2 responses to “John Collier – Cohesion, Complexity, Organization, and Emergence”
Thanks for this lecture, Dirk. Unfortunately, it was getting most interesting there at the end! Autopoietic objects withdraw, but Collier’s objects interact. (I’ve been reading Collier for over 10 years, but this was the first time I’d seen him live 😉 Another interesting point: Collier seemed to imply that DNA was deterministic, but even Pagliucci in the Daniel Dennett, Lawrence Krauss, and Massimo Pagliucci on “Science, Religion, and Philosophy” discussion (from FOOTNOTES TO PLATO) admitted that genetics (not to mention immunology) is becoming ‘non-computable’ (by an empirically-controlled program) in the same ways that Collier was describing. The Plea for Prometheus can take on many shades of meaning.
hey Mark, gotta throw folks an anarchist bone here and there, I’ll have to check out that bit of Massimo, as I’m sure you know there are a lot of current projects in the new realms of organic-physics working on calculating exactly these sorts of things but frankly the math is well beyond me and I’ve yet to grasp what people mean by “withdraw” (not for lack of asking!) if it doesn’t mean something literally like retreat and or just being beyond our grasp so I’m not much of guide, or sparring-partner, along these lines I’m afraid
synthetic zerØ 
Thanks for this lecture, Dirk. Unfortunately, it was getting most interesting there at the end! Autopoietic objects withdraw, but Collier’s objects interact. (I’ve been reading Collier for over 10 years, but this was the first time I’d seen him live 😉 Another interesting point: Collier seemed to imply that DNA was deterministic, but even Pagliucci in the Daniel Dennett, Lawrence Krauss, and Massimo Pagliucci on “Science, Religion, and Philosophy” discussion (from FOOTNOTES TO PLATO) admitted that genetics (not to mention immunology) is becoming ‘non-computable’ (by an empirically-controlled program) in the same ways that Collier was describing. The Plea for Prometheus can take on many shades of meaning.
hey Mark, gotta throw folks an anarchist bone here and there, I’ll have to check out that bit of Massimo, as I’m sure you know there are a lot of current projects in the new realms of organic-physics working on calculating exactly these sorts of things but frankly the math is well beyond me and I’ve yet to grasp what people mean by “withdraw” (not for lack of asking!) if it doesn’t mean something literally like retreat and or just being beyond our grasp so I’m not much of guide, or sparring-partner, along these lines I’m afraid