Meaningful Interpretations of Reality
Language allows us to express "meaningful" interpretations of reality. Unfortunately reality, and more important what is "meaningful" about reality are not necessarily conducive to being expressed given the inherent structure of language. Language is an emergent phenomenon critically organized around a few principles. These principles include, but are not limited to:
1) A language must be dynamic (e.g. it can change over time given various factors such as isolation of a sub-population, mixing of cultures, discovery of new information, etc...)
2) A language must have context depedencies and generalizations (e.g. for a language to make any meaningful statements about anything it must have words that are heavily context dependent...such as "red," "door," "hammer, " "Eiffel tower," as well as words that are capable of connecting apparently disparate objects...such as "metaphor," "freedom," "purpose," "justice," etc...)
3) A language must be subjective in practice (e.g. all interpretations of a language are made by sentient beings, and by necessity these interpretations must be subjective...hence no single idea can mean the exact same thing between two people, because the internal context in which the idea is represented, or given meaning, will be different)
I propose that all emergent phenomenon (in the framework of understanding them from a subjective point of view) are merely meaningful interpretations of an ensemble of objects with a particular set of rules or interactions in a paricular context.
Math:
Rules/Interactions => Axioms
Emergent Behavior => Theorems, Lemmas, Corollaries...
Physics
Rules => Quantum Mechanics
Emergent Behavior => Classical Mechanics
Biology
Rules => Laws of Chemistry
Emergent Behavior => Life
etc...
The problem is that in many horrendously complex systems our ability to intuit the connection between the interactions or rules and the meaningful interpretations of the system decreases exponentially as the complexity grows. Yet it is in these systems in particular that we need to understand the emergent behaviors, given the underlying interactions, to the absolute utmost, because these systems are the most interesting around us. For example, how a cancer develops (or any disease for that matter), how proteins fold, how signals are transmitted between cells, etc...
Therefore I also propose the development of a language that is designed to deal with making meaningful interpretations of horrendously complicated systems. Or, better yet, a way of translating the "meaningful" constraints or correlations in the phase space of a particular model into a short and compact description that captures the very essence of the emergence.
By "meaningful" I mean that the constraints and correlations are distinguishable in some way from noise.
This language, or metalanguage, or meta-meta-(*uncountable metas*)-meta-language would conform itself to any particular rule/interaction set, then take on a life of it's own, and given a particular context (or initial conditions), it would flourish...finding new meaningful interpretations of itself, and expressing them in such a way as to be understood by us.
1) A language must be dynamic (e.g. it can change over time given various factors such as isolation of a sub-population, mixing of cultures, discovery of new information, etc...)
2) A language must have context depedencies and generalizations (e.g. for a language to make any meaningful statements about anything it must have words that are heavily context dependent...such as "red," "door," "hammer, " "Eiffel tower," as well as words that are capable of connecting apparently disparate objects...such as "metaphor," "freedom," "purpose," "justice," etc...)
3) A language must be subjective in practice (e.g. all interpretations of a language are made by sentient beings, and by necessity these interpretations must be subjective...hence no single idea can mean the exact same thing between two people, because the internal context in which the idea is represented, or given meaning, will be different)
I propose that all emergent phenomenon (in the framework of understanding them from a subjective point of view) are merely meaningful interpretations of an ensemble of objects with a particular set of rules or interactions in a paricular context.
Math:
Rules/Interactions => Axioms
Emergent Behavior => Theorems, Lemmas, Corollaries...
Physics
Rules => Quantum Mechanics
Emergent Behavior => Classical Mechanics
Biology
Rules => Laws of Chemistry
Emergent Behavior => Life
etc...
The problem is that in many horrendously complex systems our ability to intuit the connection between the interactions or rules and the meaningful interpretations of the system decreases exponentially as the complexity grows. Yet it is in these systems in particular that we need to understand the emergent behaviors, given the underlying interactions, to the absolute utmost, because these systems are the most interesting around us. For example, how a cancer develops (or any disease for that matter), how proteins fold, how signals are transmitted between cells, etc...
Therefore I also propose the development of a language that is designed to deal with making meaningful interpretations of horrendously complicated systems. Or, better yet, a way of translating the "meaningful" constraints or correlations in the phase space of a particular model into a short and compact description that captures the very essence of the emergence.
By "meaningful" I mean that the constraints and correlations are distinguishable in some way from noise.
This language, or metalanguage, or meta-meta-(*uncountable metas*)-meta-language would conform itself to any particular rule/interaction set, then take on a life of it's own, and given a particular context (or initial conditions), it would flourish...finding new meaningful interpretations of itself, and expressing them in such a way as to be understood by us.
posted by meta_darwinist at 1:42 AM
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