Current Working Notes

All notes in the current archive follow. If I roll up these subjects into longer pieces, I'll move them into the Essays section.

Outline
never

1. Decide to Decide

2. Not to Decide is to Decide

3. The Difference between Now, Before, and After

4. Uncertainty and Probability

4. Multiattribute Utility Theory

5.Introduction to Tools

6. Jazz: Becoming without deciding

Embodied Abstraction
Wednesday, August 17, 2005

I've started another of Lakoff's books on how cognitive science informs philosophy. If the biological substrate of thought determines the nature of experience, then notions of pure, abstract reasoning are no longer relevant.

There may be some confusion regarding emergent phenomenon inherent in this biological view. Just because the capabilities of the brain and human consciousness are constrained by biology, it's not necessarily true that their output is as tightly constrained. The brain can't create JPEG compressed images; the computational requirements are beyond us. Yet low cost computational devices can manipulate data to do just that. The brain has done the impossible through an intermediary. There's a system of the brain and its tools that overcomes constraints. The understanding of mathematics and experience may be constrained by the brain but the use of the metaphors and models is not.

Telling Stories
Thursday, May 19, 2005

Communicating knowledge about complex systems to others is a daunting task. A mental model of some kind exists within one brain. The model must somehow be transferred into the brain of another. Obviously, the transmission occurs though the senses, mostly hearing and vision, either with or without words.

The layout of a city or a room in building might be most efficiently transferred via a map. Alternatively, through conversation it's possible to sequentially build the spatial map within the mind of another. Perhaps you start off with the kind of room and its shape and then describe where furniture is located, the type of furniture and the color of the walls.

There are ways to map social organizations and means to map the operating principles of a hard disk drive. Simulations from a complicated mathematical models can be documented in flow diagrams and their behavior summarized in graphs and tables. The outcomes from unpredictable systems are sometimes best summarized as scenarios, i.e. base case, best case and worst case outcomes of a decision made under conditions of uncertainty.

These are all analytic tools for communication. There's an emotional dimension to complex systems that these don't capture. They lack the interpretation that leads to action.

Metaphors engage the mind in a way that reaches the feeling parts of the brain. When I characterize the increasing behavior of a system as explosive, a mental image of sudden force, somewhat dangerous, is evoked. Much of cognition is metaphor as the brain uses behavior of the real world to represent abstract concepts.

Stories are more extended structures to involve others in communication. Metaphors can be extended to build a larger cognitive structure for the listener, a context that creates a greater common understanding between them.

Nothing New Here
Thursday, May 19, 2005

There are no new discoveries or paradigms on this site. It's a public notebook that's a product of my investigations into decision and systems theory. The subject matter reflects both my personal concerns and reactions to literature, both on the web and published in book form.

A theme has emerged over time, however. I've been exploring the interface between the cognitive experience of deciding with the realities of the material world. It's been a central set of questions for philosophy and religion for centuries. I see an essential unity between the spiritual and material that is too often ignored by those who advocate living in one realm or the other. As a neurologist, neuroscientist and, most recently, drug developer, this intersection of mind and brain has been central to my thinking for a long time.

I was encouraged to read that the subtitle of William James' seminal work "Pragmatism" was "A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking." I too have nothing terribly original to write here. But if philosophy is personal and autobiographical, there are few, if any other Orthodox Jewish MD PhD Neurologist drug developers that have approached basic questions of existence, knowledge and deciding. And probably not so far in the 21st Century.

I'll assume that in and of itself, writing about Decision Theory, Systems Theory, and Philosophy will be a worthwhile endeavor.

Perhaps in the tradition of William James, who also was a neuroscientist and philosopher, I can synthesize some ideas that will of practical value to those who would make choices under conditions of uncertainty and try to influence complex situations where simple cause and effect seem to apply loosely, if at all.

Drawing the System Border
Wednesday, May 18, 2005

The brain is a complex network of neuronal connections, organized into ensembles and specialized regions. Conscious thought is an emergent property of the system. It happens "out there" in the physical world. It is experienced "in here", with the mind.

