate level courses. It may be old news in other branches of philosophy, but the one branch that actually has models for reality that work and can be used to manipulate reality--physics--doesn't seem to have need of it.

The most pertinent subject I can think of where this would be a most grievous oversight would be statistical mechanics of every sort. But the stastical properties of physical systems are formulated from the deterministic models of their individual components (i.e. given that a single particle of type X behaves according to Law Y, I can derive a statistical model that explains how an ensemble of X's will behave using only Law Y).

I wouldn't call any given resulting statistic an "emergent property," and yet it seems that this term must be applied.

For example, any one of my X's above doesn't have a "pressure," yet the ensemble may have "pressure" as a meaningful statistic.


It's either too vague to actually describe discernable reality or else it seems to propose supernatural causes and effects, for a start.

Maybe I'm missing something here.

EDIT:

I might add based on the above that perhaps my objection is merely that "emergent properties" merely confuses the issue, because it simply restates in different language that humans label properties of systems differently than we label properties of their individual components. I wouldn't have an issue with this, but it seems to me that "believers" in "emergent properties" then assume that somehow the different labels are significant in an observable way.

[ October 31, 2002: Message edited by: Feather ]</p>