## Differential Logic, Dynamic Systems, Tangent Functors • Discussion 4

To clarify my previous remark about General Systems Theory, I wasn’t trying to define a whole field but merely to describe my experience in forums like these, where it took me a while to realize that when I use the word “system” a great many people are not thinking what I’m thinking when I use it.  The first thing in my mind is almost always a state space $X$ and the possible trajectories of a representative point through it.  But a lot of people will be thinking of a “system”, like the word says, as a collection of parts “standing together”.  Naturally I’d like to reach the point of discussing such things, it’s just that it takes me a while, and considerable analysis of $X,$ to get there.

It goes without saying this has to do with the boundaries of my own experience and the emphases of my teachers and other influencers in systems, the early ones taking their ground in Ashby, Wiener, and the MIT school, the later ones stressing optimal control and learning organizations, but mostly it has to do with my current objectives and the species of intelligent systems, Inquiry Driven Systems, I want to understand and help to build.

### 5 Responses to Differential Logic, Dynamic Systems, Tangent Functors • Discussion 4

1. landzek says:

Inquiry driven systems.  My mind just doesn’t work too deeply with math;  beyond a certain level of complexity, my thoughts disperse.

But it just dawned on me why some of your posts seem to resonate with my work.

I wish I could delve deeper into the thick of the formulas because I’m sure it would probably just be saying what I say in prose and description, yet in symbols of relation.  It’s just two languages really;  personally I don’t think it describes anything more precisely than, say, the way that I might be describing it or the way that I will be able to describe it.  I think it is just an example of, in our cases, yours and mine and the particular discursive arena is that we find ourselves in.  Two ways that brains manifest worlds and vice versa.

But I don’t think that we are talking about two different things.  I think you and I are talking about the same thing using different sets and organizations of symbols.  Different scaffoldings of those symbols.

But I do feel that at some point there will be someone that will be able to speak both languages and show the relationship between them is not relative, but necessary.

But then again that is an ideal, because ultimately the inquiry is dependent upon the condition which calls forth the scaffolding, which biologically speaking, I feel is independent;  and I would say might probably fall into at least the primer description that you have a link to there.

But that’s why I keep asking you, at least periodically, if you could explain these things and more plain English.  But somehow to you it is plain English or at least plain math;  it would be like you asking me to explain my work in plain math or in plain English or whatever, because to me it seems very simple and straightforward and sensible.

So what are we to do??  😄

• Jon Awbrey says:

Actually, I’m always looking for other ways of saying things, bridging the $2^n$ cultures and all that.  As it happens I was looking at that primer on differential propositional calculus just today, with a mind to serializing it on my blog.  Reading it over again I liked what I was able to achieve there, taking things from the simplest beginnings in Venn diagram world and ramping things up step by step to the first elements of differential logic.  So maybe I’ll try that …

• landzek says:

Some of your posts, even despite the mathematical formulations specifically, read to me very sensibly.

I’d say probably a third of them.  And then the other ones that are more strictly mathematical just really prevent me from finding inroads.  But I feel, from the sparse pieces that I can conceptually piece together in those other posts, that you must be saying something that would make sense to me if I was able to think mathematically, in the same way add is that 1/3, with reference to my work.

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