During the past few weeks I have enjoyed reading Against Method by Paul Feyerabend (revised edition 1988). As suggested by the title Feyerabend argues for philosophical anarchism, for an anything-goes approach to scientific method. Feyerabend responds to the method of falsification advanced by Karl Popper by showing that no theory can stand under that ideal: Every revered theory of science stands in spite of some contradictory evidence! Practitioners who need to get on with their work mostly just ignore contradicting evidence, and Feyerabend shows this turning away from uncomfortable evidence is okay and even necessary for all sorts of advance. I find this very interesting and mostly convincing.
I differ however, if I have understood Feyerabend correctly, in a view suggested by the Resource-Patterns Model of Life (RPM, which is the focus of this blog). RPM starts out with an assumption — that resource patterns (RPs) exist concretely in our universe, and even though this is only an assumption I believe almost all people will feel confident building large structures upon this assumption. The challenge of living things (LTs) in RPM is to discover and learn how to exploit RPs. So for us humans (being LTs) our important discoveries about RPs are not found in a universe of anarchy. Rather the locations of RPs, and the physically possible ways to exploit RPs, are orderly. What we may discover pertaining to RPs is also orderly, an order extant in the physical facts of the extra-human universe. Feyerabend’s anything-goes method suggests to me a failure to recognize this order underlying what we humans learn about our surroundings.
But my difference just mentioned may boil down to almost nothing when I allow that we humans do not know what we will discover until after we have discovered it. If we could gain a God’s-eye view before we start a search then it would not be a search; we would know beforehand the necessary direction of search. So my objection has merit in that God’s-eye view. But for us here below who lack that view Feyerabend seems to have a good point.
Let me add that RPM provides an excellent platform for continuing development of the philosophy of mind to which Feyerabend has contributed. We start with tabletop critters which have minds (or more specifically computer programs) which we have specified to be just barely sufficient for their survival at a low level. We add a huge RP which the critters can never hope to exploit unless they can discover new modes of cooperation. Then we start giving the critters incremental senses and/or calculating routines, running the model to see which increments in ability enable a population of critters to discover and exploit the RP. In this quest we will face concrete examples of development of language, leadership, and lying. We will come face-to-face with what looks to us like a thought which exists not in a single critter but in a connected network of critters — a thought possible only in that higher level of life.
I hope my promises just expressed will show more clearly as I post drafts of the remaining chapters for my book underway.
Sunday, December 27, 2015
Saturday, November 14, 2015
Report of Conference on Social Science Simulation
On the recent weekend of October 29 – November 1, I attended this year’s conference of The Computational Social Science Society of the Americas, at Santa Fe, New Mexico. This Society emphasizes computerized agent-based modeling. So their work bears some relation to my project in this blog. My project, to give a clue to newcomers, is exposition of a new model of our human experience, the Resource-Patterns Model of Life (RPM). Below I will comment upon two of the papers presented at Santa Fe. The second of those papers led me to read a few papers by Robert Axtell. I will end my comments here with what I found in Axtell’s papers. Overall I found affirmation in the conference. Affirmation, that is, of the approach to modeling I use in this RPM project.
Mirta Galesic presented her paper with Daniel Barkoczi, “Social learning strategies, network structure and the exploration-exploitation tradeoff”. The “social learning” subject of this paper catches my attention because social learning could describe the main question of interest that arises in RPM. Evidently this paper is only a small part of a body of literature on social learning now available. This literature has a context which bears some relation to RPM, so it will need to be studied as research is undertaken on social learning within RPM.
Digression: Before proceeding with the remainder of this post let me tell that I struggle to understand what I am doing on this blog. In a sense my drive is clear: I am promoting RPM which gives a better understanding of some important facts of life. But I have paused over questions such as: What is a model? Does conjecture have a place in science? I want my methods of both science and communication to withstand scrutiny. So I am looking for guidance, looking for what I may learn from the experience of others — especially those who have labored to communicate new agent-based views of science.
With that said let me say that in RPM the agents and their world remain, at this stage, mostly a thought experiment. I have started to computerize the agents as I reported earlier, but that effort did not promise enough rewards at this stage to justify the time it would require. So I am presenting a thought-experiment agent-based model of economic and psychological life.
Matthew Koehler presented a paper “Exploring Organizational Learning and Structuring”. But for me the most interesting part of Matt’s presentation was a long digression with which he started. In this digression he talked about the degree of specificity of agent-based models, praising what he had learned from Robert Axtell’s papers (see below). Matt showed a table (unfortunately not in the available paper) in which one axis represented the degree of specificity. Thought experiments were shown at the low-specificity end of that axis. I was heartened to see this because it seems to endorse the usefulness, within a broad view of science, of thought experiments at the early stage of development of scientific theories.
Matt also offered a suggestion for how to make a paper about a computerized agent-based model more meaningful to a reader. This was to lay out natural-language sentences, the sentences describing the agents and their world, in the first column of a table. Then in the second column give a reference to the computer code, that is to the line numbers of computer code in an appendix with the paper. This linking of natural language to computer language would empower a careful reader to understand exactly what is meant by the unavoidably fuzzy meanings of natural-language sentences. It may be impossible for some readers to gain a comfortable feeling of comprehension without such specifics. That may be helpful for me with exposition RPM. In some cases I have told more detail than I had believed necessary at first. But still I do not know how much detail to spill.
