January 14, 2016

Reproducibility in Dynamic Systems

What does it mean that something is easily reproducible?

It speaks to the stability of the processes and constraints on which the dynamic system in question relies on for its existence.

Reproducibility or recreation (or whichever other term you may want to use for the creation of something already existent, by itself or its scaffolded/nested position) could possibly be used as a measure of something's existential stability. For example, the survival of a language depends on many individuals speaking the language, a shared geographical space wherein the language is spoken as well as a social context/culture (or perhaps rather, all together a system of mutual support and constraint).

Uttering the words of a language you have grown up in requires little energy (whereas the history of that word involves massive amounts of energy, the word is essentially a concentrated unit of historical energy expenditure -and it is from this history that it has gained its efficiency [or meaning, or ...]). That you are able to say some specific word with ease and it is understood clearly, speaks to the underlying processes' incredible stability (from which that word has sprung from and is maintained by). Or imagine DNA.

The links between ease of reproducibility, the large amount of work produced to enable its creation as well as the amount of stability over time in its underlying processes -explains the history and maintenance of any given phenomenon.

January 4, 2016

The ontological status of affordances...

...only exist when they are being actualised and/or are being realised. It is not that they do not exist when not, there always exists the information of -but until this information is picked up, they practically do not exist.
Information, independently exists. It exists for so long as there is a source to "illuminate" it: The sun shines, and other stars shine, and only if the source of photons cease to exist, shall the visual information that the visual systems of life forms do not have even the possibility of detecting it.
While information is not "what we see", affordances are (often based on the middle-hand of medium-sized objects if our visual system is unaided). I guess you could say that objects are made up of information, but I'd be hard pressed to agree to this articulation in a strict scientific sense, it'll do to make the point clear however. Affordances, being relationships between (for this example's sake) properties and objects of the environment and the capabilities and effectivities of a human, seem to be able to not exist.
If we are in a room with chairs in it, and we leave the room, the chairs in the room still offer the affordance of sitting if we were to observe the room through a camera (the realisation part). If no life form is in the room to detect the information of said chairs affording sitting, then the affordance is what I'd like to call passive (or let's say, doesn't practically exist). It's ontological status is pending a life form able to perceive the information of and act in accordance with, the affordance.

Think of it as an establishment of any kind of relationship. Before one has been perceived/realised by anyone, there is a flux of information to be discovered and there is a non-relationship. Once discovered however, that relationship most probably cannot be undone. It reminds me of the very dramatic difference between not being able to not perceive the relationship when it has been established once, compared to when it is either just perceived or when we have yet to discover what type of relation we have/can have to it.
Is this problematic? I don't think so. On the level of information, it must still exist. On the level of affordances however, it cannot. This is not problematic since nothing is going in and out of existence, but, the relationship between environment and actor necessarily incorporates both and is temporarily suspended -it is inactive, or passive. Innovation and creativity is sometimes defined as the discovery of new ways to relate to existent (or new) objects, properties, life forms, ourselves, etc...
Is this important? Perhaps not. However, ontology is important in a general sense. I think it necessitates at least a mention in a blog post, in a galaxy, far, far away.

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