All I have is the procedural description of its function. It is almost as if such a description, seeing themselves in our myths, is an activity that tends towards finding the generality embedded in things. I cannot grow with them, but I can relate to them in ways that highlight how they grow.
My roots tremble, I wonder what comes next? — fdrake
Love the story, although I said "I should notify Baden, fdrake has finally snapped. We've been expecting that." Then I was relieved to find you back on more familiar fdrake ground in your second post. — T Clark
A concern - at first I thought it was a quibble, but I convinced myself it's not. A billion years is just orders of magnitude too long. The other processes you describe - soil formation, jungle growth - operate on a scale of tens or hundreds of years. You left out other, very significant processes that also operate on much shorter time scales, e.g. rainfall cycles, ice ages, soil depletion, climate change, human encroachment, continental uplift, the movement of continents, asteroid strikes. In the context of a billion years, all of these except maybe the last three would be first order Markovian effects. — T Clark
My next post in the thread will actually look at two examples in a different context of how 'extinction events' like that can get internalised as a sensitivity, or treated as an indifference to functioning. — fdrake
Even if this is a bit off topic, I noticed the same thing as T Clark. A volcanoe that has erupted one billion years ago would have people arguing that it's not a volcano at all, only that it perhaps formed as a volcanic eruption. One billion years ago we were where? The proterozoic era with only life emerging. In between there's I think one ice age that had the World completely under ice. Hence there wouldn't be the interaction between the environment and the volcano.Yes! A billion years is way too long to be accurate to the dynamics of the system, but 'a billion years' is simultaneously a cultural signifier of 'a time so long ago it's irrelevant' and 'a very long time', it also suggests the sheer time scales dynamical relations can persist in. — fdrake
Plant growth requires the formation of soil. — fdrake
Markov models in a molecular evolutionary context. The relevant thing to look for in here is how expanding the 'state space' (available information which is incorporated to process dynamics) can reduce the dependence on the unobserved past (unavailable information that is implicitly unincorporated — fdrake
I don't know what FDrake is up to here. One should really not rain on other people's parades unnecessarily, spoiling the floats, filling the tubas with water, getting the horses all wet... — Bitter Crank
A stochastic process is called "first order Markovian" if the behaviour (in terms of probability) of the a time point depends only on its immediately precedent time point. — fdrake
BTW, the raining on people's parade was self criticism. — Bitter Crank
What would such a forgetting entail? The jungle will still grow verdant on the volcanic soils, it will not care where they came from, only how they are there right now. But the prospect of an eruption is too far in the future and in the past to imagine or remember it. Less poetically, the soil formation process and the jungle following it over space will not care about the eruption itself, it will care about how its effects impregnate the present with its potential; where the nutrients and plants are, we shall cast our our net and grow. — fdrake
I live my life in widening circles
that reach out across the world.
I may not complete this last one
but I give myself to it.
I circle around God, around the primordial tower.
I’ve been circling for thousands of years
and I still don’t know: am I a falcon,
a storm, or a great song?
At the moment the Eternal Return is revealed to me, I cease to be myself hic et nunc and am susceptible to becoming innumerable others, knowing that I shall forget this revelation once I am outside the memory of myself; this forgetting forms the object of my present willing; for such a forgetting would
amount to a memory outside my own limits: and my present consciousness will be established only in the forgetting of my other possible identities.
What is this memory? It is the necessary circular movement to which I abandon myself, fleeing myself from myself. If I now admit to this willing - and, by willing it necessarily, I will have re-willed it - I will simply have made my consciousness conform to this circular movement: Were I to identify myself with the Circle, I would never emerge from this representation as myself; in fact, already I am no longer in the moment when the abrupt revelation of the Eternal Return reached me; for this revelation to have a meaning, I would have to lose consciousness of myself, and the circular movement of the return would have to be merged with my unconscious, until the movement brings me back to the moment when the necessity of passing through the entire series of my possibilities was revealed to me. All that remains, then, is for me to re-will myself, no longer as the outcome of these prior possibilities, no longer as one realization among thousands, but as a fortuitous moment whose very fortuity implies the necessity of the integral return of the whole series. But to re-will oneself as a fortuitous moment.
Probability doesn't tell us anything about unique events. It just tells us what happens when a procedure is repeated unless we're talking about logical possibility and just assigning weight some how. — frank
Or, more to the point, plants make/produce/form soil. It isn't a fast process. In mountainous areas, it may take a century for the plants to produce an inch of soil. It's faster on well watered, temperate plains. Tropical jungles produce soil, but the high volume of rain and drainage wash most of the decayed plant matter out. Regular falls of volcanic dust would definitely help. — Bitter Crank
The hows and whys of how evolution acts on the mean height of canopying trees fall away in the sigma algebra of random tree-done events; and this is a certain 'forgetting' in itself, of nature deciding what is relevant. The 'forgetting' of the influence of unique events through aggregation is exactly what random variables do. — fdrake
Hey, fdrake, is this the direction you wanted this conversation to go? I think you need to give us more guidance. I thought you were going to come back and wave your magic data wand. — T Clark
Whether a discrete event is determinative or irrelevant would depend on whether the event closed down species' ability to reproduce. My guess is that the resident plant life in some places has been changed by dramatic geological events (like volcanos). If species were unique to the vicinity of the volcanic blast or meteorite strike, they might become instantly extinct. On the other hand, conifers, for instance, wouldn't have become extinct because of Mt. St. HelensNM because there are millions of acres of conifers nearby to re-seed the altered slopes of the volcano, and any wrecked territory. Some plants have very limited ranges and volcanism could wipe them out. — Bitter Crank
If the volcano seems irrelevant to what's happening, that's your focus, not nature. — frank
I like the story a lot. Two other things I've read recently come to mind (I guess you could say in the sense of a deleuzian series of resonance) — csalisbury
Processes can be sensitive to others; seed germination times had a sensitivity to long periods of bad weather, those seeds that could survive the bad weather gained a comparative advantage later by being able to recolonise the area with less competition. — fdrake
If you want to have it that Nature possesses a rudimentary form of thought, I'd be excited to hear why you look at it that way — frank
Speaking figuratively, the seed has 'learned' something of the expected dynamics of its own internal processes given environmental variables. — fdrake
When canopy tree offspring have a reproductive advantage when they grow taller, this is already an aggregation on the level of the population. The unique events which cause the tree bodies to grow taller matter far less for the evolutionary pressures than the increase in height relative to other trees; to canopy higher. Evolution acts to increase tree canopying height in general, that it acts on all scales; molecular, developmental etc; to do this is is exactly a 'blurring of the details' of unique events. Evolution does not care for the how here, only a constrained how that satisfies the comparative advantage in the context of ecological constraints.
The more general feature here is that random variables allow you to make a summary characteristic of indeterminate processes in a way that depends on the events which happened (what makes the random variable realise) but does not care how they happened so long as they realise into the specific summary value. The hows and whys of how evolution acts on the mean height of canopying trees fall away in the sigma algebra of random tree-done events; and this is a certain 'forgetting' in itself, of nature deciding what is relevant. The 'forgetting' of the influence of unique events through aggregation is exactly what random variables do. — fdrake
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