Re: how would we define "kin"?

[glen e. p. ropella]

Mark P. Line writes:
 > > The one hitch of viewing kinship in this way is that we would have
 > > to tie a descendents event trace to it's parent's.
 > 
 > Why, if kinship is defined in terms of some causal dependence at some
 > trajectoral intersection? The parent-child relationship is just one kind
 > of causal dependence among many others, right? 

Well, one could easily run into a problem about what the initial
conditions for a causal chain must be for any "causa prima" or section
of the state of the simulation to be identified as being a "parent."
As long as the ontogenesis from that "causa prima" for that causal
chain was not instantaneous and/or had spatial extent, then it's
obvious that the parent might consist of whatever object or set of
objects it was that nursed the new object during that process.

But, if the ontogenesis was instantaneous or a point-source, then
problems will ensue.  This is especially the case if one is actually
observing a system where the objects are being classified as such
only through a process of perception.  E.g. in Conway's "Life", the
gliders are *not* prescribed objects in the programming sense, but
it still makes sense to think of them as objects.  One might go 
further to describe a glider's "parent" object.

(Just in case you think I'm off my rocker [grin], imagine what
will happen when we can set up some criteria where, when met, 
a subset of objects from a Swarm will "congeal" into a sub-Swarm.
This is the same type of process, where some criteria will 
"perceive" a set of objects behaving in a given way and will
re-organize the system to reflect that organization.  Then 
we have the problem of establishing the "kinship" relation between
some set of objects in the Swarm or the Swarm, itself, and the
newly created sub-Swarm.)

 > On your deifnition, the
 > guy who hauled my broken-down rental car to the shop 15 years ago in
 > Wapakoneta, Ohio is also my kin, for instance....

Well, in *real* life terms, where we have a *referent* for the
syntactical object we're calling "kin", this kind of statement
seems pretty silly.  But, in an Alife context, where the referent
is either non-existent (formal systems theory) or it is well-defined,
then this is exactly the case.

glen
-- 
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{Hive Drone, SFI Swarm Project         |            Hail Eris!            }
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