Galt's Gulch

Hi. My name is.. Bill Altenburg.

Posted by philosophercat 9 years, 9 months ago to The Gulch: Introductions
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I'm very happy to have landed in the Gulch...

I began my flight in 1962 and landed at 34th street with NBI as a rep in 1965.

I knew Miss Rand and was interviewed by Barbara Brandon and was at Miss Rand's 75 birthday party and her guest at the Harvard Breakfast the next day.

I am a professional philosopher and was an architect and landscape architect for many years. I am founding a research laboratory in the thermodynamics of living systems and innovation through induction.

There are two things you should know: I once told John Ridpath that Objectivism is the greatest product in the world and you don't know how to market it. He thought marketing was advertising and dismissed the idea. I know how.

Second, you need a product stream, which you know, but you need brilliant new innovative product that is only possible to Objectivists and displays its potential. I am working on a movie script, a documentary concept on Ayn Rand, and a book on the greatest thinkers. I commented on the TV series tonight.

I can create the product you need but I cant produce it.

My experience as an entrepreneur and developer tells me no one will ever know what it took you produce the three movies. Thank you.

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  • Posted by $ jbrenner 9 years, 9 months ago
    Tell me about your idea regarding the thermodynamics of living systems. Because of the ability to harness or convert energy from one life form into one's self, individual life forms can go temporarily away from thermodynamically stable states (death as a form of equilibrium) to one's that are further from equilibrium. I am a chemical engineering professor who will enjoy our thermodynamics debates, even if thermo isn't my specialty.
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    • Posted by philosophercat 9 years, 9 months ago
      I started with philosophical questions, how does an animal know when to act, and realized that the answers were in science which led me to thermodynamics and finally to Prigogine and non-equilibrium thermodynamics and dissipative structures. Then I realized that is a brand new field and needs lots of work on living systems. What I've learned is non-equilibrium thermodynamics is the link between life and pre-biotic chaotic matter and energy. You cant get from Newtonian mechanics, statistical mechanics, and quantum theory to life but you can from thermodynamics. You seem to be well along as a good chemical engineer ought to be.
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      • Posted by $ jbrenner 9 years, 9 months ago
        You have taught yourself well. It's not totally a new field, but largely so.
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        • Posted by philosophercat 9 years, 9 months ago
          I date the field from Prigogine's 1945.6.7 papers and the 1967 book on dissipative structures. What I don't understand is why US physicists have had a problem with him. He has over 90 honorary degrees but only two or so from the US. Earley and Ulanowicz being US exceptions. Any ideas?
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          • Posted by $ jbrenner 9 years, 9 months ago
            This is not a field I have spent much time on, philosophercat. It would not take me long to get up to speed because I do have an appropriate background. That just has not been my focus. I am a nanotech expert.
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            • Posted by philosophercat 9 years, 9 months ago
              Ayn Rand and I spoke about the role of science in advancing Objectivism at NBI in 1967. She made it clear that Objectivism did not need to be validated by science. My point was it will be accepted faster if its metaphysics are confirmed by science. That is my task and the path to the answer as Miss Rand and I discussed the issue was being written by Prigogine. As you know science is supposed to be determinist and Objectivism requires free will. Thermodynamics necessitates fee will and confirms Objectivism's metaphysics. I gave a paper last October that might be of some interest. It is on "The Principle of Ontological Equality" which confirms the primacy of existence. It gets closer to you than me with information being exchanged only by thermodynamic systems and at the nanoscale I have no idea how the laws apply. Here is my Lab address and if you send me your lab info I will send you a copy.
              Smarts Hill Laboratory
              257 Smarts Hill Road
              Fryeburg, Maine 04037
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              • Posted by dbhalling 9 years, 9 months ago
                Interesting ideas. First of all science is built on the philosophy of science and not vice versa. However, I certainly agree that science, which studies the world also influences philosophy. Sort of like how engineering and science are related. Science sometimes spurs engineering and engineering sometimes spurs on science (e.g., thermodynamics). That said I think it is a mistake to confuse the determinism of physics with the determinism and free will of humans debate in philosophy. A is A is true in both physics and biology. One of the problems with this whole debate is a failure to correctly define what we mean by free will. Free will, for instances, cannot mean that we can violate the laws of physics. And if determinism means we have no control over our actions, then why would we waste time debating this?

