In article <CFGt25.4HJ at carmen.logica.co.uk> WilsonR at LILHD.Logica.com
(Richard Wilson) writes:
>In article <1993Oct21.033210.17769 at alchemy.chem.utoronto.ca>
>mroussel at alchemy.chem.utoronto.ca (Marc Roussel) writes:
>>Complex systems can be built up
>>by iterating this mechanism at higher and higher levels of
>>organization.
>>And I don't follow why an island of stability leads to a complex system
>through iteration.
I think that I understand this part, so let me try to explain it.
Suppose that some arrangement of particles in a system is stable, i.e.
once the particles have reached a certain configuration, they tend to
stay in that configuration. For example, put some long chain fatty
acids in water; in order to avoid hydrophobic interactions, most of the
molecules will organize themselves into micelles (as long as you put in
enough of the fatty acids). Then these assemblages start to act as
particles and if, perchance, there are stable configurations involving
many of these super-particles, they will organize, and so on. In our
fatty acid example, we might have
fatty acid --> micelles --> micelle clusters --> ???
Of course, this is not a perfect example because we can be reasonably
sure, given our knowledge of this type of solution, that the question
marks above simply represent a bulk phase. Newman seemed to have neural
networks in mind when he wrote his paper. Does anyone know enough about
neural networks to tell us if Newman's mechanism for self-organization
holds there?
Sincerely,
Marc R. Roussel
mroussel at alchemy.chem.utoronto.ca