Robert Axtell, cited by Matt Koehler, has written in two papers (see references below) about a helpful way to categorize agent-based models. He suggests models be evaluated based upon their correlation at two levels with the empirical world. The two levels are the micro level of the agents and the macro level of system-wide developments. In each of these levels correlation with the empirical world is ranked, ranked to be either qualitative or quantitative, with quantitative judged to be better. This categorization ranks a model with a number from 0 to 3, with 3 being awarded to models which correlate with the empirical world at both micro and macro levels.
To equate Axtell’s terms “micro” and “macro” with what we use in RPM, recall that RPM allows for consideration of life in four or more levels. Almost all of our attention in RPM will focus upon the psychological implications of how living things on one level may advance to the next higher level. So Axtell’s term "micro" might refer to any level n in RPM, and then "macro" refer to level n+1. Also, micro might refer to the critters and macro to the organizations of critters which form in response to resource patterns.
RPM would be ranked at the lowest level in Axtell’s categorization scheme, because it is not close to empirical quantification at either micro or macro level. But that is alright, because RPM is still in the early fuzzy-language stage of paradigm development.
References
R. Axtell (2005). “Three Distinct Kinds of Empirically-Relevant Agent-Based Models”. Brookings Institute, 30 September 2005.
R. L. Axtell, and J. M. Epstein (1994). "Agent-Based Models: Understanding Our Creations". Bulletin of the Santa Fe Institute, Winter 1994, pp 28–32.
Daniel Barkoczi, and Mirta Galesic (2015). “Social learning strategies, network structure and
the exploration-exploitation tradeoff”. CSSSA 2015 link.
Matthew Koehler, Luciano Oviedo, and Michael Taylor (2015). “Exploring Organizational Learning and Structuring”. CSSSA 2015 link.
Mirta Galesic presented her paper with Daniel Barkoczi, “Social learning strategies, network structure and the exploration-exploitation tradeoff”. The “social learning” subject of this paper catches my attention because social learning could describe the main question of interest that arises in RPM. Evidently this paper is only a small part of a body of literature on social learning now available. This literature has a context which bears some relation to RPM, so it will need to be studied as research is undertaken on social learning within RPM.
Digression: Before proceeding with the remainder of this post let me tell that I struggle to understand what I am doing on this blog. In a sense my drive is clear: I am promoting RPM which gives a better understanding of some important facts of life. But I have paused over questions such as: What is a model? Does conjecture have a place in science? I want my methods of both science and communication to withstand scrutiny. So I am looking for guidance, looking for what I may learn from the experience of others — especially those who have labored to communicate new agent-based views of science.
With that said let me say that in RPM the agents and their world remain, at this stage, mostly a thought experiment. I have started to computerize the agents as I reported earlier, but that effort did not promise enough rewards at this stage to justify the time it would require. So I am presenting a thought-experiment agent-based model of economic and psychological life.
Matthew Koehler presented a paper “Exploring Organizational Learning and Structuring”. But for me the most interesting part of Matt’s presentation was a long digression with which he started. In this digression he talked about the degree of specificity of agent-based models, praising what he had learned from Robert Axtell’s papers (see below). Matt showed a table (unfortunately not in the available paper) in which one axis represented the degree of specificity. Thought experiments were shown at the low-specificity end of that axis. I was heartened to see this because it seems to endorse the usefulness, within a broad view of science, of thought experiments at the early stage of development of scientific theories.
Matt also offered a suggestion for how to make a paper about a computerized agent-based model more meaningful to a reader. This was to lay out natural-language sentences, the sentences describing the agents and their world, in the first column of a table. Then in the second column give a reference to the computer code, that is to the line numbers of computer code in an appendix with the paper. This linking of natural language to computer language would empower a careful reader to understand exactly what is meant by the unavoidably fuzzy meanings of natural-language sentences. It may be impossible for some readers to gain a comfortable feeling of comprehension without such specifics. That may be helpful for me with exposition RPM. In some cases I have told more detail than I had believed necessary at first. But still I do not know how much detail to spill.
Robert Axtell, cited by Matt Koehler, has written in two papers (see references below) about a helpful way to categorize agent-based models. He suggests models be evaluated based upon their correlation at two levels with the empirical world. The two levels are the micro level of the agents and the macro level of system-wide developments. In each of these levels correlation with the empirical world is ranked, ranked to be either qualitative or quantitative, with quantitative judged to be better. This categorization ranks a model with a number from 0 to 3, with 3 being awarded to models which correlate with the empirical world at both micro and macro levels.
To equate Axtell’s terms “micro” and “macro” with what we use in RPM, recall that RPM allows for consideration of life in four or more levels. Almost all of our attention in RPM will focus upon the psychological implications of how living things on one level may advance to the next higher level. So Axtell’s term "micro" might refer to any level n in RPM, and then "macro" refer to level n+1. Also, micro might refer to the critters and macro to the organizations of critters which form in response to resource patterns.
RPM would be ranked at the lowest level in Axtell’s categorization scheme, because it is not close to empirical quantification at either micro or macro level. But that is alright, because RPM is still in the early fuzzy-language stage of paradigm development.
References
R. Axtell (2005). “Three Distinct Kinds of Empirically-Relevant Agent-Based Models”. Brookings Institute, 30 September 2005.
R. L. Axtell, and J. M. Epstein (1994). "Agent-Based Models: Understanding Our Creations". Bulletin of the Santa Fe Institute, Winter 1994, pp 28–32.
