Entities and Functionality: Outline

Energy-based entity: any instance of emergence.

Static and dynamic emergence.
Dissipative structures.
Hurricanes
Social, economic, and biological entities
Evolution is fitness for an environment (not macho), but that means ability to access energy
Petty reductionism and supervenience is not useful.
Minimal dynamic entities
Theseus’ ship.
Functionality: the reductionist blind spot
The scientific agenda: digging down.
Applying reductionism to “naturally occurring” Turing Machines.
Functionality means interaction with an environment.
Environment stuff from Weinberg and Fodor.
TM as prototypical model of interaction with an environment.
Functionality is an extension of the notion of force. Fundamental particles have functionality. Functionality
is force at higher levels of abstraction.
The Pauli exclusion principle limits interaction with an environment.
Functionality allows/helps dynamic entities to persist.
Autonomy
Thermodynamic computing.
Stigmergy
Entities and the sciences

Ideas are downward entailing.

Manufactured entities often have functions. A house has a number of bedrooms.
Increasing complexity increasing efficiency, and historical contingency
Evolutionary environments.