Dear Pedro,
I agree with your presentation here of the dynamics of informational
entities and the necessary dominance of the informational realm. But
my reaction to your placing the energetic and informational realm in a
kind of opposition was a Capurrian 'hm'. What is still and will be
always needed is a proper description of the relation between the two.
The principles of Logic in Reality may provide that relation without
being 'thermodynamic inflation', and I believe more attention should
be paid to the relation than any disjunction. We have had too much of
/those/.
Regarding social complexity, the long-term trend is probably
irreversible. Short-term, in spite of the 'inventions', processes of
regression and reduction are now flourishing world-wide. Fukuyama is
one of people I personally trust least to say what's wrong here.
Gloomily,
Joseph
----- Original Message -----
*From:* Pedro C. Marijuan <mailto:pcmarijuan.i...@aragon.es>
*To:* 'fis' <mailto:fis@listas.unizar.es>
*Sent:* Friday, December 11, 2015 1:36 PM
*Subject:* Re: [Fis] Sustainability through multilevel research:
Dear FISers,
I agree with Loet's views (for once! :-) ). The energy flow
supporting the biosphere and society as a whole have not much
explanatory power regarding the bonding complexity of contemporary
societies. Of course, it is an interesting exercise, particularly
concerning the limits of sustainability, but we have had so much
thermodynamic inflation that it is very difficult adding anything
relevant. Irrespective of its sophistication, the energetic realm
can hardly substitute for the informational realm.
About the intriguing interrelationship between kinship and
nonkinship modalities of human bonding, a very interesting view
was drafted by Francis Fukuyama (1995), centered on "trust". He
was distinguishing between "familial" centered societies and "high
trust" societies. In European terms (exaggerating), it is the
dichotomy between the Mediterranean societal culture and the
Anglosaxon culture. It is not a black and white narrative, as each
polarity has advantages and disadvantages (think on wine &
Mediterranean food!), and actually today each country and each
culture has some terrible mix of everything, but it is interesting
just to see how the two kinds of bonding may interact within a
complex society. I also penned a few ideas about the matter in my
recent "How the Living is in the world" (DOI information:
10.1016/j.pbiomolbio.2015.07.002.) I am copying below a paragraph
(maybe a little bit long--excuses). /
This coarse reflection on the dynamics of successive
“informational entities” helps us make sense of fundamentals of
social evolution. The transition to a new social order, more or
less ‘revolutionary’, tends to be produced by new information
channels and communication practices that support the emergence of
new ways to organize the structures of social self-production.
Thus, the development of social complexity appears as irreversibly
linked to a chain of historical inventions for communication and
knowledge generation: numbers, writing, alphabet, codices,
universities, printing press, books, steam engines, means of
communication, computers, Internet, etc. (Stonier, 1990; Hobart
and Schiffman, 1998). This succession of fundamental inventions
has dramatically altered the “infostructure” of modern societies,
and subsequently the informational formula for being in the world
has been applied with multiple variants along that complexity
runaway: with plenty of room generated by the new information
tools, not at the bottom but at the supra-individual top. We
should not forget that the momentous Scientific Revolution was
preceded by what has been called the silent “corporate revolution”
(Huff, 2011), which opened the way for collective organizations
legally autonomous in European cities during XIII and XIV
centuries: universities, parliaments, counsels, municipalities,
professional colleges, guilds, mercantile associations, charities,
schools, etc. It was this Medieval awakening in the cities of
Western Europe what made possible the later hyperinflation of
autonomous collective organizations, –“information based”– growing
exponentially and propelling all the further complexity of modern
societies./
All the best--Pedro
Loet Leydesdorff wrote:
Dear colleagues,
I don’t consider it as fruitful to recycle the argument that
society were to be modeled as a meta-biology. The biological
explanation can perhaps explain behavior of individuals and
institutions; but social coordination more generally involves
also the dynamics of expectations. These are much more abstract
although conditioned by the historical layer. For example, one
cannot expect to explain the /trias politica/ or the rule of law
biologically. These cultural constructs regulate our behavior
from above, whereas the biological supports existence and living
from below. The historical follows the axis of time, whereas the
codification (albeit historical in the instantiations) also
restructures and potentially intervenes and reorganizes social
relations from the perspective of hindsight.
In analogy to codifications such as the juridical ones,
scientific knowledge provides the code for technological
intervention. This type of knowledge is human-specific; perhaps,
we are also able to build machines that mimick it. This
technological evolution is going on for centuries. If I look up
from my screen, I look into the gardens which have a typical
Dutch polder vegetation. The polder was made in the 17^th century
and replaced the natural ecology of marsh land and lakes. The
order of the explanation was thus inverted: the constructed
structures (instead of the constructing agencies) increasingly
carry the system. The constructs don’t have to be material; see
my example of the rule of law. It is not a religion, but a
dynamics of expectations. Replacing it with a biology misses the
point.
