Reading Thoughts and Notes
Emergence, Holland
Cellular automata, complex emergent behavior from simple rules / high information that propagates
Regular: recognizable and recurring phenomenon
Extract regularities from irrelevance (but as fitness increases, the fundamental selection pressure on low level rules decreases so we get more irrelevance? Think nematode genome)
Models make predictions, and are more simplified than the real system
Elementary particles are mechanisms for mediating interactions
Shouldn’t material be fundamental, not actions? Actions need to involve materials, act on them, so the material must precede, no?
Mechanisms for recombining elementary blocks changes emergent phenomena greatly; different instruction sets for a box of legos changes outcome greatly
Patterns of interaction persist despite overturn of material constituents
Hierarchical subassemblies form assemblies which form subassemblies, but what defines the “layer” of observation?
“Mechanisms” col of Table 1 combines actor with actions, behavior with actor and calls both mechanisms, then “system” is sort of what emerges from adding these particular behaviors with their particular actors. Thus would an organelle not be an organelle if it still had a membrane and transport but also had some other actor for those than enzymes?
Anticipate consequences without living them through models

A World of Becoming, Connolly
Reasons for phil ignoring bio
Reductionism of biology == ??
Hard to understand without stem background
Cultural theory wanted own perspective??
Protecting divinity philosophy / theology from clash w science
Ways that complexity theory affects humanities? Or that the universe is unstable and unpredictable?
1) Pre-adaptation: adaptation to former environment, then starts to serve different function after further evolution or environmental changes
Cultural pre-adaptations like treaty of versailles adapted to serve as wwII enabler??
Liberal doctrine for same sex marriage
Fear of death into religions
Can only know pre-adaptations after the fact?? Why can’t we predict??
2) Poincare resonance: uncertainties caused by stable systems pushed into disequilibrium
Resonance machine = ??
Improbabilities can have outsized impacts on future, so because you would never predict it (though you could with more info??) the future is opaque
3) Heterogeneous systems connect with eachother unpredictably
Asteroid could collide in space time w humanity / no system is really closed
Time is fundamental and directional in order to explain heterogeneity of the world??
Agency
Augustinian: Culture is a product of will divided against itself and aid or lack thereof of divinity
Does not work with mechanical universe as will arises, emerges, from determinate smaller – make “anthropic exception”
Rethink “nature w/out agency, humanity w some agency, God w all agency”
Linearity / irreversibility of time does not guarantee linear progression of agency
Power grid assemblage – human and nonhuman parts that emerge distinctive function
Agency??
Thinks consciousness is a human domain?
Monkeys w ‘cultural agency’ before linguistic
Complex agency requires agent interaction and understanding, self-consciousness, environmental ‘mastery’, creativity – new behaviors / actions
Creativity through ‘inter-agental concatenations that exceed the previous reach of either party’
Capitalism has agency then??
‘The idea of the devil needs to be translated into an appreciation of the multiple modes of agency in the world’
Nietzsche, will to power, we continually strive to further master our environment, extend the self (if it can be defined by that which we manipulate??)
There are no objects, only degrees of agency, w humans initially at the top
Individualism: parts are parts and put together make more parts
Holism: parts are useless until the entirety is constructed
William james plurality
No sharp cuts of experience, just useful for action, but also there is no perfect whole that every dynamic added up can describe???? “Loose connections”???
Experience needs anticipation, lives on the edge of next and now(what then of meditation?)
Experience ‘Temporally interfolded elements’; perception needs past to anticipate future in the present, but this incorporation must be unconscious or else experience collapses??
“And it cannot be divided neatly into that part which belongs to a subject and that which belongs to the world”
No “inert facts”, world interprets too – but the world emerges from small high information, static, rules (physics) from which emerges dynamics it seems?
Connectionism: draw up some categories, fields, boxes in which things reside, then draw connections between them and directions of influence (he’s a graph theorist really) eg capitalism is influenced by agriculture and many others, not a closed system w/ externalities but rather an open system that should “be alert to changes in other force-fields”
World immanent to itself – there are foundations of the universe not given by divinity but not necessarily within realm of scientific questioning
“a world of multiple, interacting open systems of di√erent viscosity morphing at different speeds” like a fluid dynamics simulation
So we can meditate according to connolly “dwell in a suspended state periodically to render experience more sensitive”
A type of faith that shifts with new evidence (science is religion)

Summary
A World of Becoming
This chapter introduces the reader to the application of the science and math of complexity theory on the social sciences, in particular often with respect to an analysis of capitalism and other complex, “open” macroscopic systems governing our world’s dynamics. The broadness of this only further escalates. He examines ways of viewing the world, from the extremes of viewing systems as closed, undisturbed parts which function independently of eachother (a view he dubs ‘individualism’) to ‘holism’, where the parts only function once put together in a holistic view. Connolly also touches on the idea that the world is simply not knowable – that often seemingly predictable dynamics result in unprecedented and unforecasted results. For example, phenomena invented for cracking wartime encryptions manifested into personal entertainment and consumption machines situated in the pockets of half the world. Thus, although his arguments that the world inevitably interacts, and that no defined system is truly closed, he does not believe that knowing all these parts makes a whole, and that ultimately there are still unpredictable dynamics.

