Volcanic Soils (rants on systems ontology)
Imagine a dense jungle with an active volcano in the middle. The volcano erupts once every billion years like clockwork. The jungle is huge, far larger than any possible destructive effects of an eruption.
Plant growth requires the formation of soil. Soil is maintained through the rot of plant growth and the degradation of rocks and such through erosion and weathering. Soil maintains its abilities to grow plants upon it insofar as its nutrients are not exhausted quicker than they are put back in by rot (and erosion and weathering of rocks).
Soils around volcanos are typically very nutrient dense and hold water very well, this is because the fine mesh of well digested basalt rock is easy to absorb from due to its material constitution (basalt) and its arrangement (fine powder). It is a good soil base, an excellent nutrient resource for the process of plant growth.
But the volcano will occasionally kill the plants nearby it due to its eruption. The surrounding jungle however will adapt, and slowly grow into the nutrient dense soils again by linking its process of soil formation and spatial radiation of plant growth to the nearby sources of rich available resources provided by the eruptions.
If we consider the jungle-volcano as a system, the volcano is both a life giver, a creator of plenty, and the avenging wrath of expanding too far. It is a wound that plenty forms around. But let us forget about the volcano as the jungle will some time in that billion years.
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.
So let us, we happy plants, forget the rage of the volcano. We will grow and disperse seeds and have them carried in the shit of those that live in us, we will dance decay and growth with the soil until we tell each other to stop; but we never could resist the beat once we share it. Let us instead turn inwards and look at each other. My double sexed brothers and sisters growing with me towards the light inspire my offspring to grow towards more; dear light sounds the whistle and the race to the top begins.
I hear our cousins of the moss have similar myths for why they grow so fast and over each other. But I speak too abstractly, such processes are our guiding myths and culture; in the moment we grow and disperse because that is what we do with our lives, we all grow together and carve ourselves into the spaces our growing creates. But we do not know what we grow towards, only feel how we grow out from each other. It seems the knowledge of our community's past and future is scarcely available to us, we only have a kind of collective memory of it from how our bodies bend towards the light in the first place.
It is funny how we live on, telling our stories on our stage like green idiots, but what else could we do? We are not the greater themes that guide our movements, we are those movements. Our actions are embedded in a process of development that guides us in all ways by telling us the ways to be guided, but has nothing to do with what am I doing now, I am a self guiding process towards ends I am sensitive to (thank you, dear myth and dear light) but cannot comprehend.
A human visited once, took some centre from me and my friends, and some soil, and some moss. Before he left and wrote some words on a distant cousin. I wonder if he saw us in our growing, or whether he described us in our myths? I think it read:
It seems he saw us in the same way I described, not in the manner we live beneath descriptions. Things are funny that way, why I grow so tall and canopy so high is a description of my ancestors, but they do not watch my every move, even if their photoreceptors are mine. The reproductive system we have is probably older though; even if it is also a description of my ancestors. It is funny, seeing echoes of what guides me now in the past through the description of my contemporaries.
My roots tremble, I wonder what comes next?
(Edit: a short story on how living embedded in the time homogenous first order Markov chain of complete evolutionary processes feels, and how relevant the non-completeness of the description is to the dependence on events in the far past; breaking the first order condition. Which I will go over in another later post.)
More detailed description of how it actually works on volcanic islands. They're also embedded in the climate, and the seed dispersal through the animals is a rapid recoloniser of the volcanic soils.
Plant growth requires the formation of soil. Soil is maintained through the rot of plant growth and the degradation of rocks and such through erosion and weathering. Soil maintains its abilities to grow plants upon it insofar as its nutrients are not exhausted quicker than they are put back in by rot (and erosion and weathering of rocks).
Soils around volcanos are typically very nutrient dense and hold water very well, this is because the fine mesh of well digested basalt rock is easy to absorb from due to its material constitution (basalt) and its arrangement (fine powder). It is a good soil base, an excellent nutrient resource for the process of plant growth.
But the volcano will occasionally kill the plants nearby it due to its eruption. The surrounding jungle however will adapt, and slowly grow into the nutrient dense soils again by linking its process of soil formation and spatial radiation of plant growth to the nearby sources of rich available resources provided by the eruptions.
If we consider the jungle-volcano as a system, the volcano is both a life giver, a creator of plenty, and the avenging wrath of expanding too far. It is a wound that plenty forms around. But let us forget about the volcano as the jungle will some time in that billion years.
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.
So let us, we happy plants, forget the rage of the volcano. We will grow and disperse seeds and have them carried in the shit of those that live in us, we will dance decay and growth with the soil until we tell each other to stop; but we never could resist the beat once we share it. Let us instead turn inwards and look at each other. My double sexed brothers and sisters growing with me towards the light inspire my offspring to grow towards more; dear light sounds the whistle and the race to the top begins.
I hear our cousins of the moss have similar myths for why they grow so fast and over each other. But I speak too abstractly, such processes are our guiding myths and culture; in the moment we grow and disperse because that is what we do with our lives, we all grow together and carve ourselves into the spaces our growing creates. But we do not know what we grow towards, only feel how we grow out from each other. It seems the knowledge of our community's past and future is scarcely available to us, we only have a kind of collective memory of it from how our bodies bend towards the light in the first place.
It is funny how we live on, telling our stories on our stage like green idiots, but what else could we do? We are not the greater themes that guide our movements, we are those movements. Our actions are embedded in a process of development that guides us in all ways by telling us the ways to be guided, but has nothing to do with what am I doing now, I am a self guiding process towards ends I am sensitive to (thank you, dear myth and dear light) but cannot comprehend.
A human visited once, took some centre from me and my friends, and some soil, and some moss. Before he left and wrote some words on a distant cousin. I wonder if he saw us in our growing, or whether he described us in our myths? I think it read:
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.