Daniel Barkoczi, and Mirta Galesic (2015). “Social learning strategies, network structure and
the exploration-exploitation tradeoff”. CSSSA 2015 link.
Matthew Koehler, Luciano Oviedo, and Michael Taylor (2015). “Exploring Organizational Learning and Structuring”. CSSSA 2015 link.
Saturday, November 7, 2015
Steve Schapiro, Scenes of Art
Last weekend I attended an agent-based conference in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I expect to share a few notes about that conference in my next post. But let’s start with some serendipity. On my trip home I met Steve Schapiro, a photographer from Chicago. Chance tossed us together on two legs of the journey: the shuttle to Albuquerque then the flight to Chicago.
Steve showed me this. When you are eating a meal either alone or in company — stop — sometime during the course of the meal. Look at the scene before you on the table. The arrangement of food and implements will be a scene of art. It will be perfect. You cannot improve it. If you try to improve it by moving things around you will only break it. You will make it worse.
First Steve told me about this, then later he proved it. After I had mostly finished my airline snacks and cup of coffee, he stopped me to look at the tray-table in front of me. It was indeed a satisfying scene of art.
What a delight!
Of course I can’t leave this alone. I need to explain this phenomenon. Here goes my attempt.
The scene invites you to participate. A person looking into that scene may know exactly where he or she would start. When I look at that scene I feel an impulse in my arm to start an action.
One reason for this feeling is, I suppose, that almost everything in the scene was made for use with human hands. The table, utensils, napkin, and servings of food were all made for human touch.
Let us compare the scene of a partially completed meal with three alternative scenes:
Why, you might ask, am I writing about scenes of art in this blog which has the purpose of promulgating the Resource-Patterns Model of Life? Psychology. The main interest which I find in RPM is its implication that we living things are probably biased to search for resource patterns. Such searches might be expressed as instincts or impulses. And this could possibly include our sense of art.
I could grope forward here to propose more specifically-worded ways that a sense of art may help LTs find RPs. But I prefer to encourage the reader to think in that way.
Addition: March 23, 2016
David Sloan Wilson seems to deal with a similar question. See for example Chapter 16 in Evolution for Everyone: How Darwin's Theory Can Change the Way We Think About Our Lives, (2007). Wilson looks into this question from a different model, a different perspective, although there are strong parallels.
Steve showed me this. When you are eating a meal either alone or in company — stop — sometime during the course of the meal. Look at the scene before you on the table. The arrangement of food and implements will be a scene of art. It will be perfect. You cannot improve it. If you try to improve it by moving things around you will only break it. You will make it worse.
First Steve told me about this, then later he proved it. After I had mostly finished my airline snacks and cup of coffee, he stopped me to look at the tray-table in front of me. It was indeed a satisfying scene of art.
What a delight!
Of course I can’t leave this alone. I need to explain this phenomenon. Here goes my attempt.
The scene invites you to participate. A person looking into that scene may know exactly where he or she would start. When I look at that scene I feel an impulse in my arm to start an action.
One reason for this feeling is, I suppose, that almost everything in the scene was made for use with human hands. The table, utensils, napkin, and servings of food were all made for human touch.
Let us compare the scene of a partially completed meal with three alternative scenes:
meal just set
If we look at the table with everything set in place but the meal not yet commenced, we human observers might know how we would start but we are not sure we have permission. Is this place setting mine or someone else’s? Has the time to dig in been signaled? It would be improper if we started without these permissions. The scene does not quite invite my participation.
If we look at the table with everything set in place but the meal not yet commenced, we human observers might know how we would start but we are not sure we have permission. Is this place setting mine or someone else’s? Has the time to dig in been signaled? It would be improper if we started without these permissions. The scene does not quite invite my participation.
craftsman’s workbench
We might look at a midday scene on a craftsman’s workbench and, as in the scene of a meal in progress, see objects which were made for use with human hands. But if I am not familiar with that particular craft I do not have any sense of what I would do next. The scene does not invite my participation.
We might look at a midday scene on a craftsman’s workbench and, as in the scene of a meal in progress, see objects which were made for use with human hands. But if I am not familiar with that particular craft I do not have any sense of what I would do next. The scene does not invite my participation.
extra-human landscape
A natural landscape with no evidence of human existence may appear beautiful to my human eye but this sense of beauty differs from the art I sense in a partially completed meal. I do not know how or if I would start to do anything in this scene. It does not invite my participation.
A natural landscape with no evidence of human existence may appear beautiful to my human eye but this sense of beauty differs from the art I sense in a partially completed meal. I do not know how or if I would start to do anything in this scene. It does not invite my participation.
Why, you might ask, am I writing about scenes of art in this blog which has the purpose of promulgating the Resource-Patterns Model of Life? Psychology. The main interest which I find in RPM is its implication that we living things are probably biased to search for resource patterns. Such searches might be expressed as instincts or impulses. And this could possibly include our sense of art.
I could grope forward here to propose more specifically-worded ways that a sense of art may help LTs find RPs. But I prefer to encourage the reader to think in that way.
Addition: March 23, 2016
David Sloan Wilson seems to deal with a similar question. See for example Chapter 16 in Evolution for Everyone: How Darwin's Theory Can Change the Way We Think About Our Lives, (2007). Wilson looks into this question from a different model, a different perspective, although there are strong parallels.