The "out there"/"in here" dichotomy is at the heart of much of western philosophy. Many eastern philosophies try to dissolve the barrier. It true that "The finger is not the moon"; perceiving is not the perceived. But they are not two different things. Both are part of a single system in which the brain interacts with the environment through sense organs.

It's pointless to wonder whether reality exists "out there" or "in here" as it arises from the interaction. Thought is structured and perhaps ultimately limited by its residence in brain/sense organ interaction.

Lakoff and Nunez: Where Mathematics Comes From: How the embodied mind brings mathematics into being
Tuesday, May 17, 2005

Lakoff , a linguist, and Nunez, a psychologist, take on the question of whether mathematics is discovered or invented. They convincingly argue that mathematics is a cognitive metaphor for qualities of the real world. The concept of "the embodied mind" fits well with my systems based view of the relationship of mind and world. It is a simple, pragmatic approach to how the abstract exists as emergent properties of the world.

Mathematics is true because the metaphor is directly mapped from the real world, a symbolic model of reality that can manipulated in the abstract to predict the behavior of the world to some extent. Of course precise prediction is possible only in the small set of linear problems. Non-linear systems become too complex to predict, bringing uncertainty and emergent properties even to the abstract realm of mathematics.

Steven Strogatz, Sync: The emerging science of spontaneous order
Monday, May 16, 2005

Steven Strogatz has been one of the leading figures in the mathematics of biological systems. While synchronization of independent elements is the thread that brings the book together, it's all in the context of the new systems view of biology. I love reading about his process of framing a question and then testing answers by running computer simulations of the process. When order emerges in the simulation, he and colleagues try to discern the mathematics underlying the order.

As a scientist, I gained some insight into why its so easy to manipulate the state of some biological systems. I spent many years in the lab studying mechanisms of cell death. I could never understand why so many investigators were able to find so many different ways to halt the process once it had been set in motion by an experimental perturbation. Surely all of these processes couldn't be independently responsible for the cell death. If they were independent, then blocking just one wouldn't help cells survive. Other, unaffected processes would carry out the deed.

The many interactions within a cell place some events at nodes that have broader effects. The other day, an accident on a highway here in Baltimore managed to tie up much of the traffic north of the city. There were cascading events as traffic was shunted first here and then there by blockage and congestion in one key pathway after another. Similarly, cell processes or cell state can be shifted from one state to another by strategic triggers.

Tools like network maps and simulations promise to provide a means for understanding complexity that won't yield to simple cause and effect diagrams. Strogatz ends the book with some contemplation of how consciousness arises from the network of neural connections. It may be that syncronization across the cerebral cortex is responsible for the binding of shape and color of visual objects or the binding of object and word.

Of course, its this idea of mind and meaning as the emergent effect of complex systems that has interested me for some time now. As a neurobiologist, calling meaning an emergent quality of brain is a neat way to bridge the material with the immaterial worlds.

Need and Want
Tuesday, March 8, 2005

Two general business strategy books have continued to resonate with me over the last several years. I've had trouble understanding why a book on negotiating, "Start with No" by Jim Camp and a book on career management, "Fire your Boss" by Stephen Pollen should seem so important. What principles do they share?

Camp's approach to negotiating relies on developing an attitude that one can desire an agreement, but the agreement itself cannot become the goal. If you work for the deal, you are no longer negotiating, you are compromising. The message of "Start with No" is that you can want the deal, but you should never need it.

I've found the approach powerful in the way it shifts the balance in a negotiation. If you feel you can openly reject any offer or, on the other hand, make offers that can be rejected, then much of the emotional barriers to effective negotiation evaporate. It is easier to be fully present and rational in the discussion about the deal. Personal acceptance and rejection don't matter.

If you need the deal, you are enslaved to its outcome. It's personal and you're desperate for approval. Starting with no provides a platform for autonomy and personal power over the world.

"Fire your Boss" also urges the reader to move to a place of personal strength where a particular employment situation is by choice, not by necessity. Pollen's idea is to turn outward, away from career and seek satisfaction from life outside the job. Rather than sacrifice income to be creative, look at employment as a way to pay the bills and seek the personal fulfillment of creativity elsewhere. He also advises continuous job fishing, preferably to always have an offer of alternative employment elsewhere.