It seems he saw us in the same way I described, not in the manner we live beneath descriptions. Things are funny that way, why I grow so tall and canopy so high is a description of my ancestors, but they do not watch my every move, even if their photoreceptors are mine. The reproductive system we have is probably older though; even if it is also a description of my ancestors. It is funny, seeing echoes of what guides me now in the past through the description of my contemporaries.
My roots tremble, I wonder what comes next?
(Edit: a short story on how living embedded in the time homogenous first order Markov chain of complete evolutionary processes feels, and how relevant the non-completeness of the description is to the dependence on events in the far past; breaking the first order condition. Which I will go over in another later post.)
More detailed description of how it actually works on volcanic islands. They're also embedded in the climate, and the seed dispersal through the animals is a rapid recoloniser of the volcanic soils.
Comments (48)
Random variables are summaries of stuff that happens; all the baby making in the world produces a total number of babies per year. The hows and whys of reproduction matter little to the summary "total number of babies", because the hows and ways are specified by an interaction with the population of babies.
If that seems abstract, it is because it is. More specifically, the context of the random variable "total number of babies" is specified implicitly there. We can ask "what are the total number of babies born in (category X)?". Above it is "the entire world now", but "(category X)" could be "In America", "per American state", "per continent", "between the years 1995 and 2013 globally".
Random variables can be generated through their interaction with different time points; each time point gets a set of "hows and whys" associated with it; these are the events that drive the formation of the summary. So if we take the sequence of years {1991,1992,1993}, there are random variables "total number of babies born in (category X) at (year)". This is called a (discrete time) stochastic process. An example then would be:
{Total number of babies born in America in 1991, total number of babies born in America in 1992, total number of babies born in America in 1993}.
There (category X) is "America" and year is 1991, 1992 or 1993.
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. Total births, there, would be first order Markovian if "The total number of babies born in 1993 depends only on the total number of babies born in 1992" (and the same for the other time points). Prosaically, this gets called "memorylessness"; (first order) Markovian processes are memoryless because they only care about what immediately precedes them. Like how on a pool table the balls don't care how they got to where they are, only where they are.
The billiard balls there are like the plants forgetting the volcano's rage in the above story; they can forget the eruption but not the soil nutrient distribution. The volcanic soil nutrient distribution mediates the relationship of the jungle growth to the volcano; once the relationship with the volcanic soil is set up, the volcano's rage is forgotten. Mathematically how this causal property gets represented is in terms of the connectivity of graphs, and the time points above are a sort of graph. How you can travel from one node to another in a graph determines the causal relationships of things indexed to each node.
Let [math]A[/math] be the random variable that maps a year to the total number of babies born in America on that year. Then the graph:
[math]A(1991)\rightarrow A(1992) \rightarrow A(1993)[/math]
has the first order Markov property. If you follow the arrows, you can only get to [math]A(1993)[/math] from [math]A(1991)[/math] through [math]A(1992)[/math]. History is forgotten in the process because it embeds all of its relevant information in every time step.
What this looks like in terms of the jungle-volcano system in the story above is:
[math]E(eruption)\rightarrow E(soil\hphantom{..}formation) \rightarrow E(jungle\hphantom{..}growth)[/math]
where E is a placeholder for "mean canopy cover of species X" or "total biomass of moss over area X" or some other indexed summary of the jungle, eruption or soil. EG:
volcanic ash composition and distribution -> soil nutrient composition and distribution -> growth rate of trees over space
You cannot 'access' the effects of the eruption in the past on the jungle growth except for the soil formation (this is not strictly true in general of course, and the one directional arrows between soil formation and jungle growth are actually reciprocally dependent from the perspective of the whole system). And the jungle's growth patterns really do 'forget' the eruption by only interfacing with the eruption's effects on soil nutrients.
The problem here is of course that considered from the perspective of the jungle-volcano system over time frames that the volcano will erupt in, soil formation and jungle growth are absolutely linked; the potential to accumulate plant biomass more rapidly in the direction of increasing soil nutrients is only there because of the volcano (in reality it can be more related to wide-spread seed dispersal mechanisms from animals' shit, but this won't change the increased fertility I am trying to highlight). From the view of the entire system we see an oscillating series of destruction and regeneration. From the view of the plants within it, they see the soil and how they interact with it!
The eruption as a "cause" of volcanic soil factors out, all that matters is the volcanic soil for the jungle in how it behaves. The jungle has learned not to care about the volcano because its eruption is usually off on most timescales, and when it is off there is great soil. When it is on, however, the plants nearby are destroyed.
There is no relevant information nature cannot access, nature unfolds according to its own sense of relevance, but its sub-processes learn to contextualise. Perhaps it could even be phrased like the origin of sub-process is a context of development. Like the canopy trees never become immune to lava. Causal histories get absorbed into intermediaries until they become relevant again.
From the framing device of the story, we know that the jungle growing near the volcano waits in bated breath; happy to grow how it does until it is destroyed by its own ignorance. The internalised processes of jungle growth in the jungle-volcano system do not anticipate this; at least insofar as they cannot interface with the destruction the volcano brings.
Some ways of growing, however, can interface with such destruction and profit from it (next post later). Citation describing first order 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). Citation for causal graphs. Citation for how intermediaries causally isolate nodes.
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.
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.
Or maybe that was part of your point, I'm not sure.
I definitely have snapped, fallen down a great big hole, I just hope my schizoid ranting invites others to jump in.
Quoting T Clark
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.
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.
I just presumed it was me who had gone nuts. :grin:
I look forward to your next post, as usual. Generally it takes till your third or fourth post in a thread before you leave me behind. I'll try to keep up.
