I am reading this book “Distilling Knowledge” by Bruce Moran. It was recommended to me by Emma who is in a creative group I participate in. It is an analysis of alchemy as a science in its own right.

The interpretation of alchemy is always changing but some snapshots include
– Alchemy as being the marriage of internal state and external experimentation. The success of alchemy depends as much on the state of the the individual as on the external state. IE alchemy depends as much on the subjective state of the alchemist as on the objective result of the process.
– Alchemy as marriage of matter and spiritual. Objects in the world exist in different spheres if you will, we can call them contexts or world views, like a material body and an ethereal body. Alchemy is about the combination of these different spheres.
– Chemistry/Alchemy also seemed to have been the first “lab” science – I dont know if this is true or if I read this correctly, but it seems very provocative. 

Then there is the more mundane stuff that I was familiar with, the relationship between alchemy and chemistry (the academic discipline), alchemy and metallurgy, and alchemy and art (making paints / glazes etc). 

I underlined a line on page 89 “the best way to know the body and to understand its functioning was by means of chemistry”… and then I put a note at the front of the book. 

What are ways that we understand the body? Well there is biology, the study of the organs etc, and there is perhaps physics, how the body moves, how electron gradients permeate cell walls, and chemistry  different chemical reactions (enzymes etc) in the body. I suppose I had always known about this, but I had not really thought about it.  There is an enormous discussion of the doctor making cures (chemistry) and diagnosing illness (perhaps biology). The chemical lens was the last lens, after spirit, physics, and biology. It makes me consider what other lenses are there are is it useful to discard a lens after a while. Like once you are done priming the canvas and affixing it to the frame you dont need the vices to old the canvas and frame in place any more.  Scaffolding (and psycho-tools) are helpful at a stage and then become a hindrance. 

But let’s continue. So we have the laws of the universe, the biological (evolution), physical, chemical, and of course with me being me I consider, what would it be to consider the computational body. What would it be to look at the body as a set of computations?  I am not sure what that means exactly. It is something more precise than dynamic system. Something that unfolds in time according to a particular methodology. And it is likely that different parts of the body operate by their own computational law. What does computation mean but to process an instruction set. And this is what happens when a ribosome makes an enzime according to a strand of rna. But it also happens when chemical interactions take place. Where does chemistry start and computation begin? I don’t know.

As a coda to this I thought I would include the following….  Today I am also reading an Artist Book recommended to me by a (past) lover –  it is inspiring and beautiful … and coincidentally the name of the artist is Chimes – greek for chymes (alchemist).

The other day, after going to an art / mi panel I was inspired to finish the book “An Engine, not a Camera: How Financial Models Shape the Markets, by Donald MacKenzie.  I had read deeply into the philosophical nature of models in the past particularly the work of Eric Winsberg, but I sort of left it without any breakthrough in my own thought.  Im sure I have blogged about it here, the different types of models that exist, what they measure, the guardrails that allow them to create ‘knowledge’, but it still left me with questions around what models did, and what computers/computation did for models.

An engine not a camera refers to the notion of models, like black-sholes (the options formula), are engines that analyze reality rather than images that represent reality. So when we say E=MC2, that is not a image of energy but it is a way to analyze reality in terms of energy and mass and the speed of light. You might say, well, this is just like a point of view, or a framing, but that is not the case. It is more like a reduction, like desaturating a color photograph and making it black and white.

Models are a reduction. they reduce the world to a number of variables. Models create a representation of the world as expressed by these limited variables and the their interactions as specified in the model.

But while reading this book, I came to the thought that what made a model powerful or adaptable was its ability to generate patterns.  Black-Sholes became used in the trading pits of Chicago, once various trading patterns could be extrapolated from it, such as the spread.  In fact there is a wide variety of ways I can generate trading patterns from options.

What is this relationship between patterns and models?

For instance, it is this ability to form patterns that allows us to think about options trading as replicating a portfolio, in a way similar to  CAPM. It is the patterns of model use that allow us to form equivalencies between different models.

I started thinking about patterns long ago when I was a summer intern at the Federal Reserve of Chicago and I was given a book to read: Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software. This outlined a number of ways to create object oriented software, there were repeated patterns that people used. I still use this book and the patterns from it today.

We cannot really call oriented software design a model, but we can probably call a computer program a model. A machine learning algorithm is a model, but a model plus and maybe that means it is not a model (I’ll discuss that in a future blog post).

A computer program is a model, in the same way that a mathematical formula is a model, and all computer programs are just expanded lambda calculus – so these two concepts are closely related.

Back to patterns, perhaps what makes a model good (or correct or better), is not its error, its fitness, or some other thing, but its ability to generate patterns of usage. These patterns can then connect the model to other models, or be used in a wider variety in instances and exhibit more flexibility (which perhaps is a good standard for a model).

A model is an engine for analyzing. What does analysis do? What is the difference between analysis and representation? If in the past our artists were artists of representations, what would it be to be an artist of analysis?