James P. Crutchfield - Is Anything Ever New? Considering Emergence (1999)

James Crutchfield is a veteran of the Santa Fe institute and director of UC's Complexity Sciences Center. From an information-theoretic standpoint, he here considers the optimal approach for an observer to explain the behaviours emerging from a black-box natural system. The solution put forward here is to attempt to built a machine which generates a corresponding output, minimising:

• the model size, and
• the error margin between our model and the observed data

From the complexity of this model (which here takes the form of an FSA-like ε-machine), we can deduce the structural complexity of the underlying natural system. These ideas form the core of the computational mechanics field, behind which lie Crutchfield, Shalizi and others.

It's an incredibly dense yet engaging paper, itself a reduction of The Calculi of Emergence (pdf), probably the most essential piece of work on quantifying emergence and effective complexity.

Robert Laughlin and David Pines - The Theory of Everything (1999)

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In which Laughlin and Pines continue the many-body physics discussion of Anderson, arguing that the "more is different" tenet holds so strongly in certain contexts that the idea of a reductive Theory Of Everything is effectively impossible.

The objective of a Theory Of Everything is a set of base-level equations which underpin all activity in the universe, from which the phenomena of higher levels can be constructed. Evidently, this is quickly computationally unfeasible for (say) a biosystem. Laughlin and Pines' position is stronger than this, however, citing principles such as Laughlin's fractional quantum Hall effect as transcendent "higher organizing principles", in that:

"..they would continue to be true and lead to exact results even if the Theory of Everything were changed. Thus the existence of these effects is profoundly important, for it shows us that for at least some fundamental things in nature the Theory of Everything is irrelevant."

The effects in question relate to their notion of a "quantum protectorate", key to the FQHE, in which the effects of macroscopic principles eclipse those on the microscopic level, to the point that the latter becomes negligible. The consequence is that strongly emergent laws do exist, structurally independent of the underlying equations that govern single-particle interactions.

My flimsy understanding of theoretical physics forbids me from attempting any further analysis of this paper. Interested readers can find it here; Laughlin's A Different Universe expands his ideas into book form, most notably the view that emergent processes should be the central focus of theoretical physics.

P.W. Anderson - More Is Different (1972)

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Progressing into the second part of the collection, we now switch perspectives to those from the scientific community. Nobel laureate PW Anderson writes from his work within condensed matter physics; this paper addresses the ways in which structures of increasing size and complexity begin to shift further from the symmetry we expect from particle physics, giving rise to quasi-stable far-from-equilibrium states which escape the pull of the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

It's a nice insight into how complexity emerges at the most fundamental level, filling out the justifications demanded by those who claim that special sciences of level X are "nothing but" an applied form of level Y: it's clear that new (constructive) causal explanations are needed as we shift from the point of view of electrodynamic equilibrium to the information-processing work of biology. This doesn't detract from the acceptance that level X can still be ontologically reduced to level Y.

Amusingly, I read this in the wake of skimming the "doctoral" dissertation of creationist Kent Hovind (which is quite a piece of work; it begins with the word "Hello", for god's sake). Hovind's opening argument, based on a fallacious extrapolation of thermodynamics, is essentially as follows: anything in the universe, if left to itself, will tend towards maximal entropy and go to shit (and thus, "This clearly indicates a a Creator"). Yes, this is true for a closed system, but it's hardly true that the aquatic wetlabs which first spawned life on earth were isolated from the immense energy of the sun or the environment beyond.

I am smitten with this audiovisual piece by Michael Dzjaparidze. Based upon the Schrödinger equation — a central tenet of quantum mechanics, which describes the behaviour as a particle as its wavefunction equivalent — it is thoroughly conceptually faithful as well as aesthetically impressive.

Dzjaparidze states:

The curves obtained from the equation are for instance used as envelopes for the different sound layers but also as probability functions which determine duration, (quantized) pitch, density etc. of the grains and the additive 'waves'.

Most of the sounds for this piece are a combination of granular and additive synthesis so as to be conceptually in accordance with the wave-particle duality of all matter and radiation. The frequencies for all sounds are based on the Lyman series.

The author has also produced a number of studies in pure FM synthesis, whose organic richness is a refreshing escape from the notoriously harsh digital overtones of the typical FM sound.

An absence from technology turned out to be less amenable to hacking than hoped; even with the presence of an iPhone, concocting half-baked hacks to twitpic from a Dorset field was less appealing in practice than in theory. Apologies, therefore, for the break in hackpact programming. Service hereby resumes.

Today's hack is a small Processing sketch to simulate objects moving around on a spring-like arc around a central point. It's a simple implementation of Hooke's law plus trigonometry, but creates pleasantly natural-looking dynamics which are useful, in my case, to spin camera angles around a point with some damping.

This is more rapid work-in-progress for PEAL, appearing at the Sonic Arts Expo in Leeds very shortly.