Friday, September 18, 2015
Perspectives in the Resource-Patterns Model of Life: A Search for Externalities and Who Can See Them
People commonly “talk past each other”. Each person represents a different perspective. But we often fail to see this difference in perspective as we struggle to be civil.
The Resource-Patterns Model of Life (RPM) calls our attention to the need for specific perspectives and shows limitations under which living things must somehow develop perspective. By focusing our attention on the development of perspective, I would hope that RPM would make us more aware how our perspectives serve our specific interests.
My discussion here of perspective was stimulated as a side effect of another question. I suppose it may be helpful to compare RPM with older, well established models in physical and social science. In this vein I have started to compare RPM with models familiar in mainstream economics. I have looked in RPM for the some of the objects with which we are familiar in economics, objects such as “commodity”, “price” and “market”. Recently I came across “externality”, another object familiar in mainstream economics, and realized I had not identified externalities in RPM. Uncomfortable with my ignorance I explored the question. Most of what I found, it turns out, is about the development of perspective, so that became the main subject in this post.
Let me offer a definition of “externality” for those readers who have not learned how economists use this term. An externality is a side effect of economic activity, an effect upon parties not part of the economic exchange, parties that is who are external to the activity. For example the smoke which comes out the stack of an electric power plant is an externality if we assume that neither the producers nor the buyers of the electricity are motivated to care about the smoke. Normally we think of externalities as being negative. But externalities can also be beneficial, if for example your neighbors have a loud band playing in their back yard for a party – and you like the music. Wikipedia offers a longer definition of externality.
Figure 1 shows such a prospering organization of critters, organized in a line of exchange between the model’s two essential resources, water and sugar. For review, the water and sugar constitute a single resource pattern (RP).
Externalities have not yet been mentioned in the development of this model, but when we ask if there are externalities which result from the cooperation among the critters in that line, we easily imagine that externalities could result from such enterprise. An externality could be added to the model if we wanted to experiment with its effects. The externality could be added in either of the two classes of models we might employ: (1) thought experiments or (2) computerized agent-based models. The externality might be smoke or trashing of the environment surrounding the line of exchange. It would impact other critters not in the line of exchange, or other living things also added to the model. Let us add such an externality. I have not attempted to show the externality in the Figures in this post, but please assume it is there.
Let us notice who is noticing this externality. We human modelers who have created this thought experiment can see the impact of the enterprise in the line of trade upon other life, i.e. the externality. Or at least we humans who have learned the meaning of “externality” can see the externality.
But the critters in the line of cooperation cannot see the externality. We can assert that the critters cannot see the externality because we created those critters as we created this model. We gave them a list of capabilities and those capabilities do not include capacity to sense the welfare of another critter, at least not in this early and not-much-extended application of the model.
My confidence that these critters can not sense or think some things grows from my computerized modeling. I have written computer programs which are the “brains” of such agents, thereby I can know what the critters can “sense” or “think” or “remember”. For more about the psychological capabilities of the critters see the draft chapter on psychology.
But the critters would enjoy a still brighter future if they could:
Let us suppose that the critters of Figure 1 live in only a small part of a larger universe. Near the center of Figure 2 we see that same prospering community of critters from Figure 1, but now the scale is reduced to about one-third of the former size to show the larger surroundings. Now we can see that the universe of the critters contains many pairs of water and sugar, many RPs that is. In fact we see a larger pattern, a pattern of RPs. But, while our critters have happily colonized the RP from which they derive their sustenance, we humans can see that the critters could do much better if they could perceive what it is that makes their success possible (the RP and the rules we gave them) and start a search for other similar RPs.
With a new perspective the critters may go on to occupy their corner of the universe. Figure 3 shows what this little world might look like with all the RPs being exploited, a consequence of the critters succeeding in developing the perspective we have suggested.
Remember that our goal as human modelers is to gain insights from RPM, insights about ourselves and our society. So we will proceed by extending the model, giving the critters new sensual and computational powers, trying to understand which additions are necessary to empower the critters in the model to take this next step toward mimicking our human experience.
Recall also that life exists in levels. In RPM a living thing can appear singular, as a single critter or single human. But an organization of living things can also be conceived as a single living thing, a LT on a higher level. Conversely, rather than look up in the order to larger living things, we can look down in the order to smaller living things: Any single living thing, such as a critter or human, can probably be dissected and discovered to be an organization of smaller living things, LTs on a lower level. The development of perspective, the ability of an organization to recognize and act upon an RP, is a key component of level-to-level advance.
In this avenue of development we may consider an analogy with our own human nervous systems. The psychology of a human being derives somehow from the interactions of millions of nerve cells. We could not predict the behavior of a human even if we could perfectly understand the behavior of the human’s constituent nerve cells, or so it is commonly asserted and I probably agree.
But let us start with our initial population. Recall the condition in Figure 1. This population of critters enjoyed a comfortable standard of living but at that stage no critter could perceive the RP which fed them, so no effort to find neighboring, similar RPs could have started. There were none among them whose wellbeing relied upon the perspective which developed later in our story. So obviously, at this preliminary stage, there were not any critters whom we might characterize as having an interest in the perspective not yet developed.
But after that perspective of the resource pattern was developed and used (as illustrated in Figure 3), then a much larger population was made possible by use of that perspective. It follows that the lives of most of that larger population depend upon that new perspective. Without the perspective their lives would not exist. We humans looking into the model from our perspective can reasonably conclude that those critters have an interest in the perspective. The perspective, having been developed and used to advantage, correlates with an interest among the critters.
