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Nick Gall's Weblog
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Saturday, January 10, 2004 |
The Heterogeneous Self.Self is hetro across time (diachronic?): old self, current self, future self.
Self is hetro in time (synchronic?): hetro components compose the self.
Both forms of hetro entail competition and cooperation.
7:09:52 AM 
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Why so few references to "Coordinated Change"?There are only about 1,880 Google hits for the query:
("coordinating change" OR "coordinated change" OR "to coordinate change")
This is surprisingly low, given how central I think this issue is to evolution (See Structure = Coordinated Heterogeneous Change?). Is there a different phrase for the same concept? E.g., Cooperative change?
Later, I used the plural, "changes," in the query:
("coordinating changes" OR "coordinated changes" OR "to coordinate changes")
And this resulted in about 6,250 hits. Still fewer than I would have expected. Also, "coordinated change" refers to the concept, while "coordinated changes" often refers to specific examples.
I did discover that "coordinated change" is often associated with attempt to refute Darwin's theory of evolution. It is part of the arguments around "irreducible complexity". Such critiques associate complexity of a change with the number of coordinated changes that would be needed to effect that change.
This reinforces my emerging understanding of complexity as a relative measure -- relative to a specific process, e.g., designing, building, using, repairing, changing -- not an absolute measure of an entity. Thus, "a software application is complex" is actually a non-sequitur (or at best an incomplete statement). The app may be simple to use, simple to install, and simple to update, but complex to design, complex to build, and complex to integrate. Furthermore, what makes these processes complex is the degree of coordination required. Thus, to manage complexity, we must modularize coordination.
6:25:33 AM
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Friday, January 09, 2004 |
Structure = Coordinated Heterogeneous Change?You never know where Google will take you.
I was checking SiteMeter to see who had hit my blog lately (and, more importantly, why they had hit my blog), and I saw that someone had hit my blog while using Google to search for "dissipative structures and surfactant." It turns out that my blog discusses each concept, but in different entries. Since I was curious as to any possible connection that I hadn't made before, I did the same Google search.
I didn't find anything that I understood well enough to see any definitive connection, but I did discover two fascinating things in looking.
I read this as saying that order (stability) can arise spontaneously from disorder (chaos) through "coherence." Random fluctuations cancel one another out. Coherent fluctuations amplify one another into a stable "dissipative structure." This reminded me of a passage in "Entanglement" by Amir D. Aczel (a gift from my brother-in-law Clement Wang) about how laser light is coherent light and how a Bose-Einstein condensate is an ensemble of atoms "in a coherent state, just like laser light." (p. 53). This suggests how stasis (stability, structure, fixed points) and change are a duality: statis is coherent change.
Now what does "coherent" mean in all this (e.g., "coherently amplified")? Well certainly, "coherent" means "coordinated," "synchronized," etc. Aczel uses the term "in phase" when describing coherent (laser) light. So coherent suggests a time dimension to the coordination, i.e., coherence is coordinated in time, synchronized. Note also that laser light and Bose-Einstein condensate are both formed from homogeneous coherent fluctuations (e.g., photons in the case of laser). So perhaps matter is composed of coherent heterogeneous fluctuations? For example, a hydrogen atom is composed of two heterogeneous fluctuations (a proton and an electron) that coordinate to form an atom. To extend the example, two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom coordinate to form a water molecule. This molecule is itself a fluctuation.
Food for further thought.
3:34:35 PM
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Tuesday, January 06, 2004 |
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