2/17/22, 11:22 PM Ergodic or non-Ergodic, that is the question.

| by Ian Glendinning @Psybertron | Medium

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Aug 30, 2017 · 5 min read

Ergodic or non-Ergodic, that is the question.

Ergodicity is my new favourite word.

And rather than a definition, it deserves a riff. Some things are ergodic, some are not,
they’re non-ergodic. A ubiquitous question is, does the end always justify the means or
maybe no end ever justifies any & all means?

You might achieve the same physical state, some “objective” end, but we all know
intuitively that sometimes the collateral damage to the rest of the cosmos and collective
human psychology might outweigh the (local) objective result. For some things, when it
comes to getting stuff done, we already know that the how is as important as the what.

The more complex the situation, the more we may need to consider, maybe also need to be
seen to have considered, all the possible options and steps, and the more ingenuity,
imagination, skill or craft may be needed to pick a route to the desired solution.

At the level of society, politics, culture and psychology — the humanities — I doubt that
would be considered remotely contentious, probably more like second nature. Duh —
obvs!

But what about physics, science generally, the real world of natural philosophy? Surely
“atoms” — the particles of matter and energy — don’t care how they got to some
arrangement, do they? The same arrangement is the same result, surely? You’d be mad —
it’s inconceivable, impossible — to think otherwise. That’s what a hard-determinist would
say. In reality and in thought experiments, running repeated cases from the same starting
condition to the same final state, must achieve the same result, identical in absolutely
every way. Indeed, even the thought experiment’s stock-in-trade, “if” the situation was
reset to an identical starting state, we can safely ignore questions of how the reset could
conceivably, possibly, let alone tractably or physically be achieved, after all it’s only a

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2/17/22, 11:22 PM Ergodic or non-Ergodic, that is the question. | by Ian Glendinning @Psybertron | Medium

thought experiment. Physics is deterministic, therefore … all bets on variations beyond

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statistical uncertainty are off.

Well the hard-determinists, the greedy-reductionists, are wrong. Many processes in the
natural world exhibit both route-dependent and route-independent properties. The
properties of states depend on their histories as well as their arrangements. The net result
of their histories cannot be reduced to the arrangements of the component parts in their
end states. Think about that.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb uses Ergodicity in the context of downside risk-management in a

chapter he’s pre-published from his forthcoming book Skin in the Game. Where downside
risks in probability tails involve not simply cumulative damage but binary all or nothing,
dead or alive, result or ruin, success or failure, it makes a hell of a difference how you
arrive at a population of cases to derive and interpret your stats. One person taking the
same risk many times is quite different from a distributed population of individuals each
risking their own skin in their own games. “Average” risk is pretty meaningless in the
former case where the sequence of repeated risks clearly matters unlike the latter.

Ergodicity

As we saw, a situation is deemed non-ergodic here when observed past probabilities do not
apply to future processes. There is a “stop” somewhere, an absorbing barrier that prevents
people with skin in the game from emerging from it –and to which the system will invariably
tend. Let us call these situations “ruin”, as the entity cannot emerge from the condition. The
central problem is that if there is a possibility of ruin, cost benefit analyses are no longer
possible.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Stuart Kauffman chooses non-Ergodic as the key concept more people really need to
understand in his response to the 2017 Edge Question. It’s very brief and profound, so
presented with acknowledgement in its entirety here:

Non-Ergodic

“Non-ergodic” is a fundamental but too little known scientific concept.

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2/17/22, 11:22 PM Ergodic or non-Ergodic, that is the question. | by Ian Glendinning @Psybertron | Medium

Non-ergodicity stands in contrast to “ergodicity. “Ergodic” means that the system in question
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visits all its possible states. In Statistical Mechanics this is based on the famous “ergodic
hypothesis, which, mathematically, gives up integration of Newton’s equations of motion for
the system. Ergodic systems have no deep sense of “history.” Non-ergodic systems do not visit
all of their possible states. In physics perhaps the most familiar case of a non-ergodic system is
a spin glass which “breaks” ergodicity and visits only a tiny subset of its possible states, hence
exhibits history in a deep sense.

Even more profoundly, the evolution of life in our biosphere is profoundly “non-ergodic” and
historical. The universe will not create all possible life forms. This, together with heritable
variation, is the substantial basis for Darwin, without yet specifying the means of heritable
variation, whose basis Darwin did not know. Non-ergodicity gives us history.

Stuart A Kauffman

I’m pretty sure now I’ve seen Dennett use ergodicity in his evolutionary explanations
towards consciousness, and I know now Kauffman must have used it in his Reinventing the
Sacred which I’ve read and reviewed before, but it never really registered — as a word —
until I saw those two references above within 24 hours yesterday.

There are so many corollaries from appreciating the distinction, that I’d probably better
stop and leave the concept as food for thought.

[END]

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Below are a growing lists of (very rough) thoughts sparked-off already.

Shout up if you’d like me to elaborate.

Conscious, intentional stuff happening within physics, but not supported by physics ?!?

Because — info underlies both material / energetic physics AND information processing
(conscious or otherwise).

Reality. Ontology. Possibility. Conceivability. (Marletto in Edge 2017)

(Spookily, if one substitutes Shakespeare’s original verb “to be” it’s remarkably close to the —

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2/17/22, 11:22 PM Ergodic or non-Ergodic, that is the question. | by Ian Glendinning @Psybertron | Medium

objective, deterministic — existential point, but not the reason I posted with that allusive title.
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Was the Bard on this case already?)

Evolved or Divinely created. Hardly matters to a determinist, ironically, but natural

history should be fundamental to normal rational people.

Causal dependency can be backward.

Kauffman reverse causality …. Taleb too points out similar error.

Reversibility. History matters in irreversible incorporation — integration is more than

arrangement of components. Entropy, 2nd Law and probabilistic mechanics are
fundamental — ubiquitous — here.

Irony of historicity given Taleb / Beard spat? I won’t mention it if you don’t ;-)

Think also about those fuzzy areas between “hard” science and “soft” humanities …

(eg Engineering, psychology, statistics and risk?)

Engineering humanities — “Rivets in formation” (Ingenuity is the root of engineering.)

However many things and layers in our ontology, EVERY thing and every interface comes
in 3-layers.

Thing <> Interface <> Thing = 3 things

Interface <> Thing <> Interface = 3 things

Difference is simple choice of edge or node view in system networks?

Originally published at Psybertron Asks.

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