A nuance may catch our attention. Consider the specialization paradigm which we described above (the first of the two avenues for development of a new perspective). Under specialization some critters may come to have or to control large amounts of saved resources, and those powerful critters might be expected to risk some of their savings in research which might yield a profitable new perspective. Research may be funded that is. So we may expect funding to give rise to another specialty, being researchers, critters willing and able to perform research for compensation. Thus researchers naturally have an interest in the search for new perspectives which provides their livelihood. So, in exploring this nuance we discover the effect of a new and not-yet-described RP. The funding of research, overseen by some powerful critters, becomes an RP for other critters, and this creates a distinctive inner niche where life – if following appropriate rules – may thrive.
We have lingered over the challenge presented by development of perspective. RPM lays this problem open to us, on a workbench as it were. In the example presented, we see how a population of critters could grow if the critters can develop a broader perspective. We see programs of research through which we may seek a deeper understanding of our own individual and group psychology, and these programs are given greater, realistic focus by RPM.
We humans often seem to blame other humans for being wrong on some point; we wish we could shout some truth into our opposites. But what we do not always see is that our opposites have a different perspective, a different interest. They are seeing a different RP or opportunity for organization.
The Resource-Patterns Model of Life (RPM) calls our attention to the need for specific perspectives and shows limitations under which living things must somehow develop perspective. By focusing our attention on the development of perspective, I would hope that RPM would make us more aware how our perspectives serve our specific interests.
My discussion here of perspective was stimulated as a side effect of another question. I suppose it may be helpful to compare RPM with older, well established models in physical and social science. In this vein I have started to compare RPM with models familiar in mainstream economics. I have looked in RPM for the some of the objects with which we are familiar in economics, objects such as “commodity”, “price” and “market”. Recently I came across “externality”, another object familiar in mainstream economics, and realized I had not identified externalities in RPM. Uncomfortable with my ignorance I explored the question. Most of what I found, it turns out, is about the development of perspective, so that became the main subject in this post.
Let me offer a definition of “externality” for those readers who have not learned how economists use this term. An externality is a side effect of economic activity, an effect upon parties not part of the economic exchange, parties that is who are external to the activity. For example the smoke which comes out the stack of an electric power plant is an externality if we assume that neither the producers nor the buyers of the electricity are motivated to care about the smoke. Normally we think of externalities as being negative. But externalities can also be beneficial, if for example your neighbors have a loud band playing in their back yard for a party – and you like the music. Wikipedia offers a longer definition of externality.
The first two perspectives
As we search for externalities in RPM we will use the model of tabletop critters. The critters, as you may understand if you’ve been following development of this blog, start out as dirt-poor hunter-gatherers. Then the critters gain prosperity as they gain new ways of cooperating among themselves, cooperating to exploit resource patterns in their environment. |
| Figure 1. A community of critters prospering without knowledge of either their relative prosperity or the causes of this prosperity. |
Figure 1 shows such a prospering organization of critters, organized in a line of exchange between the model’s two essential resources, water and sugar. For review, the water and sugar constitute a single resource pattern (RP).
Externalities have not yet been mentioned in the development of this model, but when we ask if there are externalities which result from the cooperation among the critters in that line, we easily imagine that externalities could result from such enterprise. An externality could be added to the model if we wanted to experiment with its effects. The externality could be added in either of the two classes of models we might employ: (1) thought experiments or (2) computerized agent-based models. The externality might be smoke or trashing of the environment surrounding the line of exchange. It would impact other critters not in the line of exchange, or other living things also added to the model. Let us add such an externality. I have not attempted to show the externality in the Figures in this post, but please assume it is there.
Let us notice who is noticing this externality. We human modelers who have created this thought experiment can see the impact of the enterprise in the line of trade upon other life, i.e. the externality. Or at least we humans who have learned the meaning of “externality” can see the externality.
But the critters in the line of cooperation cannot see the externality. We can assert that the critters cannot see the externality because we created those critters as we created this model. We gave them a list of capabilities and those capabilities do not include capacity to sense the welfare of another critter, at least not in this early and not-much-extended application of the model.
My confidence that these critters can not sense or think some things grows from my computerized modeling. I have written computer programs which are the “brains” of such agents, thereby I can know what the critters can “sense” or “think” or “remember”. For more about the psychological capabilities of the critters see the draft chapter on psychology.
The need for a new perspective
The critters in that circumstance described above benefited from a RP because of a good fortune which lay outside of their control: the RP was there in their environment and we modelers gave them the rules of cooperation which would empower them to exploit that RP even if they could not perceive the RP.But the critters would enjoy a still brighter future if they could:
- perceive the RP which feeds them,
- start to act in ways which constitute a search for the locations of other RPs like the one that feeds them.
Let us suppose that the critters of Figure 1 live in only a small part of a larger universe. Near the center of Figure 2 we see that same prospering community of critters from Figure 1, but now the scale is reduced to about one-third of the former size to show the larger surroundings. Now we can see that the universe of the critters contains many pairs of water and sugar, many RPs that is. In fact we see a larger pattern, a pattern of RPs. But, while our critters have happily colonized the RP from which they derive their sustenance, we humans can see that the critters could do much better if they could perceive what it is that makes their success possible (the RP and the rules we gave them) and start a search for other similar RPs.
 |
| Figure 2. The same thriving but unperceptive community of critters from Figure 1, but seen in the larger universe of their surroundings, a universe with many opportunities for extension of critter-life. |
With a new perspective the critters may go on to occupy their corner of the universe. Figure 3 shows what this little world might look like with all the RPs being exploited, a consequence of the critters succeeding in developing the perspective we have suggested.