The situation with more general causal networks is more complicated, you end up with so much shit mediating so much other shit 'direct cause' or 'causal isolation' is difficult to even conceptualise (even though the 'Markov Blanket' link in post 2 spells it out). What the 2 posts stress is that when you aggregate to the level of 'jungle' 'soil formation' 'volcano eruption'; 'volcano eruption' only interacts with jungle 'through' soil formation. If you check out the link in the first post, you'll see in reality there are other dependency chains and the volcano is not just 'on or off' in the island system; even when it's not erupting and forming the land, the heat it provides makes a microclimate, so you get volcano -> climate -> plant growth and volcano -> soil -> plant growth both being flows of the system. These have radically different operations; the climate is a constant feature of volcano interacting with sea, the land itself the volcano made is just kinda 'there' until the next eruption (so are the initial post-eruption nutrients).
The plants still won't be immune to lava though, they don't respond to lava in the way the land itself does; they respond to weather and soil; so it's likely the volcano's effects on their growth are mediated through other flows like those two examples. So they can't 'adjust' to the eruption in that way, they could never 'anticipate' it, even if seed dispersal from bird shit can rapidly recolonise the volcanic soils; what matters is that soil quality rather than the eruption which caused it.
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.
Better time range would be 100 000 years. And to really function as you said perhaps only 10 000 to few thousand years. That still is a time that people don't give a shit.
So long as you can get this bit from it, that's all I care about.
When throwing billions of years one has to be cautious:
Talking about extinction events the timespan is crucial. It's an interesting viewpoint when thinking about cause and effect. When viewing things in billions of years external factors outside Earth will be crucial:
It is my impression that @fdrake doesn't want us to get caught up in this issue. I think he has other fish to poach.
So, some volcanoes produce lots of airborne particles (which settles on the land, sometimes a long ways from the volcanic event, if it is powerful enough. Other volcanoes ooze magma which hardens and may take a long time to turn into soil. Dust good; magma, not so fast.
Central North America was given feet of volcanic dust whenever the Yellowstone supervolcano blew up. It's about due to blow up again. With any luck, it will blow up before November, 2020 while Donald Trump is visiting there to announce big cuts to the Department of the Interior. Maybe the Republican National Convention could be going on there when it blows. Get rid of the whole damned party.
Quoting fdrake
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.
Can you explain this further? What is the question at hand?
I thought you were more classically educated than that. The word "philosophy" comes from the Latin words "philos" meaning like, love, or precipitation and "sophy" meaning "study of" or "procession."
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.
But didn't you frame it in terms of causation? There's never loss of memory in terms of causation because that would entail fragmentation of the universe. A priori that can't happen.
Yes, but I felt guilty too.
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)
A poem by Rilke
As to the second, I don't know if this will be in any way intelligible outside the broader context of the book, but I'm reading Nietzsche & the Vicious Circle by Pierre Klossowki, a study of Nietzsche which tries to take the eternal return seriously (very very similar to Deleuze; the book is dedicated to him. Also, interestingly, Klossowski was an acquaintance of Rilke. his Mother was Rilke's final lover.)
His big thing is that, for Nietzsche, the eternal return was actually a sudden revelation he had, something he talked about with friends, but tried to cover over in his work by translating into concepts.
The above is I think trying to understand what 'amor fati' actually means. It's often taken as something 'live your best life, and as a heuristic for doing that, imagine youll have to live that life over and over forever.'
I think klossowki is saying something similar to what you're saying toward the end of the story - that it's really willing a dispersion of self into a bigger process, where your identity will be lost (until it is worked into another identity). The eternal return is something more like affirming this eventual dispersion. There's a lot more too it tho, and I'm still wrapping my brain around it. But the dynamic between forgetting and anamanesis is a huge part if it. ) I think - and this is where it gets quasi-mystical - part of what he's saying is something I've found echoed in a lot of diverse works ( there's a work of AP called 'surviving death' and also in various religious traditions: You survive the destruction if you lose the one thing you're overly concerned to save. The self is traded for an attunement which is beyond the self. Which is why a poem like 'sailing to byzantium' is a grand inversion by someone (Yeats) who should know better - but then consider the difference betweens yeats falcon/gyre in 'the second coming' and Rilke's in the poem above , and it makes sense. Yeats is scared while Rilke has a kind of resolute abandon to the circle *he* may not complete.
(this post brought to you by a carefully watched hypomania)
I agree with you entirely. If I rewrote my OP and changed the volcano's timescale to "once every 10000 years" like you suggested, would your criticisms cease? To me, the year choice mattered little for demonstrative purpose. If I was actually analysing the behaviour of a real ecosystem involving a volcano I would care more, but since I was writing a story where I took the perspective of a tree for a bout 2/3 of it I thought the issue of precisely how volcanos integrate into ecosystems didn't matter much, only that they can operate as on-off switches of eruption and have mediated causal relationships with the grander ecological dynamics they imbue with nutrients and so on.
Quoting frank
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.
Quoting Bitter Crank
In reality the two systems; soil formation, plant growth; are both coupled (direct link) and mediated (indirect links). The coupling occurs through the decay of organic matter and the behaviour of rain and decomposers - the processes of decay. They are also linked in the way you say directly to rain; even though the decomposers exploit the rain, and the trees exploit the decomposers exploiting the rain and so on.
Would you agree that the action of a volcano on such a long timescale, not long enough to be 'regular' for the plants, would be an irrelevance for the evolutionary dynamics of trees in such an ecosystem?
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.
Suppose one of the global extinction events had happened 130 million years ago, just as flowering plants were appearing. They might not have spread and diversified enough early in their history to survive a catastrophic environmental change. Other plants, we know, did survive, because have thrived on both sides of the catastrophic divide.
