IDers should understand the true purport of these ideas: God didn't do it. LOL

This is why I find Carlson & Doyle so interesting"”Even if "God didn't do it," a designer can.

I have a post I think may be relevant to your discussion at UD. It touches on emergent phenomena and ways it can be defined formally.

Irreducible Complexity in Mathematics, Physics and Biology.

The heretical word "irreducibly complex" is even hinted to describe emergence.

If hierarchical reductionism didn't work, neither would modern microprocessors.

Most machines behave reductionistically because they are deterministic rather than probabalistic. They are not self-organizing.

Holons are self-organizing wholes composed of smaller parts (which are themselves holons). Their behavior is probabilistic and not deterministic.

We do not have machines which self-assemble, which repair themselves from a wide variety of damage, or which reproduce. Reductionistic engineering is utterly incapable of building such a machine.

Interesting stuff. If you haven't read Robert Laughlin's book "A Different Universe" you might want to.

What Laughlin points out is that complex systems can incorporate both extreme sensitivity and extreme insenstivity to pertubations. These types of systems are found in engineering all the time, particularly in electronics. He uses an example of guidance systems where the amplifiers exhibit a collective instability that can create powerful amplification (by responding to small changes) but where they also include stabilizing systems that keep a plane from overcompensating.

The same can be found in biological systems. The transcription of DNA into messenger RNA is an example of collective instability that is very sensitive to pertubations whereas the translation of RNA into protein is absolutlely stable. From an intracellular and ecological standpoint this makes perfect sense. With its remarkable sensitivity, transcription can be sensitive to both the situation within the cell as well as environmental factors. But the response to that sensitivity (RNA to protein) must be absolutely insensitive.

The trick is balancing and integrating these two extremes. In engineering this is a great challenge. Is it any wonder that systems engineers stand in awe of cellular design?

Sometimes they call themselves "hierarchical reductionists" because they say that even though in theory things could be explained in terms of physical properties, it is much easier and time-effective and efficient to use "higher-level" explanations for more complex interactions. This whole view seems to me like the neighbor kid who says he has a rare baseball card in mint condition in his house but he can't show it to you because he doesn't want to ruin it's mint condition. In other words, the person who holds this view says that reductionism works but he can't show you that it works, you just have to take his word for it.

macht,

As a fellow engineer, I'm a bit surprised to hear you make this argument. I don't know what kind of engineering you do, but in my field of integrated circuit design this kind of hierarchical reductionism is indispensable, well-grounded, and not at all controversial. Every IC designer is a hierarchical reductionist.

An integrated circuit can be viewed at many hierarchical levels:

As
1. A collection of atoms.
2. Interconnected regions of doped silicon.
3. Transistors.
4. Switches (idealized, simplified transistors).
4. Gates.
5. Multiple levels of modules, where a module is composed of a combination of lower-level modules.

Noone would dream of running functional simulations at the transistor level for a design containing 100 million transistors. The simulations would run so slowly that the design would be obsolete before it could be put into production.

Instead, engineers simulate functionality at the higher, more abstract levels of the hierarchy, where it is practical, but they also guarantee that each level of the hierarchy faithfully represents the next lower level. If this is done correctly, you end up building a chip that is ultimately nothing but a collection of interconnected doped regions of silicon; yet this rat's nest of interconnected regions provably gives rise to correct behavior at the highest levels of the hierarchy.

If hierarchical reductionism didn't work, neither would modern microprocessors.

We'll show you the baseball card. All you had to do was ask.

1. A high-level description of the design's functionality is written in a behavioral modeling language.

2. The high-level description is converted to an equivalent set of interconnected gates. The equivalence between the two levels can be proved formally as well as by simulating the two models side-by-side and comparing results.

3. Each gate model is shown to be equivalent to a set of switches interconnected in a particular way.

4. Each switch is shown to be equivalent to a transistor operating under certain conditions.

5. Each transistor model is shown to be an accurate representation of the behavior of a number of doped silicon regions arranged and interconnected in a certain pattern.

