Gary, yes, you're exactly right about this: i started off that paragraph
trying to paraphrase Prigogine and then ended it summarizing Salthe.
Thanks for the positive response to the The Cosmic Bellows! Would it be
an unforgivable pun if i called that a "puff"? :-)
gary F.
====== Gary R. wrote: ========
For right now, however, just a quick question. You wrote:
>One thing i should clarify -- it was misleading of me to post the
>following as if i were summarizing Prigogine:
>
>[[ Prigogine pointed out that under certain conditions, self-organizing
>processes can occur spontaneously to facilitate the reduction of a
>gradient; thus we have entropy production giving rise to the organic,
>"order out of chaos". The irony is that if we look at the whole system
>or universe in which the organism is nested, we see order as emerging
>in
>order to produce disorder more thoroughly, with thermodynamic
>equilibrium acting as "final cause" or attractor in the state space of
>the universe. ]]
>
>When i later forwarded this post of mine to Stan Salthe, he commented:
>
>[[ That is the way, I think, I have been the only one putting it (this
>reference to the Universe). ]]
>
>The above is actually a thumbnail sketch of the _Cosmos and History_
>article i mentioned, and thus it should be attributed more to Salthe
>than to Prigogine, although dissipative structures do play a central
>role in Stan's view of the universe.
>
>
>
Would you --and would Stan--think that it's fair to say that one could
suggest that the first half of your own quoted quote above does
summarize Prigogine
>[[ Prigogine pointed out that under certain conditions, self-organizing
>processes can occur spontaneously to facilitate the reduction of a
>gradient; thus we have entropy production giving rise to the organic,
>"order out of chaos".
>
And indeed you strongly suggest that at least for you this might be the
case by quoting the title of Prigogine/Stenger's book, Order Out of
Chaos: Man's New Dialogue with Nature. On the other hand, and having
just complete The Cosmic Bellows, the next sentence does seem to me to
pertain uniquely to Salthe's theory. So you wrote:
> The irony is that if we look at the whole system
>or universe in which the organism is nested, we see order as emerging
>in
>order to produce disorder more thoroughly, with thermodynamic
>equilibrium acting as "final cause" or attractor in the state space of
>the universe. ]]
>
Perhaps Stan is the only person who has put it this way in "reference to
the universe" as he commented.
---
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