Interactions of actors theory
Pask's nexus of analogy, dependence and mechanical spin produces the differences that are central to cybernetics.
Interactions of Actors, Theory and Some Applications, as the manuscript is entitled, is essentially a concurrent spin calculus applied to the living environment with strict topological constraints.
[3] One of the most notable associates of Gordon Pask, Gerard de Zeeuw, was a key contributor to the development of interactions of actors theory.
[6] As a means to describe the interdisciplinary nature of his work, Pask would make analogies to physical theories in the classic positivist enterprises of the social sciences.
Pask's concepts produce relations in all media and he regarded IA as a process theory.
For ease of application Pask stated the differences and similarities of descriptions (the products of processes) were context and perspective dependent.
He interpreted these as acting as computing elements which exert repulsive forces to interact and persist in filling the space.
The knots, links and braids of his entailment mesh models of concepts, which could include tangle-like processes seeking "tail-eating" closure, Pask called "tapestries".
Extending his physical analogy Pask associated the interactions of thought generation with radiation : "operations generating thoughts and penetrating conceptual boundaries within participants, excite the concepts bounded as oscillators, which, in ridding themselves of this surplus excitation, produce radiation"[9] In sum, IA supports the earlier kinematic conversation theory work where minimally two concurrent concepts were required to produce a non-trivial third.
However, his formal methods denied the competence of mathematics or digital serial and parallel processes to produce applicable descriptions because of their innate pathologies in locating the infinitesimals of dynamic equilibria (Stafford Beer's "Point of Calm").
He saw mechanical models as the future for the concurrent kinetic computers required to describe natural processes.
He believed that this implied the need to extend quantum computing to emulate true field concurrency rather than the current von Neumann architecture.
Whereas a conversation is mapped (due to a possibility of obtaining a vague kinematic, perhaps picture-frame image, of it, onto Newtonian time, precisely because it has a beginning and end), an interaction, in general, cannot be treated in this manner.
Truth value in this case meaning the coherence between all of the interacting actors.He added: It is essential to postulate vectorial times (where components of the vectors are incommensurate) and furthermore times which interact with each other in the manner of Louis Kaufmann's knots and tangles.In experimental Epistemology Pask, the "philosopher mechanic", produced a tool kit to analyse the basis for knowledge and criticise the teaching and application of knowledge from all fields: the law, social and system sciences to mathematics, physics and biology.
Pask held that concurrence is a necessary condition for modelling brain functions and he remarked IA was meant to stand AI, Artificial Intelligence, on its head.
The Hewitt, Bishop and Steiger approach concerns sequential processing and inter-process communication in digital, serial, kinematic computers.
In Pask's true field concurrent theory kinetic processes can interrupt (or, indeed, interact with) each other, simply reproducing or producing a new resultant force within a coherence (of concepts) but without buffering delays or priority.
Both the quantity and quality differ.No Doppelgangers applies in both the conversation theory's kinematic domain (bounded by beginnings and ends) where times are commensurable and in the eternal kinetic interactions of actors domain where times are incommensurable.
Pask defined concepts as persisting, countably infinite, recursively packed spin processes (like many cored cable, or skins of an onion) in any medium (stars, liquids, gases, solids, machines and, of course, brains) that produce relations.
A change of separation between A and B producing Doppler shifts during interaction, recoil or the differences in relativistic proper time for A and B, would account for this for example.
Without a repulsion, or Newtonian reaction at the boundary, sets, their members or interacting participants would diffuse away forming a "smudge"; Hilbertian marks on paper would not be preserved.
Pask, the mechanical philosopher, wanted to apply these ideas to bring a new kind of rigour to cybernetic models.
Some followers of Pask emphasise his late work, done in the closing chapter of his life, which is neither as clear nor as grounded as the prior decades of research and machine- and theory-building.
