Posted: Apr 07, 2011 1:24 am
pfrankinstein wrote:You raise some very interesting insights byofrcs.
I'll need time to ponder them.
Thanks Paul.
Further on from my post, today I was on the bus (the voltage regulator has failed on my ride and I'm waiting for the part to arrive as I bought a replacement cheap on eBay from a wrecking yard so I'm using public transport) thinking about this residual verses positive selection and so here is what I think is the underlying mechanism that can be used on both cases,
Attraction and Repulsion.
as in what causes attraction and what causes repulsion ? - hey I'm a reductionist. The claim is that at each scale of the universe there is selection and that is why stuff exists but what is the fundamental mechanism of selection and the answer to the question of what is the raw building block of selection at any scale is to identify what are the attraction and repulsion mechanisms at that scale.
At the most fundamental scale we know of the attraction mechanism is gravity which acts on mass but equally we have the Pauli exclusion principle that in effect stops things made of fermions from collapsing as no two fermions can occupy a particular quantum state at the same time. It goes on from there with a vast array of intra and inter-molecule forces on the small scale (angstroms) to the large scale e.g. the scales that radiation pressure is relevant.
What we see as the "information" accumulation that is embodied in a selected entity is as a side-effect of these attractive and repulsive forces. They are the mechanism that acts at that scale.
We can use the same idea of attraction and repulsion at any scale including living organisms and societies/culture. The side-effects of the information that accumulates comes from how societies attract or repulse.