If satisfaction with life comes from outside the workplace, then the job is less entangled with personal identity. You don't need the job for emotional validation. Similarly, having a choice about whether to stay in a job or go provides personal autonomy and detachment from the situation.

The common principle is to embrace wanting but avoid needing. If one can live life needing nothing but wanting everything, the world is opened but can't dominate. The self can enjoy power over the world only by not needing it. Once there is need, there is a loss.

There's a puzzle, a seeming contradiction, in being simultaneously engaged with the world and yet detached. Its the balance of the material and the spiritual. Desire is the driver: once it crosses from want to need, desire can enslave.

More than prediction
Sunday, February 13, 2005

Finishing up Toulmin's Foresight and Understanding, I reread his attack on prediction several times. He asserts that there must be more ways to evaluate theory than simply the theory's ability to predict.

He points out, correctly I think, that many theories are revised even though no new predictions are made. Elegance and satisfaction seem to be criteria by which one theory is judged as superior to another.

I realize that I've used this argument myself in defense of the religious/spiritual approach to life. God is admittedly a theory. My concept of God doesn't really allow for predictions that prove or disprove existence of the spiritual dimension. It is there for our perception or not. Its effect is on our thought and thus our actions. Spirituality is in the realm of choice.

I'll move evaluation of theory into a multiattribute utility analysis, where prediction is just one attribute to evaluate theory. I agree with Toulmin that a theory can also be judged on how it makes one feel. Theories are the spectacles through which we see the world. Many of those theories are adopted and used without question, never judged as to their utility. Whether they predict the future or not, if they justify our actions, we may resist any examination.

Edge cases and normative decision making
Tuesday, February 1, 2005

When studying decisions, its possible to examine optimal solutions, prescriptive Decision Theory, or to examine how people make decisions, often less than rationally. To predict the future and be right most frequently, the most probable outcome is most important. It will be the case most frequently. However we don't act that way, we act as if rare outcomes are more important, perhaps there is a place for irrational actions. The extreme and exceptional cases, edge cases, have more information content per event than events near the average.

Juice Analytics | Agile Analytics Weblog: "In each case, edge cases help us understand the far reaches of the possible. They help us map out reality."

I've been returning over and over to the idea that things look very different from inside the system as one of the components compared to the view from above. From within, experience can be granular and anecdotal. From without, with a broad or long view and large numbers, there is smoothness and predictability.

A predictive theory of reality
Tuesday, February 1, 2005

Taking the pragmatic view of evaluating the truth of a theory, we look only at its predictive value. The more generally a theory can predict, the more true it is. If it misses some cases or is not generally predictive, a truer theory can be found.

If metaphysics is a theory of reality, what can be predicted? I'm working towards a systems based metaphysics that takes complexity into account with probability. This view predicts that knowledge of reality is derived purely from interactions with the systems around us, but that knowledge is ultimately limited by our perspective and system complexity. Getting outside of a system and having a longer, broader view is needed to transcend the limitations.

Regularity and Large Numbers
Monday, January 31, 2005

Highly regular, predictable events are likely to be reducible to laws. Whether we consider an abstract mathematical relationship or a complex physical system with reproducible behavior, the lack of surprises allows the law to represent the system.

The behavior of less predictable systems can't be so easily captured by rules. And the mathematics of chaos and complexity have proven that the rules that govern a system can't be used to predict the system's behavior. Simple sets of rules can generate unpredictable behavior.

With a large enough set of observations any system becomes predictable in the aggregate. Its average behavior and the limits of its behavior are known. Over long periods of time, with many many events, predictability becomes better. The large numbers smooth over the unpredictable granularity of individual events.

WIthout those large numbers, there are no laws, only instances. Each new event provides important information about what might happen in the future. Anecdotal evidence, observations of single unusual cases, represents new and surprising information about the system. In a new system, every new experience is an anecdote. Once large numbers of observations have been made, predictability is good and the system becomes boring, reducible to simple models like mathematical laws.

Copyright 2003 by James J. Vornov