Analogies and Interference

When I try to explain something to others, (and to myself as well) I make extensive use of images and analogies. There are a few reasons for taking this approach, with my lack of real mathematical expertice as a front-runner. But using analogies has some serious drawbacks: the listener might be tempted to understand the analogy, but miss the underlying abstract concept being described. Similarly I do run into issues where my mental model looks like it fully captures a concept, but put to stress it turns out to be just an analogy.

One important analogy I've been working with lately is the concept of interference, specifically the interaction between (sound) waves which leads to new, different patterns. These patterns can't be fully described from the originating waves themselves individually. For a simple pattern of two constant waves, the mathematics describing the higher level patterns is easy enough. But as soon there are many more changing waves, the mathematical description of the patterns quickly becomes too complex. The resulting patterns quickly become chaos.

But precisely these interferences lead to music. Although it's theoretically possible to describe a piece of music in a complete mathematical fashion, only using the underlying soundwaves as the input, there is no musician who uses such tools. (Computers did slightly alter this statement, I know) No, for musicians a language on a more abstract level has been defined to describe music, based on specific notes, octaves, etc.

In some, hard to understand manner, the interferences between separate entities (waves) has lead to higher level structure (music). I've been using this analogy to describe the concept of emergence of complex structures from separate entities (or agents). To me it works to explain how complexity can exist. This leads me to using statements like: "The cell is the result of interference between molecules, which are nothing more then an interference between atoms".

I'm not sure yet if this analogy usage is actually helping in explaining (and qualitative proving) certain ideas about the world outside. As I'm not equiped to mathematically proof these statements and ideas, this is probably the best approach available to me. If any of you has found a better way, please tell me:)

(alien) life?

Two weeks ago, several (Nasa) scientists made an important discovery: life is more complex then we thought. Sounds like a no-brainer to me. Issue is that these scientists used a very narrow definition of the concept "life". In their experience life only exists in the form of specific biological processes and elements, which combined lead to all forms of life as we currently see around us. This approach to defining life has a severe drawback: it only captures biological life-forms, and as they discovered, only a subset of those as well.

It seems to me that a broader definition of the concept of life is required. But where to start?
(An interesting read and good overview of the many issues is given by Joseph Morales over at http://baharna.com/philos/life.htm )
To me "life" is the emergent behavior of complex natural interactions. If these interactions lead to recognizable entities, which evolve, learn and grow, then I would consider them alive. This is a statement with a lot of words that need further explination, definition and nuances. A large part of the posts in this blog will be dedicated to these concepts, focussing on these building blocks of life.

But one consequence of my approach to the concept of "life" is that I consider a much larger set of phenomena part of the "living" category. For example, as much as a ant-colony as a whole is alive, I would also consider a religion as a living organism. The traffic patterns around cities also "lead a life of their own". Many other examples can be found.

From this perspective the question of the existence of extraterrestrial life is also interesting: Isn't it interesting that we consider our sun alive, compared to old "dead-stars"? We are using the "life"-jargon for stars and galaxies, perhaps more correctly then we're giving ourselves credits for. Those are already existing, proven, extraterrestrial life-forms, we just need to acknowledge them as such.

Welcome

Through this blog I'll like to share some of my thoughts on the relation between feedback, complexity, emergence, robustness, learning, life, and philosophy. Infused around it are thoughts, discussions, and descriptions of the world of my books.

Being an engineer, I'll take an technical approach to describing, modeling and talking about these subjects. The usual disclaimers apply, both to the relation of this blog with my employment and to the usability, offensiveness and possible private nature of some of the posts.

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