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From: minsky@media.mit.edu (Marvin Minsky)
Subject: Re: Intensions are legit; was FIRST order?
Message-ID: <1995Jul5.232857.24965@media.mit.edu>
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References: <3tab33$n77@ecl.wustl.edu> <804930557snz@chatham.demon.co.uk> <3terqs$lb5@ecl.wustl.edu>
Date: Wed, 5 Jul 1995 23:28:57 GMT
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In article <3terqs$lb5@ecl.wustl.edu> fritz@rodin.wustl.edu (Fritz Lehmann) writes:
>     Oliver Sparrow wrote:
>---begin quote---
>Latent dimensionality, as it were? The perfect model of a trout would apply to
>all trout in identical tanks: consider two such. Pull up the dividing wall:
>lo! trout social behaviour emerges to confound the model. Latent dimensions or
>the creation of new degrees of freedom?
>---end quote---
>
>     I'm _guessing_ that this responds to the notion that Indistinguishables
>(entities whose total description, in omniscience, is symmetric and
>leaves them distinct but indistinguishable) may exist.   This does not,
>however, mean that they cannot interact, just that all interaction between
>them is itself symmetric.  Only if the symmetry is broken do the
>indistinguishables become distinguishable.  Two indistinguishable trout may
>dance, if the dance, and its relation to the rest of the universe, leaves
>them still indistinguishable.  Even if most of the world is a "rigid"
>relational structure (with no automorphisms other than identity), it can
>still have symmetric "protrusions" and therefore indistinguishable parts. 
>("Protrusion" here doesn't mean spatial protrusion, but a protrusion in
>the relational structure describing all extant relations).

If you have one trout and an exhaustive search machine, like Konrad
Lorenz, then you can experiment on a single trout by finding all the
"releasers" of its potential behavior--and then you can predict what
two such fish will do.

Conclusion: if you have a stupid, incomplete model of something then,
yes, you can't predict its behavior under other conditions--social or
otherwise.

Am I missing some alleged profundity in this discussion, or are you
saying simply that incomplete models yield incomplete predictions.  

In other words, I wonder if that talk about dimensions and symmetry is
of any value here, gentlemen.