Horsetail plants (Equisetum) are around 300 million years old -- they are a "fossil species" but they aren't particularly rare. They are sometimes called "pot scrubbers" because they have a very high level of silica in their stems (they don't have what we would call leaves). There is enough silica in the plants to dull combine blades when the horsetail is in harvested fields. It's hard to eradicate. They are a dark green with segmented hollow stems. They reproduce by spores, and were once one of the dominant plants on earth.
Most plants from 300 million years ago are extinct -- they were unable to survive the several big environmental changes that occurred. Conifers (gymnosperms) are another plant that survived from the period of horsetails.
That seems to be trying to make evolution into a cause (of tree height). If we think of it that way, it's only one of many causes.
The earth was once completely covered in ice (possibly because of atmospheric CO2 evacuation due to forestation without decomposition). It's believed that volcanic activity poured CO2 into the atmosphere and rewarmed the earth's surface.
Life has dramatically transformed the earth's surface and atmosphere numerous times. Sometimes it's tiny cyanobacteria doing it, sometimes trees, and sometimes big-brained primates.
The interaction sometumes results in mass extinction, but as long as something survives, a new world with new possibilities opens up.
If the volcano seems irrelevant to what's happening, that's your focus, not nature.
Well there's a lot to work through, and I'm not exactly presenting things in a unified manner, so the discussion being scattered is to be expected.
Quoting Bitter Crank
I think this is exactly right. If an event closes down a population's ability to reproduce, it truly is an extinction event. But if, like in the jungle-volcano system, there's jungle outside the volcano's fury, it can incorporate the extinction event. If a population can survive such an extreme event as this, it can actually adapt to it in some ways. Whether the population can adapt to some change depends on:
(1) whether the change destroys the reproductive ability of the population.
(2) whether the population is embedded (or has within it) in a process that can adapt to the change.
In terms of (2) and actual plant recolonisation of volcanic soil post-eruption, this can be done through the longer range varieties of seed dispersal available to when animals can carry seeds in crap; if the long range seed dispersal is a part of the system already, it already has a recolonisation option for the volcanic soils. What might be 'selected for' here; what might be changed about the seed dispersal-seed formation sub-system; if it provides an comparative advantage of reproductive success, is the durability of seeds in animal guts, how long they can be stored before germinating, the efficiency of energy storage within them and so on; anything that makes it easier for the plants to recolonise the volcanic soils.
In considering the jungle-volcano system, it's still worthwhile to think about the jungle's development in terms of what it is sensitive to as well. If the volcano is not integrable like above, then the jungle works in a causally isolated manner from the volcano, and cares about the soil rather than the lava.
The next post I had in mind precisely talked about this kind of thing; germinating times of wild barley vs crop barley, wild barley germination times are much more variable than crop barley (crop barley had regular germination selected for 'artificially' so long as humans have been growing barley), wild barley seeds can lay dormant for quite a long time; over a year if memory serves. This allows them to wait out particularly snowy periods and recolonise after that in a less competitive environment; but the seeds do a 'mixed strategy'; most of them germinate quite quickly, some play the long game, some play the very long game. Will write more in a new post about this when I can be bothered writing up bits from a book I have.
Let's say I am a wheat plant and I'm growing on a hill. I disperse my seeds, they'll grow or not grow. What makes them grow or not grow is their ability to embed in soil in conditions suitable for their growth. It would be a big advantage here to have seeds that germinate based on environmental indicators of their success chance for growth.
And so that is what they do; seed germination is temperature dependent, sunlight dependent and weather dependent. There is no goldilocks "just right" here, a range of possibilities are available for germination. It would also be nice if seeds had a mode of low energy consumption they could enter if none of these conditions are met for a long while; and they do, this is called dormancy. It would be a waste for seeds to go dormant; to not germinate; without any possibility of germination, so dormancy ends due to environmental sensitivity too. So let's talk about dormancy.
Seeds have little models of their environment in them. Which is to say, they are sensitive to their environment in constrained ways. The environment is always 'on', always in some condition of temperature and sunlight and weather, the dormant seed needs just to attune to differences in their environment; the process by which seeds are enabled to attune to their environment is not done at the level of particular seeds, it is done at the level systems of environmental attunement. Dormancy is a response to the problem of troubling environmental variation, just as the germinating condition sensitivity of seeds is their way of finding out whether to grow from their environment.
Dormancy itself requires us to think what capacities of seed germination allow seeds to adapt to indicators of resource unavailability. Put another way; what process within the seeds can vary with quite long term patterns in the environment; like a snowy period, an ice age (a volcano like in the OP metaphor)? How can something vary with something that is usually 'off'? One way is germination time changing; but look what's being described here.
Germination time influences are composed of various complicated (in the sense of complex system) cellular, intercellular, molecular, organ-level and inter-organ level changes. Nevertheless the overall environmental sensitivity which is relevant here is their emergent property of germination time. But look at the nature of this emergent property; it is still within the seed. Perhaps a better way of putting it is that it is an output of the seed insofar as it germinates; an open site for an environmental feed forward that can become internalised as a feedback loop. This invites us to see the seed as an interacting process with itself and its environment.
Doubtlessly the question might be asked; how can it be an interacting process with itself? Which is a fair question, but ultimately rooted in a failure of perspective. The seed is how it functions as a seed. How does it function as a seed? Through the interaction of its internalised processes, and how those processes interact with its environment. The seed is a corpuscle of interacting sub processes, and emergent dynamics like 'germination time' are just as much a properties of seeds as the processual dynamics which lead to germination time.
The seed also internalises its environment through sensitivities to weather, temperature, sunlight; but it never internalises a whole, only a map constrained by what is available to it and what can be embedded in its processes. Human eyes may see the colour wheel, but our skin sees UV and IR. And we have learned to think of light as waves; then wavicles; then quantum clouds. And as an interaction between cultures, retinas and environments.