Best,
Loet
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Loet Leydesdorff
Professor, University of Amsterdam
Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR)
l...@leydesdorff.net <mailto:l...@leydesdorff.net>;
http://www.leydesdorff.net/
Honorary Professor, SPRU,
<http://www.sussex.ac.uk/spru/>University of Sussex;
Guest Professor Zhejiang Univ. <http://www.zju.edu.cn/english/>,
Hangzhou; Visiting Professor, ISTIC,
<http://www.istic.ac.cn/Eng/brief_en.html>Beijing;
Visiting Professor, Birkbeck <http://www.bbk.ac.uk/>, University
of London;
http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=ych9gNYAAAAJ&hl=en
<http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=ych9gNYAAAAJ&hl=en>
*From:* Fis [mailto:fis-boun...@listas.unizar.es] *On Behalf Of
*Nikhil Joshi
*Sent:* Friday, December 11, 2015 9:47 AM
*To:* FIS Group
*Cc:* Nikhil Joshi
*Subject:* Re: [Fis] Sustainability through multilevel research:
The Lifel, Deep Society Build-A-Thon - 1
Dear Guy and FIS colleagues,
Thank you for your comments and the copy of your article. Your
views on the roots of biological systems and their evolution in
dissipate systems are very interesting. Your paper reminds me of
a paper by Virgo and Froese on how simple dissipative structures
can demonstrate many of the characteristics associated with
living systems, and the work of Jeremy England at MIT.
Given your research focus and expertise in looking at living
systems as dissipative systems, I would appreciate your views and
assistance in understanding the energetics involved in the common
multilevel organisational pattern (CMOP) (presented in the paper
II of the kick-off mail).
At first glance, it appears that different levels in
self-organization in living systems a core dynamic in living
systems is comprised of a cycle between a class of more-stable
species (coupled-composite species) and a class of less-stable
species (decoupled-composite species), see paper II in the
kick-off mail.
hence:
Level 1: Molecular self-organization, involves a cycle
between oxidised molecules (more stable) and reduced molecules
(less stable) in molecular self-organization in
photosynthesis and cellular metabolism [Morowitz and smith].
Level 2: Cellular self-orgnaization, involves a cycle between
autotrophic species (more stable) and heterotrophic species (less
stable) in ecosystems [Stability of species types as defined
by- Yodzis and Innes Yodzis, P.; Innes, S. Body Size and
Consumer-Resource Dynamics. /Am. Nat./ 1992, /139/, 1151].
Level 3: Social self-self-organization, involves a cycle between
kinship-based social groups (more stable) and non-kinship-based
social groups (less stable) [Stability of species types as
suggested in Paper II, based on an extension of work of Robin
Dunbar and others].
At level 1 (molecular self-organiztion)- solar energy is stored
in the high-energy reduced molecules. Do you see a possibility
that living systems could store energy in cycles involving less
stable species at the two other levels (level 2, and 3) as
well? (When I speak of stored energy, I am referring to
stored-energy as introduced by Mclare, and discussed by Ulanowicz
and Ho [Sustainable Systems as Organisms?, BioSystems 82 (2005)
39–51].
These are early thoughts and your views are much appreciated.
Many Thanks,
Warm regards,
Nikhil Joshi
On 01-Dec-2015, at 10:27 pm, Guy A Hoelzer <hoel...@unr.edu
<mailto:hoel...@unr.edu>> wrote:
Hi All,
I have been following this thread with interest as much as
time permits. I think multilevel approaches to understanding
information flow is an important one. I also think the
structure of natural systems exhibits both hierarchical and
heterarchical features. The hierarchies we formally
recognize can be extremely useful, but they are rarely
exclusive of alternatives. Here is a link to a paper Mark
Tessera and I published a couple of years ago arguing for one
particular hierarchy of multilevel emergence in physical
systems connecting lower level physical systems to biological
systems:
Tessara, M., and G. A. Hoelzer. 2013. On the thermodynamics
of multilevel evolution. Biosystems 113: 140–143.
Regards,
Guy
Guy Hoelzer, Associate Professor
Department of Biology
University of Nevada Reno
Phone: 775-784-4860
Fax: 775-784-1302
hoel...@unr.edu <mailto:hoel...@unr.edu>
--
-------------------------------------------------
Pedro C. Marijuán
Grupo de Bioinformación / Bioinformation Group
Instituto Aragonés de Ciencias de la Salud
Centro de Investigación Biomédica de Aragón (CIBA)
Avda. San Juan Bosco, 13, planta X
50009 Zaragoza, Spain
Tfno. +34 976 71 3526 (& 6818)
pcmarijuan.i...@aragon.es
http://sites.google.com/site/pedrocmarijuan/
-------------------------------------------------
------------------------------------------------------------------------
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