Applications of E42
as a
Model

UNDER CONSTRUCTION

E42 is a program for constructing, editing, representing, and finding the characteristics of N, K Boolean systems. As such it is simply a well-defined formal system. It is based on truth tables and standard logic. As such it implies no more than what it is. That said, one attraction of such formal systems is their utility as models of something else. What this something else might be is as varied as human creativity can make it.

A separate issue is whether it makes any sense to use a particular formal system as a model for a particular something else. We won't address that issue here, leaving it to be addressed in the contexts where we apply E42 as a model to something else.

Below is a list of somethings to which E42 might refer. Because the construction of E42 is varied and adaptable and because it can be applied to many things, we consider it a meta-model, which can be customized as specific models.

A playground for formal logic. (MORE)

A lab for learning about discrete dynamic systems. (MORE)

Biological processes. (Kauffman) (MORE)

Epistemological processes (Bateson)

We frame knowledge in a broad Batesonian epistemological approach informed by modern developments in neural nets and discrete dynamic systems models. This epistemology specifies mental process as the transformation of differences across a richly connected network.

Map-Territory distinction

Bateson is explict in not specifying what the universe is. Indeed, his intellectual attraction to Korzibski's (?) Map-Territory distinction makes this clear. It is the map whose fundamental relations are differences and their transforms. There is no implication that the universe is based on difference.

Therefore, in that epistemological context, E42 was evolved as a model of mental process, where mental process is construed as the transformation of differences across a network that is richly connected and contains feedback loops.

Making this epistemology explicit and exploring its implications when made explicit is the primary application we make of E42.

In E42 we have a system of relations as formal as arithmatic, indeed E42 is a system of formal logical relations, so our dynamic process is well defined. We simply have to decide about representation. The evolutionary challenges of how different species represent the dynamic relations in the ecology around them is not so well defined. That is one reason for making a calculated guess (such as an N, K, Boolean model) about the abstract issues found in ecological relations.

A Dynamic Universe

Sometimes we construe E42 as a model of a dynamic universe. This is in direct violation of the boundaries Bateson set for his epistemology and that we generally set for our own epistemology. While there may be cogent, perhaps persuasive, reasons for modeling knowledge as a discrete Boolean dynamic system, the extension of these arguments to the universe itself is not intellectually motivated in our work. Occasionally we do it anyway. We'll be explicit (we hope) when we make this shift of using E42 as a model of knowledge to E42 as a model of how the universe works.