Compelling Points
Continuous, though not necessarily smooth, degrees of agency throughout hierarchy of forms of being
The world is perhaps not fully predictable or knowable
Study the vast interplay of these open systems to try to assemble a better one

Implications
I think one story of the world is a great arm’s race between centralized control and distributed control and the becoming and unbecoming of each. This grand narrative has remade itself in religion, in politics, in computer science, in our own evolution and cognitive substrate.
In World of Becoming, Connolly discusses his ideas of agency of which every level of complexity possesses varying degrees. In this view, there is

Let us go to the skin. Let us zoom in on the pores, closer, the hair follicles, closer, the dust mites, closer, the bacteria bristling against the pincers of the dust mite situated on the precipice of a hair follicle crater, closer still, the phospholipid membrane of the skin cells which repel the hydrophobic membrane of the bacteria upon? it, and here, closer still, the molecules of double bonded oxygen, molecules of triple bonded nitrogen, carbons sandwiched between oxygens, swirling, all of which themselves composed of, mostly, nothing, and here, at this border, standing on the phospholipid membrane in this swirling nothingness, is the self. This distinctive border recreates itself in familiar cascades of electrical storms illuminating the dark between of synaptic clefts, synaptic cliffs, when we imagine the self. It is, of course a lie and a truth. It is here; we can see it. Above there are swirling, uncontrolled, stochastic gases colliding with little discernible pattern. Below, within, there is unimaginably ordered chaos. Massive protein mouths, volcanos in the crust of the membrane we stand on, open and close as crooked water molecules pour within. Their mouths open to a wondrous din – machinery of ribosomes nearby pop incessantly as amino acids click to tRNA; creak insatiably as their creations fold themselves into new forms of being. Within, we see it, the self. “Life”. Under foot, its patterns of vibration tell long stories of becoming, eons of formation and dissolution that materialized in the complex rhythms below, within. Outside, we see disorder. But we do not see the self. We do not see the adrenal glad which rests above the kidneys which dispatched the massive, imminent, immanent epinephrine molecule, hurtling toward the other hemisphere of this cell on which we stand and to be absorbed upon impact by the gaping adrenergic mouth. We do not see the towering thick beanstalks of axons permeating the adrenal glands, themselves –
Lookout! Hydroxide incoming!
No we don’t see it, but we see we are a part. And we can of course, zoom out. We redraw our perspective yet again. We find the boundary of agency, which is characterized by the

Questions from class:
How are the lines of hierarchy drawn, of system and part
Take all points of space, and map their causal power on all other points in space, then find ones with highest causal power
Take all points of space and map information transfer between other point, for that one point keep going until
Within what space? Keep increasing space until information ???
Can assembly, complexity, answer what is the self? Does the self have to originate from similar places??
Let’s say assembly tells us what life is. Then do we find the border between life and “nonlife” below a certain threshold and call that not the self? That does not tell us the location of the self within the body, and it says that the water within our body without which we would not be ourselves, is not a part of our self…
Recognizing the self has fitness advantages. Distinguishing that the electricity in my brain can tell my toes what to do with high accuracy under all conditions, my cell phone what to do with high accuracy under some, and the air what to do only when it is direct contact with my skin, this is the self and know these distinctions is a very basic, crucial portion of survival. So the self is constructed from the causal power of the neurons in the brain. It is a representation of all the state action state2 pairs between the brain and the rest of the points in the world, dropping off sharply when the uncertainty of state2 is too high. So then does a cell have a self? Does it have a mapping or representation of some locus of control to the other points in the world? Yes, for example if lactose is present (state) and gene is on (action, though is this part necessary?) then this protein is made and the rest of the cell is in this state (other states in all the points of of space for which self is fairly certain)
This asserts that a self should know / predict the states of pretty much everything, all dynamics, within itself. How does abstraction fit into this picture? I do not know the exact states of all my cells, yet my cells make up my self. Do you have to define a granularity of self s.t. My predictions need only hold on some physical scale? I have a good understanding of what my nose should sense at any given moment – this is a fairly microscopic scale prediction of which molecules should be bound to olfactory receptors, yet I cannot predict which molecules should be bound to my liver to any degree of certainty. However, my subconscious can?? This too, part of my self, and part of my loci of control. If you had a self that could make even more certain fine-grain, molecular predictions of itself, would this be even more self-ish? Meditation may agree.