Mnr AM de Lange wrote:
> (snip)
> What I do reject is that reversible descriptions depict reality while
> irreversible descriptions are a
> worthless illusion. Both reversible and irreversible changes occur. However,
> the traditional notion is that only reversible changes are fundamentally
> important. Prigogine began to challenge this notion acouple of years ago.
> Since few took heed, I find it necessary also to challenge this notion.
Hello At,
I had a rather visceral reaction to this post. I'm not referring to
anything else in the thread but just the ideas as I understood you to say.
Winifred, I hope this is not too rude considering the fact that I'm
breaking in. Perhaps the artistic perspective will be useful, perhaps
not.
The first thing that strikes me is that an "irreversible change" of
direction is what we call an "undoing." It is not that it is truly
irreversible but that in an action which is called "reversible" direction
has no significance. To reverse direction in an "irreversible" forward
motion situation of time or space is what one does to undo an action or to
go back in time for example.
You already point out the linguistic metaphor later so I will deal with
that at that time. In music you have significant reversibility which is
almost a kind of joining of the two concepts. Composers play with the
concepts of forward and retrograde motion and direction (inversion) all
within the same Universe of a piece of music. A fugue for example has it
all. Significance is not lost if within the forward motion of a melody
e.g. the melody is reversed (retrograde). Even though the melody is not
equal in effect when in retrograde, it is non the less significant in
affect.
Another common example is the four note theme of the Beethoven Fifth which
is literally turned every which way imaginable (with both a retrograde and
an inversion in each of the five elements of music and then their
multitude of various manners of changing those five elements). What this
means is that both the retrograde of the order of a series of notes and
their inversion constitutes only two of the many possibilities contained
within the information that makes the BFS significant. What a retrograde
does do is create a different melody as does an inversion, however a
trained ear will both perceive and understand those devices while an
untrained ear will be moved. Both are effected by the change in the
information.Each change in direction of the primal elements simply adds to
the possible information that is carried within the piece. It is at this
point where I, (being the most ignorant of those who gaze at physics)
would still question whether entropy is a more valid model for human
interaction than the abstract relationships found within an aesthetic work
that draws its power from the culture that is from a particular group.
Just a thought.
> Other readers may ask "What the heck is a reversible description?" (snip)
very interesting stuff. I've really enjoyed At's explanations of entropy
and especially the one a while back with pixels.
> Readers may now think that it is incredible stupid trying to read
> something backwards. (snip). Reading the book backwards is exactly like
> rolling the
> movie backwards.
Is not the difference here that 1+1=2 is timeless and it's significance is
neither grounded in order (time) or position (space) but in quantity? By
the way, on the piano two seconds equal a third not a fourth. Two seconds
have nothing to do with quantity but with distance and are something like
your entropic pixels.
> (snip) This difference between playing a movie forwards or backwards
> indicates irreversibility.. If no difference can be observed, then
> the movie depicts a reversible phenomenon.
Doesn't this indicate the need to find the right category instead of a
universal law. e.g. quantity and distance share common numbers and even
some other things but one is grounded in space and the other is an
intellectual construct to measure amounts for a practical purpose beyond
itself? Again I hope I'm not embarrassing myself by even playing on this
field.
> One of the main problems of the theoretical tools of physics is that
> they can produce only reversible descriptions (movies). (snip)
I don't understand why a movie is a reversible description.
> The only exception is the Second Law of Thermodynamics concerning "entropy
> production". This law says that when ANY SYSTEM changes, only those
> changes will happen by which the entropy of the universe will
> increase. Playing a movie of real life backwards, will represent
> changes by which the entropy of the universe will decrease!
Predictability will decrease but "information" will increase, yes? There
is more information in a reversal because of "perceived" decrease in
predictability. (Am I off here?) In the BF symphony it often constitutes
surprise and novelty and even though the order is rigidly defined it still
is too complicated to seem predictable. It might even be
complexly/compressible (how's that for a contradiction?) but like a canon
or musical round, even though the melodies all go forward and are the
same, it is their interaction that constitutes the information and not the
fact that you can compress it into a formula that can be expressed with
one repetition of the melody on paper. (here I would like to tip my hat
to John Zavacki and say that even though we think in multiple voices it is
the interaction of all of those voices that constitutes the information.
In music we call that contrapuntal harmony and it is a nightmare to
comprehend, so much so that in today's dumb and dumber climate it often is
not even taught in conservatories. Training for that must begin much
earlier than today's public schools).
> Making a movie of the motion of the planets and playing it forwards
> or backwards afford no differences. It means that planetary motion
> is reversible. Newtonian mechanics depicts this motion very accurate.
Predictability? But it is not the same really is it?