Artificial distinctions which do not reflect system dynamics can be made. Nevertheless, nature can learn to discriminate. 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.
Such sensitivities can be sites of contingent interaction; like wild wheat germination times varying. Or they can be(come) internalised system capacities; like dormancy.
Nature makes maps of itself along its interstices. Simplified projections to either side. Like the zebra striped with grass, the pepper moth black as smog, or the dance of the long tongue moth and its flower.
Quoting csalisbury
I've been listening to A Thousand Plateaus recently. I think this thread (and my recent posts) have been some interaction between that book, the recent (wonderful) The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli, and a lingering interest in causal networks that I use to procrastinate at work.
I don't feel comfortable talking about identities and the unconscious at this point; I suppose the vantage point of the thread is supposed to be a-subjective, indifferent to the functioning of human beings. But I won't lie and say I don't have opinions on the matter insofar as they relate here. I'll spell them out once I know better what they are.
The plants with the long germination time flourished after the bad weather because
1. There was sufficient CO2 in the air to allow them to grow at all
2. Because liquid water was available.
3. Because the earth's core makes an electromagnetic field that shields the planet from radiation
4. Because there isn't a band of asteroids where the earth is
5. Because the earth exists at all.
6. Because there are planets.
7. And so and so on.
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. If you want to say the universe is basically mechanical, then mechanical systems are always causally open. A mechanism can only artificially stand out from the grand monolith it's a part of.
The opposition between thought and being is not an opposition which matters for seeds. They do not have substrate independent concepts (red, justice, ...), recursive grammars, or the ability to imagine angels dancing on the head of a pin. In terms of germination; they are sensitive to environments' warmth, moisture content, light level. From the perspective of a plant, the distinction between thought and being might look more like the distinction between environmental indicator and environmental condition. Not that they have the faculties to conceptually aggregate their sensitivities like we can from the outside.
Though they may have functional sortals embedded in their germination patterns; temperature ranges which are amenable to growth, light levels amenable to growth, moisture levels amenable to growth; switches that say germinate or do not germinate, with fuzzy boundaries depending on the seed and the plant and all sorts of other things. The variation on the individual level manifests in a distribution of germination times on the originator plant level; of probabilities of germinating given (environmental condition) and on the plant community level.
What conceptual distinctions make sense for a system depends on the system; the distinction between thought and being is only something that can become relevant once thought occurs, not before it. The task here is to be able to think through a perspective from its context; to let our thought take its cues from the immanent structure of a system; and not to see distinctions - types of development - in it which are not there.
The distinction between thought and being is a device for outputting metaphysical doctrines; some collapse to one pole - idealism, vulgar materialism. Some insist upon dwelling within the dyad; the myriad correlationisms. Some make the split between thought and being and express us as moments of both; like Spinoza. But what is the dyad to a seed?
If we follow a system's dynamics with our thoughts, when does the distinction between thought and being become relevant to it? Only insofar as our capacity to make errors in description of it; an epistemological issue for us, not an ontic or ontological one for the system.
Ordering fake plants for the aquarium because algae is covering the living ones I've devolved back to an algae drifting on Max Richter and I can't be splayed open or eaten in this ancient sea. Skyscrapers aren't in me in dream form. Nothing is in me now. When I die, it's for all time.
In terms of seeds and dormancy; dormancy evolved upon the back of seed dispersal mechanisms and environmental sensitivity of seeds for their germinating conditions.
What this looks like in terms of seed populations and environmental conditions is:
[math]\begin{align}\text{Environment}\rightarrow \text{Seed}\end{align}[/math]
There are many directions of variation in an environment which are not relevant for the germinating behaviour of seeds. They have evolved a sensitivity to environmental conditions which give them comparative advantages in reproductive success; this is a form of self modelling of the [math]\begin{align}\text{Environment}\rightarrow \text{Seed}\end{align}[/math] interaction within the seed. It was of reproductive benefit for the reproductive system of wheat to internalise environmental constraints on the reproductive success of wheat plants! The insertion of this process into seeds then looks like this:
[math]\begin{align}\text{Environment}\rightarrow\text{Seed}(\text{Environment}\rightarrow \text{Seed})\end{align}[/math]
which dwells alongside the previous:
[math]\begin{align}\text{Environment}\rightarrow \text{Seed}\end{align}[/math]
Now the environment can interact with the seed's model of its environment as well as the seed as a whole. Speaking figuratively, the seed has 'learned' something of the expected dynamics of its own internal processes given environmental variables. The seeds have become responsive to environmental considerations as a result of interacting with their environment along a direction (really a space) of variation; the seed germinating process. And in particular, temperature, moisture, light, have become internally represented parameters of the seed indicator system because they were driving forces of seed reproductive success.
What was a feed forward; the environmental control on the reproductive success of seeds; has been internalised in a simplified form within the seeds as a feedback; a sensitivity of the seed's germination indicators to their environment.
In a response to @frank I wrote:
Quoting fdrake
The ability for seed germination processes to filter in what is relevant for them is precisely this kind of causal flow. Individual seeds have no choice in how their germinating process was generated; it cannot vary within seeds; but the germinating process (seeds' germinations) can vary within plants, and it can vary within populations of plants. In this regard, a seed need not have its germinating indicators tailored to its own needs to provide a reproductive advantage, all it needs is to be hooked into the reproductive success rates of the overall population of plants to garner this advantage.
