3 ms·
I suspect the science isn't quite 'seeking the individual'. Rather than trying to find fancier ways to define the lines, are there lines at all? Perhaps fuzzy
by sago 6y ago
I suspect the science isn't quite 'seeking the individual'.
Rather than trying to find fancier ways to define the lines, are there lines at all? Perhaps fuzzy grouping opens up more powerful models. What began as co-evolutionary theory is way more continuous.
I was at SFI in the 90s, before the big push mentioned in this article. I remember a conversation about it, discussing perhaps there isn't such a thing as an individual. It wasn't even said as if radical (e.g., by that point the Selfish Gene (1976) and The Extended Phenotype (1982) were well established, and way behind any 'cutting edge'). So I suspect it isn't quite 'finding the individual' that the article author keeps focussing on. But more 'models that abandon individuality'.
I generally suspect that a problem with large swathes of human thought are discretising continuous reality. That's definitely a core SFI view too. Or at least was in the 90s.
- janeroe 6y ago> I remember a conversation about it, discussing perhaps there isn't such a thing as an individual. Sounds pretty Buddhistic.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Konohamaru 6y ago"Fuzzy X theory" are all crank theories. Why? Because they're trying to find a solution to the sorites paradox, and if it were as simple as some new system/mathematics/framework, then there would no longer be a sorites paradox and philosophers would say "whew, job done!" and cite the inventor alongside Aquinas or Aristotle as the three greatest philosophers who ever lived. But despite the hundreds of fuzzy groupings/fuzzy set theory/whatever, that never happened, has it?
- sago 6y agoWeird. > Because they're trying to find a solution to the sorites paradox, Exactly and explicitly the opposite! Why assume that dynamics are crisp if 'individual' isn't?
- Konohamaru 6y agoIf someone has a fuzzy logic that definitively answers questions such as "what is the boundary between an individual and a system?" then he or she did the same thing Newton and Leibniz did with Xeno's paradoxes, and he or she would go down in history as both the greatest philosopher and a mathematician equal to Leibniz. But that doesn't happen to these guys and gals who work on fuzzy logic, does it?
- sago 6y ago> If someone has a fuzzy logic that definitively answers questions such as "what is the boundary between an individual and a system?" Ah, I see. That was our disconnect. That's the opposite of the idea. The logic is just to abandon a discrete boundary (physics does this in many cases). I think my use of 'fuzzy' might have sparked a different debate. Not one I find convincing (if Science then Philosophy, not Philosophy ∴ not Science ? um...) but I don't much rate 'fuzzy logic' for mathematical reasons. That's another rabbit hole! Thanks for clarifying.