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 <[email protected]> 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