In that regard, the
[math]\begin{align}\text{Seed}(\text{Environment}\rightarrow \text{Seed})\end{align}[/math]
indicator system is an aggregation over seeds embedded within particular seeds. What this would look like probabilistically is:
[math]P(\text{germination}|\text{environment})\rightarrow P(\text{germination}|\text{temperature, sunlight, moisture})P(\text{other})[/math]
how the germination indicators for the seed would interface here is as an approximation to:
[math]P(\text{germination}|\text{temperature, sunlight, moisture})[/math]
but it is also simultaneously a filter for environmental variables which are relevant but not seed sensitising; like our old volcano friend from the original post.
Edit: sketch until I describe conditional distributions and networks.
I have a feeling this whole story is a parable or a metaphor, but I can’t see what of. However seems far more germane to a biology forum than a philosophy forum.
Here's what I think is at stake here (let me know if it's different): are you trying to account for the autonomy of systems without at the same time trying to entirely disengage that system from it's wider environment? That is, trying to account for a relative autonomy of systems within (variable) threshold values that when crossed (under equally variable conditions), make it so that the environment now bears upon the system in question?
One thing your descriptions reminds me of - at a totally different scale of time and space - are vesicles, which are like little sheltered chambers formed by fat molecules, which provide something of a micro-environment within the bodies for different kind of chemical reactions that would not take place without them. And of course the coherence of a vesicle is itself dependant on it's own environmental factors, even as it shelters and separates what takes place inside from what takes place outside.
A different question: what's the enemy here? Are they accounts which can't provide such an account? And what do they look like? Trying to triangulate the motives here.
Any relationship to the ‘arche-fossil’? Am I getting warm?
Now there’s a clue.
I think I'm doing philosophy, though I don't think the topics and questions are particularly well posed yet. It's somewhere in the intersection of assemblage theory (philosophy);Deleuze, DeLanda (and Bryant); causal network theory (statistics) and cybernetics or system control theory (which I haven't included yet but will).
Quoting Wayfarer
No actually. Hasn't entered my head while writing this.
Quoting StreetlightX
I'm trying to see where a knot of ideas I've had leads.
So that's one thread in it. I think this is related to a previous discussion we had (in "I Am An Ecology") about how nature learns what to care about; and how that might be fleshed out in terms of the becoming-relevant of a parameter in a dynamical model. Here, temperature, moisture, sunlight vs the rest of the environment for the seed germination process. An 'answer' I'm striving towards here is that nature (can) learn what to care about by the development of subprocesses (say, dormancy) which have signalling structures (seed sensory capacities) that somehow embed the salient features of larger system dynamics (reproductive success rates based on environmental parameters) for the subsystem.
Another thread is about system history. I've been quite meticulous to only use the word 'time' internally to a system level description; like germinating times in wild barley. (Except when describing stochastic processes, but I did also phrase the indexical nature of time in them as an 'interaction' first!). All the other 'orders' in my posts here are actually system orders (like [math]\text{Volcano}\rightarrow\text{Soil}[/math]), directions of causal influence, rather than relations of temporal antecedence. To be sure, there are relationships of temporal antecedence in the posts, like the reproductive system of plants being older than the dormancy adaptation of their seeds, but these only occur when one system is a developmental trajectory of another.
These two questions are related. When a system learns to care about stuff, it learns not to care about other stuff that might be relevant. There's a mathematical feature of models in evolution (which holds for the deterministic dynamical systems that I'm aware of too) that the next time step depends only on the current one. Let that sink in and take it seriously. If our descriptions of reality are accurate and have an assumption in them that only the recent past matters, where does the relevance of all this bloody history come from? In the first post I referenced that you can 'restore' the next->current (Markov) dependence property of a model by making the state space of the model bigger; by including more relevant information. A corollary is, if you exclude relevant information, you allow more history. As Rovelli put it in the Order of Time "time is ignorance".
The last thread is one I've not written much about yet, it's in the details of the seed germination mechanism 'models' its environment. I plan to leverage:
Quoting fdrake
the idea of a sortal induced by germinating/not germinating on the individual plant level ("is this environment right for germination?" check thresholds...) to show one way one system (seed germination) can model another (environmental influences on reproductive success rates of seeds) through a discussion of the good regulator principle in cybernetics.
Since you've read The Order of Time, I'm trying to tease out a sense in which an approximation of one system by another might be immanent to their relation; and this approximation is a 'forgetting' of irrelevant parameters, which induces 'history' to their relationship through unobserved relevance. Another thing I'm being inspired by here is the brief discussion of wasps and orchids in A Thousand Plateaus; one being a 'map' of another.
Is that why you didn't really address my posts? Because they weren't in topic? I was wondering about that.
No no you helped me. The thought/being criticism is wack, though.
I didn't bring up thought/being. It was just about causality. Causality is a kind of relationship. We use the concept. We project the idea on events. Didn't Rovelli say something along the same lines?
Yes. I would love to be able to talk without the word "cause", but it is so convenient. I'm trying to think of causes systemically, as they are distributed over networks of interaction. I would prefer to do away with it all and just talk in terms of interactions and sensitivities, but if I did that everyone would recognise what I'm writing here as the schizoid scientific philosophy conspiracy theory it is rather than being enticed to follow me down a rabbit hole they might get stuck in too.
So, very soon this will morph into "volcano souls" and we'll be talking Xenu and hydrogen bombs. *Grabs popcorn*.
I don't really know. Someone who conceived of nature as one big undifferentiated glut, or one big self differentiating glut probably would be anathema here; if they refused the ability to take on the perspective of subsystems. I'm not certain I really have any direct targets here, since I seem to be out on such a limb. I'm carrying my general prejudices with me though; no to reductive notions of causality, yes to thinking in terms of becoming.
