Sister blog of Physicists of the Caribbean in which I babble about non-astronomy stuff, because everyone needs a hobby

Monday 9 July 2018

Relational properties : a scientific approach to morality ?

A rather meandering and dry read, but I suspect there's something interesting here.

In physics, many properties are relational. Position is relative as are time and velocity. In each case, we need to define a property relative to something else. For example, try to say where Boston is, without saying it in relation to something else. Similarly, velocity is not actually a property of an object: it is a property of the object in relation to the observer. The insight of physical law is that if we properly define these quantities in relative terms, then we have an objective (rather than subjective) description of events.

More than a focus on parts rather than wholes, a focus on things — objects, parts, elements or wholes — causes problems when the properties we are interested in are actually properties of the relationships between things, or the context in which things are found. In the study of networks, the degree of connectivity of a node is a property of the relationships between nodes rather than of a node itself. There are many more examples.

In reductionist thinking, fitness is considered a property of the organism, or better yet of the gene. However, fitness is actually a property of an organism in a particular context. Put the same organism into a different context, and its fitness is different. This may seem obvious when stated this way, but the mathematical formulations of evolution often ignore this. They assign fitness to the organism (or gene) by averaging over the possible contexts. When an organism samples all possible places, and a gene samples all possible genetic combinations it might be part of, then we can talk about its average fitness without regard to context. But this is a strong assumption, and there are important implications for discussions of altruism and other cooperative behaviours when it is not true.

Basic concepts can be difficult to define because they have to do with relational properties. Consider “meaning.” The nature of meaning is a central topic of inquiry in philosophy. We can start to think about this by defining meaning as a relationship between a label and an entity or set of entities. This relational mapping can be established though various means. For example, a computer program may map computer data files onto images, music or movies. Such a program creates a set of relationships that give meaning to the data files. This is an objective definition of meaning in a relational context. If there was only one possible such mapping that would always be used for all labels, then meaning would be a simple idea, but there are many possible relationships and therefore meaning becomes a subtle and important topic to study.

A possible interesting way of taking a scientific approach to morality. That some properties are relational and not intrinsic to any individual object seems pretty solid to me; some other abstract concepts, such as the completeness of a survey, are measurable but not with perfect accuracy and have no real physical component at all. Morality, I suspect, can be judged objectively but only in relative, relational terms.

https://medium.com/complex-systems-channel/relational-properties-in-objective-science-d723ddb4fac4

11 comments:

  1. Aristotle's categories.

    Find me a property which is not relational.

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  2. charles peirce first formalized this idea a while back though his work remains pretty obscure to most people. Anyway he defined this idea in terms of how oneness, twoness, and threeness compare. The writer combines two and three, whereas, relations technically are twoness. The observer or interpreter creates the threeness, i.e. the notion of meaning and significance. Anyway, this topic is pretty profound i believe, but formal semantics in general (which is what i call it) is not well understood.

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  3. Edward Morbius I'd say everything can be defined as having a relation to at least one other thing, with enough effort, but I don't think that makes every property intrinsically relational. For example the number of atoms in a sheep at any given instant isn't a function of the number of atoms in some other sheep. The mass of the sheep might be a function of the Higgs field, but still isn't a function of the mass of another sheep, whereas the relative velocity of the two sheep is unavoidably relational.

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  4. Edward Morbius Actually the oneness twoness stuff is probably overrated, but anyway here's another bunch of comments about his logic that show people were intrigued by the idea but not necessarily convinced. https://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2008/02/peirce_on_mathematics.html

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  5. Rhys Taylor No, but the number of atoms in a sheep is related to the sheep's metabolic and energy-expenditure regime, how much energy it can obtain (largely from grass), and how much it must expend: on wool and milk production, predator evasion, social dominancee struggles, disease, reproduction, and the relationship of mass to total energyexpenditures, etc., etc.

    Geoffrey West's Scale explores part of this.

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  6. Edward Morbius Indeed, my point exactly. Everything does have relations to everything else (especially if there's a temporal component), but not everything is relational at any given moment.

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  7. Rhys Taylor Which gets me to the topic of false narrative. I'm still looking for a good definition, but one I'm thinking of is: drawing relationships that do not exist, whilst ignoring relationships that do exist.

    Narrative is relational.

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  8. Edward Morbius The first science of Discworld book had a nice concept of narrativium, a physical substance or property that forces fictional worlds to behave as human storytellers think they should.

    I guess narratives are mainly about causal relations. A good story explains why things happen as well as how.

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  9. Rhys Taylor I've been looking for a good set of rules / variants of narrative.[1]

    The simplest is a time-ordered relation of events (facts)[2]. Tthere are others.

    Causality, point-of-view / perspective, theme, etc., are others.

    Narrative need not be either rational or mnemonic, though it's often both.


    ________________________________
    Notes:

    1. https://www.etymonline.com/word/narration

    2. https://www.etymonline.com/word/fact

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