Grant Holland
Fri, 26 Feb 2010 07:04:46 -0800
Saul,I have a great deal of sympathy for your friend's point of view. Of course, his view derives from an engineering-centric valuation - so his deck is stacked. Nature squirms around all over the place doing every possible thing just to persist. But the "deck" (the second law) is stacked *against* it. So nature goes around "cheating" all over the place - and dying (extinction) all over the place, but hanging on anyway just because "at least one" strain perpetuates - maybe because of its "inelegance", rather than in spite of it. I see no reason to expect the persistence to last forever - but what a ride! And there is a lot of "luck" involved. Organic Complex Systems postulates that a dance between randomness and determinism is essential to lifelikeness - neither totally dominates. The dynamic spectrum between them is king. (Yes, I have a measure for this.)
I do not see *intention* (or any other teleological ideas) evident at the origins of life - or in the foundations of "lifelikeness". The "magic" to me is that really fancy systemic properties such as intention, "intelligence" and others arise as emergent properties at high levels of organization atop deeply-nested systemics.
But, my theory is not science - it is mathematics. It is a theoretical model that can hopefully be applied to disparate, and even contending, scientific theories of life. Think of differential equations or nonlinear dynamics: they can be used to model scientific theories that disagree with each other. In some ways, Organic Complex Systems is an alternative modelling paradigm to nonlinear dynamics - at least as they apply to "the living".
Grant Saul Caganoff wrote:
Hi Grant, and welcome to the group. I too have struggled with complex enterprise systems and have been intrigued by analogies with natural organisms, although at a very superficial level. Recently I met up with a long lost school buddy who has spent the last 20 years in biology. I have spent the last 20 years in IT (cut to references to Herman Hesse novels involving diverging paths between the priesthood and "worldly" pursuits...whither go I?). Anyway, I mentioned something along the lines about how natural systems seemed more adept at handling complexity. My friend pointed out that natural biological processes are mostly one jury-rigged process built on another with dubious processes often being co-opted for purposes way beyond their original "intent". When I mentioned the apparent longevity if natural systems, my friend pointed out that species regularly become extinct. My friend scoffed at the idea of anything vaguely resembling "intelligent design" which I certainly don't believe in, but which I guess I had come to naively attribute to natural evolutionary processes - probably as a result of wishful thinking. So I'm intrigued by your theory. Do you, as I believed, side with a model in which natural selection leads to elegant solutions. Or is your view more aligned with my friends assertion that the natural outcome of evolution is a ramshackle expression of "good enough" for now. Does a bilogical model of complex IT systems lead to an SAP or a Google? Regards, Saul On Friday, February 26, 2010, Grant Holland <grant.holland...@gmail.com> wrote:Dear FRIAM... I'm excited and happy to subscribe to the group. (Thanks for the invite Stephen, - and David.) For many years I have architected and implemented large-scale (mostly Java) enterprise software (applications and systems) for corporations and gov. institutions mostly in North America on behalf of a number of major computer systems vendors (e.g. Sun). However, for the past few years, my passion has turned to the question "Why is the organization and dynamics of living systems so different from those of 'engineered' ones - and why are their systemic properties so much more interesting?" From a practical perspective, I hoped to improve the engineering of large-scale computing systems from this research; but in reality I became fascinated with the theory, and so I had to (lovingly) read lots of books and research articles. Anyway, to drive toward an answer to above question, I have developed a mathematical theory of living and lifelike systems, which I call "Organic Complex Systems". A few months ago I began to write up an overview of the results of my research so far. I am nearing completion of that paper, and intend to publish it on arXiv.org in a couple of months with the hope of getting comments, and hopefully collaborators. BTW, perhaps somewhat more descriptive of this work is the subtitle of this forthcoming paper: "A Comprehensive Theoretical Apparatus for Modelling the Organization and Dynamics of Living and Lifelike Systems". Anyway, these are my immediate interests. I'm looking forward to finding out about yours. Take care, Grant ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org