Remember that our goal as human modelers is to gain insights from RPM, insights about ourselves and our society. So we will proceed by extending the model, giving the critters new sensual and computational powers, trying to understand which additions are necessary to empower the critters in the model to take this next step toward mimicking our human experience.
Recall also that life exists in levels. In RPM a living thing can appear singular, as a single critter or single human. But an organization of living things can also be conceived as a single living thing, a LT on a higher level. Conversely, rather than look up in the order to larger living things, we can look down in the order to smaller living things: Any single living thing, such as a critter or human, can probably be dissected and discovered to be an organization of smaller living things, LTs on a lower level. The development of perspective, the ability of an organization to recognize and act upon an RP, is a key component of level-to-level advance.
 |
| Figure 3. The critters, having learned a perspective of their larger environment, have populated their larger environment. |
How a new perspective might be developed
While I cannot predict how our critters (aided by much human tweaking) might eventually gain ability to develop the new, needed perspective, here I will briefly describe two broad avenues of development.Avenue 1: Diversity in population along with specialization
Some of the LTs in an organization may have or develop special abilities. For example we might extend our model of tabletop critters such that some fraction of the critters are born with a rudimentary sense of sight, so they can detect a concentration of particular colors of light coming from certain directions, and we might also give distinct colors to the sugar and water. So these critters gifted with rudimentary sight can directly sense the resource pattern which enables the prosperity of their community of critters. This new ability within the set of critters may constitute one step in development of the needed perspective. Other needed steps may include rudimentary signaling, or language, and induction or the ability to propose the existence of additional RPs.Avenue 2: Systematic organization, spontaneous order, moral codes
This second possible avenue for development of perspective grows from spontaneous order, or the relatively new science of chaos theory and its kin. An entire population of constituent agents, when viewed as a single combined agent, may often exhibit behaviors which we humans could not have predicted from our knowledge of only the abilities of the constituent agents. A set of LTs within RPM may act in a way that enables it to discover and exploit neighboring as-yet-unused RPs, although we observing humans may not be able to explain how this happened.In this avenue of development we may consider an analogy with our own human nervous systems. The psychology of a human being derives somehow from the interactions of millions of nerve cells. We could not predict the behavior of a human even if we could perfectly understand the behavior of the human’s constituent nerve cells, or so it is commonly asserted and I probably agree.
Reflections on development of perspective
Here are a few reflections on the development of perspective in RPM.- We human modelers face a challenge to give the critters enough powers (senses, physical actions, and calculating or “thinking” power) so that they can develop the needed perspective. This challenge is large and difficult. It is probably more than I can accomplish. It may require the careers of a score of modelers.
- I find it difficult to write about this topic because I want to write clearly and concretely. But I am groping into a dark, unknown region. The words at my disposal serve poorly to convey either what I am finding or what my findings may mean. But then I suppose that this is the experience of any new science, of anyone who hopes to describe new concepts, which have not yet spawned their own terminology, with our existing set of words.
- In spite of the difficulty which clearly lies ahead for RPM, I claim that the structure provided by RPM is a big step forward. RPM narrows the problem of development of perspective, providing a resource-constrained framework within which to work.
- As noted above, we humans struggle to invent new language so we can discuss what we see in RPM. But we also notice that the critters in our model could use some ability to communicate. They could, we may imagine, discover the RP which empowers their present level of success if they could give signals to each other. A vocabulary with only a few meaningful symbols may add considerably to their ability to organize. I hope to learn more with subsequent research.
- Recall that this discussion about the development of perspective was stimulated by an observation about economic externalities: Educated humans can perceive an externality in RPM, but the low-level critters at the start of our thought experiment could not perceive the externality. Now, after we have discussed development of a higher-level perspective for our critters, in which perspective the critters can perceive the RP that sustains them, we may wonder if this higher-level critter can perceive the externality. No. We still have not given them anything like general overview of affairs in which an externality may be perceived.
- Wealth spawns philosophy and exploration, or at least that is an assumption I make about societies. The golden age of Greece would provide a first example among humans. Second, present American civilization has wealth which spawns both space exploration and my development of RPM. A third example is provided by the critters in Figure 1. They can obtain all the resources they need to survive with only a small fraction of their time-effort. As such they have resources which they may apply to the challenge of learning about their universe, and that exploration may yield discoveries which increase the probability of the long term survival of their descendants.
- One human speaker sometimes challenges another to explain what the other means by the word “we”. We humans often shift our base as we speak, sometimes speaking only for ourselves, sometimes speaking as representative of an already-extant group, sometimes hoping that the group suggested by the “we” will come together at some future time. I am trying to hone my skills in recognizing when I shift base while speaking, or when I hear another speaker shift base. I believe I have a long way to go in gaining this skill and I sense that I am not alone. But RPM may help us with this education, help us to see that “we” represents a specific interest. Critters which specialize, using abilities often helpful for the larger community, will probably signal with an implied “we”. Each perspective may have its own “we”.