One part of the story conceives a seed as an evolutionary machine in an environment which affords seeds different reproductive successes based on its conditions. But the seed is in an entire environment, from the molecule to the climate, a complex system saturated with causal flows. The reproductive success rates of seeds benefit from internalising indicators of the flows that matter for their reproductive success; a seed becomes a map of its environment insofar as the environment interacts with the sensitivities of the seed.
But those sensitivities are distinguished somehow; how an environment interacts with a seed in terms of reproductive success is a constrained story told with few of the directions of variation available to the environment. These directions of variation embed themselves in the seed in an indicative form through modifying their reproductive success rates; a seed has attuned and will attune to what is relevant in its environment through the population level reproductive successes. It dances on the stage of its environment like a green idiot to music beyond its reckoning, but like us it learns to tell stories of its environment. So too for the bodies of their ancestors. Which parameters are relevant for them are those which are contained in the stories.
Relevance and irrelevance to reproductive success induces a sortal on the environment; a partition of its behaviour into that which counts-as relevant for the seed's reproductive success and that which does not. We can imagine an environment as a series of cycles; seasons, diurnal patterns of animals, weather in those seasons, rain crystallising in spider webs; some are sensitive to others, some are not. We should take from the seed example that something can only become relevant to the dynamics of a system when a causal flow can take something in the background as a given; a flow not in friction with something that varies sufficiently slowly with it. The subtended land soil forms over, those tectonic ingresses surrounded by water; is bedrock both literally and metaphorically for the cycles of the environment it subtends. It is not without change, just without change relative to the processes it supports. It is that relative changelessness which supports the ability for a system to separate itself from its environment; when a butterfly flaps its wings tornados move more than light.
The same can be said for the seed-bearing organismal sensitivity to light, moisture, temperature, it is a slower direction of variation relative to the sensory innovations of seeds to those sensitivities. When one follows a cladistic tree back in time, one sees not what is unchanging and essential, but what perturbations become reproduced; what contingencies are embedded in a flow of biomass reproduction that can become its moving (really becoming) parts. Essence is stability reified as given in a being; essence as a property forgets the becoming of its subtended sortal; it unasks the questions of what and how flows become partitioned into relevance and irrelevance for that being.
But when one treats not even essence as a given; and conceives it as a stability born from a partition of flows into relevant (learned sensitivity, destructive ignorance) and irrelevant (true causal isolation, statistical independence of flows) for a given flow; one therefore has to ask where in the flow does the capacity for such partition arise.
Relevance is a contour of interactive intensity; sensitivities are sites of intense interaction. Sensitivities are directions of variation which matter.
I quite like this vocabulary of 'inducing a sortal on the environment': I read it as a way (at a first approximation) of qualifying causality. So rather than the linear indifference of 'cause -> effect -> cause -> effect', this kind of approach forces a proper empiricism of bodies ('descend' from causes to bodies): not just 'what caused it?', but also: 'is that (kind of) body open to that cause?/Does it have that capacity to be so affected?". It 'materializes' cause, it makes of bodies not just a mere vector for causes - as though their particular constitution were irrelevant, and as though bodies were mere carriers or chora for causes - but as something worthy (necessary) of study in their own right. And this in turn allows one to think of 'natural discontinuities', in a way that challenges some approaches to nature as continuous and Whole - a nature full of gaps and forgetting, as it were.
I have in mind in particular some passages in Deleuze (and Guattari) on Markov chains, which they speak about in relation to order arising out of discontinuity, which this discussion has helped me make sense of. I quote a commentary: "For Deleuze, it is a question of thinking about chains in a way that does not rely on causal or final succession, or structure. Markov provides the concept for this kind of chain, which is distinct from both continuity and the absence of order.... Like Markov, Deleuze maintains a dimension of order that operates randomly through discontinuous junction that is comprised of divisions, and also determined sections. In Deleuze, the nature of order is, then, semi-random. Furthermore, the connected elements do not signify and are not homogeneous. In other words, they are nonsignifying and heterogeneous" (Anne Sauvagnargues, Deleuze and Art).
In Anti-Oedipus they explicitly link the Markov chain with the wasp and the orchid: "Each chain captures fragments of other chains from which it "extracts" a surplus value, just as the orchid code "attracts" the figure of a wasp : both phenomena demonstrate the surplus value of a code. It is an entire system of shuntings along certain tracks, and of selections by lot, that bring about partially dependent, aleatory phenomena bearing a close resemblance to a Markov chain". One way in which I think of this is that this elaboration of links between selection (of relevance), forgetting (of what is not relevant) and production (of the new) contains in it a whole 'naturalist' philosophy of nature, which I think is really cool.
This is also a gorgeous way of thinking about cladistics as well - it's the kind of thing that ought to be thought to every first year bio student, if not in high school bio class in general.
(1) A bunch of proteins in a certain shape.
(2) The shape has a cavity called an 'active site'.
(3) The shape only fits things resembling it closely.
What an active site does is temporarily bond to some chemical to induce a chemical reaction to it. The chemical can make the enzyme fit to it by how it interacts with it, but that doesn't matter much here. A canonical example in humans is amylase in saliva, which takes starches; long chain polymers of carbohydrates; and acts at the carbohydrate-carbohydrate bonds to produce smaller carbohydrates to start their digestion.
The amylase is just there in human saliva. The starch is just there in food. When we chew, the proximity of the starches in our food and the amylase induces the breakdown reaction.
Amylase has sensitivity to the presence of certain carbohydrate bonds; it then acts on them when they are close. The internal dynamics of the amylase molecule facilitate the breakdown of starches into smaller carbohydrates. From the point of view of digestion, what matters is the efficiency of the breakdown relative to evolutionary-ecological-amylase productive constraints rather than the specifics of the molecular structure of amylase. They are a machine which solves the initial problem of starch digestion.
