Date: Wed, 12 Feb 2003 01:21:38 -0800 From: Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com> To: Dave Hayes <dave@jetcafe.org> Cc: freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Modelling complexity (was: Re: matthew dillon) Message-ID: <3E4A1222.6383A1C3@mindspring.com> References: <200302120844.h1C8iP141535@hokkshideh2.jetcafe.org>
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Dave Hayes wrote: > > I understood you perfectly. > > Then why did you paraphrase what I said incorrectly? I paraphrased the *consequences* of what you said, were less than 100% of us to adopt your world view. We all have to choose to play the game by your rules, or the consequences of adopting your rules is a system which does not remain in steady state. You hypothesize that all behaviour is tolerable, and should be tolerated (if only by ignoring it). Why don't you take your simple system, and posit a strange attractor of a willful disrupter, and see if your system maintains itself in some acceptable range +/- some small value, independent of the amount of force driving the occilations? I'd like to see your graphs, and your equations, demonstrating that the resulting damped, driven harmonic oscillator doesn't end up overdriven, with no sigma to multiply damping. > > To fail to agree with you is not always a result of a failure to > > understand you. > > Granted. However, some of your disagreement does rest in the inability > (or unwillingness) to understand. > > BTW, you cannot prove that you understood what I said and neither > can I. We might agree that you understand, but the possibility > would still exist that you do not. And how is that relevent? If you want to be a Solipsist, then you aren't really going to be useful to anyone else, because your going to act like everyone else is a figment of your imagination anyway. Where is *our* utility in *you* acting like that? What's our economic incentive for listening to or continuing to consent to interact with you? > > It is not about permission, it is about possibility, for any given > > situation. > > Maybe -I'm- not understanding -you-. ;) Isn't one of your positions > based on permission to behave in certain manners? No. Permission is an artifact of authority, and no authority can be absolute for an indefinite period. It's not a metastable state. > > By designing the situation, you design the constraints, and therefore > > you limit the possibilities for behaviour. > > Now you know why I don't take most of your analogies seriously. =) I have no idea. Is it just that you can't follow the mathematics behind emergent properties of chaotic systems, or is it just that you disagree that the chaotic systems can be constrained in such a way as to have a particular desirable set of emergent properties? > > You are talking about "rules". "Rules" are meaningless, in that > > compliance with "rules" is always voluntary upon the complying > > person, unless the rules constitute a subset of natural law. > > > > For example, one can break the "rule" that you are not allowed to > > spit on the sidewalk, because the laws of physics do not prohibit > > the act. But a "rule" which states "objects must not fall up, in > > a gravitational field" may not be disobeyed, even by the most > > willful child: that "rule" is enforced by the laws of physics. > > I think you are using the world "rule" inaccurately here. Perhaps > a "rule" should be used to denote man made barriers, and a "law" > should be used to denote environmental ones? No. You are mistaking my use of the word "law" for the common use of the word "rule", as in "some arbitrary value whose compliance is enforced by a larger society". A "law" is "the way things are". For example, it is a "law" on the Internet that you can only send packets with certain protocol number values (IP, IPv6, ICMP, etc.). This is "the law", because no matter how hard you try to send packets with protocol numbers other than that, they will not get from point A to point B over an arbitrary segment of the Internet reliably, because the core routers will simply discard, not forward, them. That's "just the way things work": it is a law. Like gravity. > >> Not if you find some hackable server on another ISP and set up your > >> email spam machine there. =) > > > > What part of "all" didn't you understand? > > The part that says that you can't mold software to do mostly whatever > you want to, in spite of "constraints" which are imposed by humans. This is a nonsequitur. Did you not mean to use the phrase "due to" instead of "in spite of" or the word "can" instead of "can't", or both? In any case, there are two interpretations of my statement that would attempt to take a relativist stance on my use of the word "all". If you meant one of those, I suggest you fire up your favorite search engine and search for the following phrase: "von Neumann complete" I'll give you a hint: it has to do with information theory, and the fact that you are wrong XOR John von Neumann is wrong... and I know which way I'd personally bet on that one. 8-). -- Terry To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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