6. The modeled behavior of the doped silicon regions is verified by solid-state physics.

This chain of verification, through hierarchical reductionism, is what allows us to build circuits composed of hundreds of millions of transistors — and actually get them to work. Doing all of this work at the lowest level of the hierarchy would be wasteful and ultimately futile.

Hierarchical reductionism is thus not a cop-out at all, but rather an enormously useful tool for understanding and/or designing systems which are too complicated at their lowest levels to be comprehended by mere human intelligence.

Sunny Y. Auyung (A total babe!) wrote
http://www.creatingtechnology....

See the Pubs

http://www.creatingtechnology....

And

Carlson J.M., Doyle J., Highly optimized tolerance: A mechanism for power laws in designed systems.
PHYSICAL REVIEW E 60 (2): 1412-1427 Part A, AUG 1999.

We introduce a mechanism for generating power law distributions, referred to as highly optimized tolerance (HOT), which is motivated by biological organisms and advanced engineering technologies. Our focus is on systems which are optimized, either through natural selection or engineering design, to provide robust performance despite uncertain environments. We suggest that power laws in these systems are due to tradeoffs between yield, cost of resources, and tolerance to risks. These tradeoffs lead to highly optimized designs that allow for occasional large events. We investigate the mechanism in the context of percolation and sand pile models in order to emphasize the sharp contrasts between HOT and self-organized criticality (SOC), which has been widely suggested as the origin for power laws in complex systems. Like SOC, HOT produces power laws. However, compared to SOC, HOT states exist for densities which are higher than the critical density, and the power laws are not restricted to special values of the density. The characteristic features of HOT systems include: (1) high efficiency, performance, and robustness to designed-for uncertainties; (2) hypersensitivity to design flaws and unanticipated perturbations; (3) nongeneric, specialized, structured configurations; and (4) power laws. The first three of these are in contrast to the traditional hallmarks of criticality, and are obtained by simply adding the element of design to percolation and sand pile models, which completely changes their characteristics.

http://www.cs.sfu.ca/research/...

Fascinating subject to me and I wonder, macht, that it doesn't attract more attention. (Or maybe everyone's thinking about it?)

I have long attempted to get IDers interested in HOT… To no avail.

One problem that I see for ID (or the Dembski-brand of ID) is that like "complexity theory," it reduces complexity to a (statistical) law and robs complexity of all its wonder! Complexity is either generated randomly or an "act of God," and their all the same to me.

"Complexity theory" has a real problem–it hasn't been investigating complex systems at all!

Properly, complexity theory and its application, science, is the domain of biologists and… designers.

They have the science "down pat" (contrary to what Talbott seems to imply). What they don't have is a theory.

I think that science is in a real quandary now with the recognition that emergent properties that cannot be deduced from fundamental properties. If that cannot be done, doesn't science start looking more like engineering. For instance, the rigidity in metals is not predicted or explained by the properties of single atoms or molecules. It is an emergent property. Now in engineering the modulus of elasticity can be measured for a metal and then the dynamics of rigidity characterized. But that is more of a description than explanation. For many scientists the inability, in principal, to discover something fundamental that explains later complexity would be devastating.

And according to some scientists things are even worse. Emergentists can be divided into a least two groups. The epistemological emergentists just claim that everything ensues from the bottom up, but that its too complex for humans to deal with all the variables. On the other hand, there are ontological emergentists like Nobel physicist Robert Laughlin who claim that in fact even fundamental properties may be emergent. Here's a quote from "A Different Universe":

The myth of collective behavior following from the law is ,as a practical matter, exactly backward. Law instead follows from collective behavior, as do things that flow from it, such as logic and mathematics.

Paul Davies is saying something very similar with regard to mathematics.

Here's another very intriguing statement from Laughlin talking about Einstein's relativity being emergent:

It would mean that the fabric of space-time was not simply the stage on which life played out but an organizational phenomenon, and that there might be something beyond. [My emphasis].

Now I don't think that Laughlin is talking here about a designer of life, but many ID proponents would agree that there is "something beyond" that is at least partly responsible for how life plays out.

Mathematics is both a mix of reductionistic truths and non-reductionistic truths. Both have validity, but neither encompases the most complete description. I would expect the same of physics given that physics is presumed to be inherently mathematical.