When giving a description of the amylase-starch system, however, what matters is the active site-chemical interaction. From that you can consider the various molecular and geometric structures that an enzyme may have as directions of variation which may be selected for; the specifics blur out, what matters is the feed forward of simple carbohydrates from complex carbohydrates.
But what of amylases that are not currently omnomnoming their starch? They are sensitive and specific to the presence of starches. Consistent with the previous themes in this thread; causality is always an interactive process, sensitivities are open feed forwards, but now we have enzymatic specificity; they only work on one thing, their mechanism as enzymes is sensitive only to starch presence, they have a single developmental trajectory in terms of starch - the production of smaller carbohydrates. (though stuff sufficiently similar can block enzyme functioning!)
When a system has a sensitivity, the system can be controlled or influenced by manipulating that sensitivity. Like a bridge to torsion (so make structures which resist it), inside temperature of a fridge to outside temperature of the room (make thermometers and variable cooling mechanisms). A sensitivity is a direction of variation which is open to (active site) the presence of a feed forward (starch presence); and a feed forward is the name of a realised interaction from some external system.
If we consider amylase itself as a self maintaining process; of folded proteins with their movements constrained to a geometry induced by their intermolecular forces; the amylase part of the amylase-starch system, going down from the amylase starch interaction catalysis renders the amylase just a bearer of an active site. The proximity of amylase and starch is what initiates their interaction, but they both are sensitive to the presence of the other.
[math]\text{Amylase} \leftrightarrow \text{Starch}[/math] (enzymatic catalysis of starch breakdown)
[math]\text{Amylase} \leftarrow ... [/math] (presence of active site)
Prosaically, the wisdom in the phrase "3/4 of success is just showing up" is reflected in the causal structure of enzymes; when amylase shows up at the starch of the day, they do their job simply by proximity to it.
Maybe the only relation to the arche-fossil is that it tries to be a ground-clearing for thought like this. A demystification device, an impetus from idealism or correlationism to materialist thought.
Cashing out this idea of sensitivity could be done in a few ways. If we're looking at the molecular dynamics of a distribution of amylase in solution binding to starch molecules in solution, an appropriate model would probably look something like:
[math]P(\text{amylase enzyme}_i\text{ binds with }\text{starch molecule}_j) = \exp(-d(i,j)^2)[/math], the probability depends on how near the active site is to the appropriate bit of the starch molecule. It would also probably depend on other things, like the relative velocities of the enzyme and the starch, the relative orientation of the two... Ideally this would capture all the dynamical variables of interest. But there's still the amylase-starch system to talk about in terms of its relationship to digestion (glucose metabolism), in which case what matters is the aggregate and presence of the interactive system of their molecular dynamics.
On this level, what matters is the enzyme's capacity to act as an environmental filter for starch molecules, and how efficiently (energetically/productively) it can catalyse their breakdown. What matters is the 'on/off' property of 'has this produced simpler sugars?' and what is selected over reproductively are the protein configurations of the enzymes which facilitate this transformation. The specifics of those protein configurations are blurred; the sigma algebra of amylase producing events realises into the aggregate variable of (more or less efficiently produced) simpler sugars. That is, they are selected for as a system of interacting with starch unto themselves. In other words; selection acts upon the interaction between amylase and starch by modifying amylase's open feed forward that becomes closed by starch's presence; a potential for a feed-forward (starch presence->amylase) becomes interactive feedback (starch <-> amylase catalysis).
Condensing a decision process into a flow chart lets you think about the tasks involved in each arrow.
Writing down required inputs and outputs for an algorithm helps you code it.
The same is true for mathematical ideas. But a relatively unique (I think) thing about such diagrammatic representations of processes in math is that you can ask mathematical questions about the diagram to analyse the original idea. Leonhard Susskind invented the idea of the "world-sheet" in string theory by drawing two Feynmann diagrams up on a board at right angles to each other, then started analysing what it would even mean to rotate them like that and treat them as sides of a shape.
The same seems to be true when wrestling with the mathematisation of ideas, and using math to study ideas and lend them precision. So I drew a diagram of some of the ideas I've been ranting about.
Two systems [math]S[/math] and [math]T[/math] have some parameters associated with them [math]C(S)[/math] and [math]C(T)[/math]. The black arrows take the underlying systems to the salient features of their dynamics. Then the red and blue arrows link the parameters through functional relationships. The actual structure of the relationships there is arbitrary, it's just supposed to be a reasonably general picture of what's going on.
For a specific (overly simple) system, we can look at the Lotka-Volterra equations in predator-prey dynamics:
The system [math]S[/math] is the behaviour of the wolves, the system [math]T[/math] is the behaviour of the rabbits. These map to the number of wolves [math]w[/math] and the number of rabbits [math]r[/math] through [math]C[/math] (the black arrows).
Then we have the relationships of these parameters, how to get from [math]w[/math] to [math]r[/math] on the graph. The blue [math]dw[/math] arrow and the red [math]dr[/math] arrow correspond to the equations:
[math]\begin{align}dw=aw-br\\dr=cr-ew\end{align} [/math]
An insight that can be gained from this portrayal is the distinction between two problems; the parameter emergence problem and the parameter interaction problem. The black arrows take systems and coalesce them into parameters; parameter emergence. The red and blue arrows take coalescences of parameters and describe the effect of one system on another through their functional dependence; the parameter interaction problem.
Parameter emergence in a system is the question of how a system congeals into distinct flows with characteristic features, parameter interaction is the question of how the characteristic features of complex systems interact with each other.
Specific instances of parameter interaction are the usual domain of mathematical models and natural laws, [math]F=ma[/math], [math]y=mx+c[/math]. Rarely do we consider how complex systems obtain the directions of variation that allow their sub-systems to couple.