> (snip) All the planets, for example, are unceasingly subjected to
> ever changing solar winds (plasmas emerging from the sun). (This was
> not known in previous centuries and thus to Newton.) Making a movie
> of these plama winds and playing them forwards or backwards affords
> great differences. Newtonian mechanics depicts the movements of these
> solar winds very poor. Thus the notion that our solar system can be
> described reversibly, is an illusion.
Complexity creates a problem with Predictibility? But is the
incomprehensibility out there or is it within us, like the non musician's
lack of conscious comprehension of retrograde/inversion in the Beethoven
Symphony?
> Is posssible to obtain reversible changes in ANY system (even huamn systems
> such as organisations)? (snip) The one way is to isolate (close in all
> respects) the system. The system will gradually devolve into a reversible
> situation in which the only changes will be minute fluctuations
> (random changes on a microscopic level). (snip)
Might we then say that 1+1=2 if we are only speaking of arithmetical
quantity? (a closed intellectual system)
> The other way is to make the system completely open, but to ensure
> that no differences at all exist between the system and its immediate
> surroundings. Any change at the systems boundaries have to be
> craefully matched by a similar changein the immediate environment.
> With what word will we describe such an environment? (snip)
Sounds like the discovery phase of a "manifesting" piece of music out of
randomness, through expression and into pure environmental sound. We call
it Aleatory (random toss of the dice) composition. The composition grows
from an environment set of rules and consists of a relationship within
that environment for a specified time and then finishes as the interaction
comes to a close. Modern Semiotics, as I understand it, has a strong
Aleatory influence. Aleatory forms are always time and space specific and
usually exists only as a set of written linguistic instructions for the
performance.
> Whatever way we follow (isolation or congenial surroundings), the
> reversible outcome is most devastating.
> * It paralyse the major role players in any organistion. For example,
> leaders become ineffective. What ever they try to do, become
> wasted in minor quaarrels.
quarrels over interpretation in the former and over quality in the latter.
> * It prohibits the butterfly effect. For example, the actions of the
> of followers become merely random fluctuations. There is no
> amplification of their output such that the whole organisation
> may benefit from it.
Sounds like the results of the market approach to musical composition in
America.
> The present fashion of intellectual specialisation is little else
> than setting up a system of reversible thinking. Reversible systems
> thinking has most devastating outcomes as I have decribed in the
> previous paragraph.
On Broadway we would call that a formula. Like a movie or musical formula
that has become totally predictable, but because the audience
sophistication has been lowered, predictability is considered affirmation
of the audience's intelligence. I consider this to be a direct result of
the last 38 years of three Rs education in the public schools in America.
We are now experiencing the same problem in competition within the
corporate world.
> Peter Senge identifies systems thinking as the
> Fifth Discipline needed to learn more about Learning Organisations.
> Making this fifth discipline reversible will destroy rather than
> promote learning organisations..
I would put it less politely. Making the fifth discipline banal and
predictable always destroys the holistic emphasis of learning
organizations. It kills the "childish" genius side to learning. Thus
sewing the seeds for their decline.
> (snip) the only possible surprise is that I try to think
> inclusively rather than exclusicely.
The next part of At and Winifred's conversation makes me wish that I had
them both for my instructors in Math. At's knowledge of the problems with
the "concrete" (beings) in English that turns numbers into things is in my
belief right on. It is the abstract forms of music that contain the
antidote to this side of English and as complex music has become less a
part of the climate of the average person's life the concrete has
hardened.
I would like to point out one further aspect to this. In the U.S. there
was a surge towards languages with more process bases that have been
resisted thus far. Even the benign Ebonics which was a kind of bridge
between the process languages of Africa and English was too threatening
for the American culture. Instead they stay locked in the construct of
Latin.
How historically appropriate that the Romans invented concrete while
drinking themselves stupid on lead cups, pipes and sweeteners. Latin has
reversibility based upon word endings. Latin also is the grammar that
every European language has built their concepts of verbs (process and
action) upon. That it doesn't fit any of the Germanic languages is an
obvious statement but these Latin worshipers even write Latin Grammar
books about Japanese. I question whether the current push towards the
short solutions to the educational dilemma of low Math scores in the
schools isn't based on the desire to see Mathematics as a kind of
replacement Latin as a Universal language. I relate to At's admonition to
not getting stuck in one exclusivist position while avoiding another or:
As John Warfield states at one point. This is putting the
comprehensibilities of one system into another and creating
incomprehensibility. He also states very succinctly that complexity
disappears when you know how to do something. The problem IMHO is that
complexity abounds.
Regards,
Ray Evans Harrell, artistic director
The Magic Circle Chamber Opera of New York, Inc.
mcore@idt.net
--"Ray E. Harrell" <mcore@IDT.NET>
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