Correlation between perspective and interest
RPM reveals a strong correlation between perspective and interest. A given perspective, if it either aids or promises to aid the expansion of a population, will probably be valued by agents in the population. Those agents have an interest in the perspective as I will argue here.But let us start with our initial population. Recall the condition in Figure 1. This population of critters enjoyed a comfortable standard of living but at that stage no critter could perceive the RP which fed them, so no effort to find neighboring, similar RPs could have started. There were none among them whose wellbeing relied upon the perspective which developed later in our story. So obviously, at this preliminary stage, there were not any critters whom we might characterize as having an interest in the perspective not yet developed.
But after that perspective of the resource pattern was developed and used (as illustrated in Figure 3), then a much larger population was made possible by use of that perspective. It follows that the lives of most of that larger population depend upon that new perspective. Without the perspective their lives would not exist. We humans looking into the model from our perspective can reasonably conclude that those critters have an interest in the perspective. The perspective, having been developed and used to advantage, correlates with an interest among the critters.
A nuance may catch our attention. Consider the specialization paradigm which we described above (the first of the two avenues for development of a new perspective). Under specialization some critters may come to have or to control large amounts of saved resources, and those powerful critters might be expected to risk some of their savings in research which might yield a profitable new perspective. Research may be funded that is. So we may expect funding to give rise to another specialty, being researchers, critters willing and able to perform research for compensation. Thus researchers naturally have an interest in the search for new perspectives which provides their livelihood. So, in exploring this nuance we discover the effect of a new and not-yet-described RP. The funding of research, overseen by some powerful critters, becomes an RP for other critters, and this creates a distinctive inner niche where life – if following appropriate rules – may thrive.
Conclusion
Stimulated by “externality”, a concept familiar in economics, and by the question of whether externalities can be spotted in RPM, we have been sidetracked into a discussion of perspective. It has become clear, I hope, that an externality in RPM can be spotted by a human modeler educated in economics. But there is no way the primitive critters of the tabletop model can hope to “see” or “know about” an externality. We modelers know what calculating powers we have given to the critters, so we can know with considerable confidence what the critters cannot know.We have lingered over the challenge presented by development of perspective. RPM lays this problem open to us, on a workbench as it were. In the example presented, we see how a population of critters could grow if the critters can develop a broader perspective. We see programs of research through which we may seek a deeper understanding of our own individual and group psychology, and these programs are given greater, realistic focus by RPM.
We humans often seem to blame other humans for being wrong on some point; we wish we could shout some truth into our opposites. But what we do not always see is that our opposites have a different perspective, a different interest. They are seeing a different RP or opportunity for organization.
Friday, May 22, 2015
RPM makes obvious what some earlier writers have overlooked.
This post is stimulated by my reading of "The new entropy law and the economic process", by Alan Raine, John Foster, and Jason Potts, Ecological Complexity 3 (2006) 354-360. I refer to this as Raine's paper.
Raine's paper overlaps in significant ways with the Resource-Patterns Model of Life (RPM) which is the subject of this blog. But RPM adds important ideas which I do not see in the scope of Raine's paper. Here I copy from Raine's paper (page 355):
My response: RPM makes it entirely obvious.
Biological and socioeconomic systems can expand to use increasing amounts of resources where those resources exist in large patterns in the environment. These patterns are:
Please do not consider this to be criticism of Raine's paper. That paper has contributed to my knowledge. I write to call attention to the additional contribution of RPM. I thank Jason Potts for calling my attention to Raine's (and Jason's) paper.
Raine's paper overlaps in significant ways with the Resource-Patterns Model of Life (RPM) which is the subject of this blog. But RPM adds important ideas which I do not see in the scope of Raine's paper. Here I copy from Raine's paper (page 355):
A basic puzzle remains: why do biological and socioeconomic systems expand their structure (and populations) with the result that they use increasing amounts of free energy (and associated materials)? Generally, they expand to whatever energetic limits exist and, as Malthus failed to perceive, economic self-organization can keep on extending these limits. The notions that biological populations will expand if they can, and that economic ‘progress’ will continue are taken for granted, but on reflection, it is not entirely obvious why. [emphasis added]
My response: RPM makes it entirely obvious.
Biological and socioeconomic systems can expand to use increasing amounts of resources where those resources exist in large patterns in the environment. These patterns are:
- larger than can be exploited by individual organisms (or organizations) at an earlier-and-smaller level of development, but
- not too large to be exploited by groups of organisms (or organizations) when those groups discover and employ rules of behavior which produce beneficial cooperation among the individual organisms (or organizations).
Please do not consider this to be criticism of Raine's paper. That paper has contributed to my knowledge. I write to call attention to the additional contribution of RPM. I thank Jason Potts for calling my attention to Raine's (and Jason's) paper.
Monday, May 18, 2015
Platform for Development of Language
The Resource-Patterns Model of Life (RPM) provides a delimiting framework within which many questions of social science may be pursued. This morning I came across a paragraph telling about tension in the field of linguistics. This tension would be eased, it seems to me, among linguists who had embraced RPM, because RPM shows perhaps the principal problem which evolving lifeforms need to overcome through language.
Now here is that paragraph, by John Searle (1972).
Now these critters can live comfortably and reproduce a lot more, if and when they can learn some simple rules and conform their behavior, during working hours at least, to those rules. These critters need a crude language. What will it be?
