Metastability

I have been following Bernard Stiegler's work a bit who puts a lot of emphasis on metastability, a term that comes from science and that has found its way into philosophy as a very important concept. Below I show how this term evolved and even to my surprise found its way into David Lewis' book Convention. If the W3C is about anything, it is about creating conventions. So I thought it would be a useful topic for this group.

Here are some interesting things about it:

One can see the evolution of the term on Google in this Ngram
http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=metastable&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=0&smoothing=3

In James Gleick's The Information, a very interesting book that describes as a number of fascinating stories the development of information and its mechanisation, the theme emerges in a number of places:

Metastability:
[[
In 1943 Schrödinger asked "When are organisms said to be alive" ...
Ordinarily, a piece of matter comes to a standstill; a box of gas reaches a uniform temperature; a chemical system “fades away into a dead, inert lump of matter”—one way or another, the second law is obeyed and maximum entropy is reached. Living things manage to remain unstable. Norbert Wiener pursued this thought in Cybernetics [1948]: enzymes, he wrote, may be “metastable” Maxwell’s demons—meaning not quite stable, or precariously stable. “The stable state of an enzyme is to be deconditioned,” he noted, “and the stable state of a living organism is to be dead.”
]]

Crystals and Metastability:
[[
In seeking a clue to the gene’s molecular structure, it seemed natural to look to the most organized forms of matter, crystals. Solids in crystalline form have a relative permanence; they can begin with a tiny germ and build up larger and larger structures; and quantum mechanics was beginning to give deep insight into the forces involved in their bonding. But Schrödinger felt something was missing. Crystals are too orderly—built up in “the comparatively dull way of repeating the same structure in three directions again and again.” Elaborate though they seem, crystalline solids contain just a few types of atoms. Life must depend on a higher level of complexity, structure without predictable repetition, he argued. He invented a term: aperiodic crystals. This was his hypothesis: We believe a gene—or perhaps the whole chromosome fiber—to be an aperiodic solid.
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Kolmogorov in Russia was thinking similarly
[[
To measure the complexity of an orderly crystal or a helter-skelter box of gas, one could measure the shortest algorithm needed to describe the state of the crystal or gas. Once again entropy was the key. Kolmogorov had a useful background in difficult physical problems to which these new methods could be applied. In 1941 he had produced the first useful, though flawed, understanding of the local structure of turbulent flows—equations to predict the distribution of whorls and eddies. He had also worked on perturbations in planetary orbits, another problem surprisingly intractable for classical Newtonian physics. Now he began laying the groundwork for the renaissance in chaos theory to come in the 1970s: analyzing dynamical systems in terms of entropy and information dimension.
]]

Gilbert Simondon, a French philosopher of technology in the 1950ies onwards, has a lot to say on the topic and it is nicely summarised in the Dictionary of Continental Philosophy p538:
http://books.google.fr/books?id=kRUZ61uISUMC&lpg=PA539&ots=t8S_Gj8wtG&pg=PA538#v=onepage&q&f=false

[[
Simondon reconceptualises traditional distinctions, including those of form and matter and of individual and milieu, in terms of information; only by conceiving of these distinctions as processes of individuation can their reality be taken into account. Simondon begins  his reconceptualisation by criticising the hylomorphic schema that has dominated thought about individuation since Aristotle onwards. In its place, Simondon offers the process of crystallisation as an example of individuation: by carrying out a proliferating series of communications to an amorphous substance, crystallisation gradually informs that substance, causing it to pass from a metastable to a stable state.  Because the process of individuation takes place in each communication between each crystal and the metastable substance, it must precede the emergence of the individual. Simondon consequently proposes the model of crystalisation as a description of the process of individuation from the microscopic to the macroscopic, from the physical to the biological to the social. On this view, animate matter can be differentiated from inanimate matter by its capacity to sustain a certain degree of metastability that renders its individuation perpetual and necessarily incomplete.
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What I found really surprising recently is to discover the term metastabilty used by David Lewis in his Convention p 42 when he proposed a very first definition of a conventional signaling system

[[
A regularity R of the behavior of members of a population P when they are agents in a recurrent situation S is a convention if and only if, in any instance of S among members of P
(1) everyone conforms to R
(2) everyone expects everyone else to conform to R
(3) everyone prefers to conform to R on condition that others do, since S is a coordination problem and uniform conformity to R is a proper coordination equilibrium in S
]]

Especially the following 

[[
Once the process gets started, we have a metastable self-perpetuating system of preferences, expectations, and actions capable of persisting indefinitely.
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David Lewis mentions metastability twice in his thesis. Any ideas how come he did not develop this further, or why he would have used that term then? Has more work been done in philosophy on the concept of metastability? It would be nice to be able to proove that the system is metastable by starting form a definition of metastability that was accepted broadly. Has this topic come up again in more recent analytic philosophy? 

Henry

Social Web Architect
http://bblfish.net/

Received on Friday, 31 August 2012 14:34:48 UTC