                Free will could mean the ability to make a variety of choices given different inputs (senses), but we can create machines that do this. So I think the correct definition of free will has not yet been found.
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                • Posted by philosophercat 9 years, 9 months ago
                  The philosophical and science literature if full of articles proclaiming and proving determinism. The claim is based on the reversibility of Newtonian mechanics. The presumption was classical mechanics was universal hence all entities were reversible in time and thus the future and past are equally accessible. This does not fit human experience but there was no science providing another basis for life. That ended with the identification of non-equilibrium dissipative structures by Prigogine. Since the properties of dissipative structures is irreversibility of time determinism was falsified. What was not done was to establish how to get from irreversibility to free will. That problem is solved but it means getting from non-equilibrium thermodynamics to biological systems. the trick is understanding that causation in classical mechanics is an external force acting on an object with predictable results but in non-equilibrium thermodynamics it is an internal force acting on external objects with unpredictable results. the unpredictability comes from the stochastic surroundings not the agent. Two have it right are Robert Kane and Helen Stewart.
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                  • Posted by dbhalling 9 years, 9 months ago
                    I think it is a mistake to draw either conclusion from physics. First the definition of free will has not been clearly defined. Second of all the connection between physics and biology and neurology is far too tenuous to make such a leap.
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              • Posted by $ jbrenner 9 years, 9 months ago
                Much of nonequilibrium thermodynamics is stochastic, not deterministic. At the nanoscale, electrons are moving in confined boxes, and so there are corrections to account for the surface Gibbs free energy terms that, in the smallest entities, can overwhelm the bulk thermodynamic terms.
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                • Posted by dbhalling 9 years, 9 months ago
                  Stochastic systems (e.g., motion) is deterministic, it is just that we do not know the initial conditions of all the particles involved. As a result, we use statistics making assumptions about the initial conditions.

                  Only in the Copenhagen interpretation is the whole idea of statistics turned upside down into the idea that the particle is not anywhere until we measure it.
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                  • Posted by $ jbrenner 9 years, 9 months ago
                    A better way to state this would be to say that stochastic systems approach deterministic equations in the limit of large numbers of entities. Typically 10000 such entities is an adequate number for a large number limit.
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                    • Posted by dbhalling 9 years, 9 months ago
                      We have to differentiate between the math used to describe the system and the physics of the system. The math may be not deterministic, but except in the case of QM under the copenhagen interpretation, the underlying physics is deterministic. It may be non-linear, but it is not non-deterministic.

                      From wikipedia:
                      Physical systems in which we are uncertain about the values of parameters, measurements, expected input and disturbances are termed Stochastic Systems. In probability theory, a purely stochastic system is one whose state is randomly determined, having a random probability distribution or pattern that may be analyzed statistically but may not be predicted precisely. In this regard, it can be classified as non-deterministic (i.e., "random") so that the subsequent state of the system is determined probabilistically.

                      The uncertainty is in the initial conditions, the math is probablistic, but the underlying physics is still deterministic.
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                      • Posted by philosophercat 9 years, 9 months ago
                        If you mean by "the underlying physics" classical, statistical, and quantum mechanics you are right and philosophy has been bedeviled by it for 300 years. The new physics of non-equilibrium thermodynamics is radically different because it includes the surroundings in its physics not the object as a point isolated from the surroundings. When you add work, work requires that something be moved a very un-stochastic process. The new physics confirms the truth of "Life is a process of self sustaining and self generated action." AR This statement is not possible under classical physics but is necessary under non-equilibrium thermodynamics of dissipative structures in open thermodynamic systems. Welcome to the new world in which classical mechanics is not universal. The problem with the math is there are too many variables for predictability when you include the externalities to get a result. So its causal but unpredictable. Like Newton needed a new math its still up in the air. No one has pushed math across the gap between biology and thermodynamics. best effort see http://www.englandlab.com/uploads/7/8/0/...
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                  • Posted by $ jbrenner 9 years, 9 months ago
                    The main benefit of stochastic (Monte Carlo) simulations is that you DO get to track individual entities (such as particles), whereas with deterministic systems, you are correct in that you don't really know the initial condition of each individual entity.
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