In one of my first exercises with computerized agent-based learning, I modeled two agents who needed language. It went like this. The first agent learned of some condition in the world (a condition set randomly from a small positive number of conditions), but had no power of physical action. The first agent could only display a symbol visible to the second agent (a symbol selected from among a small positive number of symbols). The second agent could not sense the condition experienced by the first agent, and had no way of knowing (at first) what the first agent's symbol might mean. The second agent could act effectively in the agents' world, and each act available to the second agent would produce a result which was either positive or negative for both agents — depending upon whether the act of the second agent correlated correctly with the condition observed by the first agent. Both agents had memory of prior conditions, that is memory of what they had sensed and done and whether their acts had succeeded or failed. In each cycle of the model the agents got a new chance to try again.
Obviously, my agents eventually stumbled upon a correlation between a symbol and a desirable action. They learned a language. Thereafter they did naught but thrive. I thought I had shown something important. Although I allow it is obvious that the agents' linguistic success had to happen; I had designed it to happen.
So I have this experience with modeling primitive language formation, and I see the situation of the critters who need a language which is much more advanced than the first language just described, but which is still much simpler than our human natural language. I hope to proceed with attempting to model that groping for language among the critters, some day. In my eager thinking, this modeling relates to the tension in linguistics described above by John Searle.
If we imagine some Darwinian evolution acting in our model, the critters may be descended from ancestors who had lived in environments which rewarded signaling between cooperating agents. The signaling pertains to finding and harvesting from patterns of resources in the environment. Does not that begin to frame an answer to the question of what capacities of language may be inborn in a critter?
*"Chomsky's Revolution in Linguistics" by John Searle, © 1972 The New York Review of Books, found in On Noam Chomsky: Critical Essays, edited by Gilbert Harman, 1982, U. Mass. Press, ISBN 0870233556, page 19.
Now here is that paragraph, by John Searle (1972).
The most spectacular conclusion about the nature of the human mind that Chomsky derives from his work in linguistics is that his results vindicate the claims of the seventeenth-century rationalist philosophers, Descartes, Leibniz, and others, that there are innate ideas in the mind. The rationalists claim that human beings have knowledge that is not derived from experience but is prior to all experience and determines the form of the knowledge that can be gained from experience. The empiricist tradition by contrast, from Locke down to contemporary behaviorist learning theorists, has tended to treat the mind as tabula rasa, containing no knowledge prior to experience and placing no constraints on the forms of possible knowledge, except that they must be derived from experience by such mechanisms as the association of ideas or the habitual connection of stimulus and response. For empiricists all knowledge comes from experience, for rationalists some knowledge is implanted innately and prior to experience. In his bluntest moods, Chomsky claims to have refuted the empiricists and vindicated the rationalists.*Recall the initial condition on the tabletop after a large resource pattern has become available to critters. Heretofore the critters have been barely surviving as hunter-gatherers by searching everywhere incessantly.
 |
| The population of critters can multiply if the critters find rules of cooperation. |
Now these critters can live comfortably and reproduce a lot more, if and when they can learn some simple rules and conform their behavior, during working hours at least, to those rules. These critters need a crude language. What will it be?
In one of my first exercises with computerized agent-based learning, I modeled two agents who needed language. It went like this. The first agent learned of some condition in the world (a condition set randomly from a small positive number of conditions), but had no power of physical action. The first agent could only display a symbol visible to the second agent (a symbol selected from among a small positive number of symbols). The second agent could not sense the condition experienced by the first agent, and had no way of knowing (at first) what the first agent's symbol might mean. The second agent could act effectively in the agents' world, and each act available to the second agent would produce a result which was either positive or negative for both agents — depending upon whether the act of the second agent correlated correctly with the condition observed by the first agent. Both agents had memory of prior conditions, that is memory of what they had sensed and done and whether their acts had succeeded or failed. In each cycle of the model the agents got a new chance to try again.
Obviously, my agents eventually stumbled upon a correlation between a symbol and a desirable action. They learned a language. Thereafter they did naught but thrive. I thought I had shown something important. Although I allow it is obvious that the agents' linguistic success had to happen; I had designed it to happen.
So I have this experience with modeling primitive language formation, and I see the situation of the critters who need a language which is much more advanced than the first language just described, but which is still much simpler than our human natural language. I hope to proceed with attempting to model that groping for language among the critters, some day. In my eager thinking, this modeling relates to the tension in linguistics described above by John Searle.
If we imagine some Darwinian evolution acting in our model, the critters may be descended from ancestors who had lived in environments which rewarded signaling between cooperating agents. The signaling pertains to finding and harvesting from patterns of resources in the environment. Does not that begin to frame an answer to the question of what capacities of language may be inborn in a critter?
*"Chomsky's Revolution in Linguistics" by John Searle, © 1972 The New York Review of Books, found in On Noam Chomsky: Critical Essays, edited by Gilbert Harman, 1982, U. Mass. Press, ISBN 0870233556, page 19.
Wednesday, April 29, 2015
"Entropy" has different meanings
I share the following quote because it expresses something I hope to get my head around.
The measure of the amount of information which communication theory provides … is called entropy. If we want to understand this entropy of communication theory, it is best first to clear our minds of any ideas associated with the entropy of physics. Once we understand entropy as it is used in communication theory thoroughly, there is no harm in trying to relate it to the entropy of physics, but the literature indicates that some workers have never recovered from the confusion engendered by an early admixture of ideas concerning the entropies of physics and communication theory. [Italics in the original.]from: John R. Pierce, An Introduction to Information Theory: Symbols, Signals and Noise, 2nd revised edition, 1980, Dover Publications, page 80.
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