Glen/Nick/Marcus/Dave/et alia -
For reasons I can't begin to enumerate here, I have been unable to keep
up with this list beyond reading/skimming every day or three and each
time I formulate a response or contribution to a thread, it sits for
another cycle (1-3 days) and feels stale or misbegotten before I get it
sent. This one may fall to the same fate... if you are reading this,
then I suppose it did not.
I have always struggled to understand the multiple/myriad understandings
of Rosen's work and it's importance among this group... and this time
I feel like I'm doing a *little* better. I've always been fascinated
by all variants on the question "what is life?" (or replace "life" with:
"consciousness", "complex systems", "nature", "reality", etc.) and the
structure/function (or entropy/anentropy if you prefer) duality.
This paper:
Robert Rosen: The Well Posed Question and it's Answer - Why are
Organisms Different from Machines
<http://www.people.vcu.edu/%7Emikuleck/PPRISS3.html>
http://www.people.vcu.edu/~mikuleck/PPRISS3.html
seems to have helped me track some of the things youse guys rattle on
about when referencing Rosen... I'd be at least interested in a few
opinions about how well this guy (or just this paper) reflects your own
understanding of Rosen's work and it's relevance to "Life Itself" ?
- Steve
On 10/24/18 8:49 AM, ∄ uǝʃƃ wrote:
> My comment may be addressed a bit by the 2nd paper Roger posted (DGI). But
> my 1st reaction to your comment was an attempt to reconstruct what Rosen
> *might* have intended re: function and organization. I'm running with my
> gestalt memory, but I'll challenge it against his text later. A relational
> conception of function and organization would necessarily be temporal and
> situational. So, the function of any one component would depend
> fundamentally on how the components were related in that *specific* context
> (either a good colloidal mix or segregated). And such definitions would not
> be (arbitrarily) dependent on how the system is observed (as long as the
> system is robust to any manipulation involved in the observation). E.g. the
> role/function of a vortex in a sink drain isn't "to drain fast", perhaps it's
> to equalize pressure. And it may not even be that. These
> purposes/roles/functions are examples of preemptive registration ... imputed
> by the observer.
>
> The (M,R)-system model is (I think) an attempt to describe organization such
> that it is robust to changes in both material components (N different things
> playing the same function/role) and situational context (persistence over
> time and robust to "damage"). If I'm right, then Rosen's conception of
> organization wouldn't credit salad dressing to be more or less organized in
> either the settled or shaken state.
>
> To boot, his ideas around closure imply that components would be defined in a
> particular way. For example, your idea of "draining the water out" treats
> the water layer as a component, rather than treating each H2O molecule as a
> component. Obviously, the ontological status of the "water layer" is
> fragile, whereas that of the molecules is robust. Your idea of hierarchy
> should play well, here. Except that a *strict* hierarchy disallows
> heterogeneous operands. If a closure happens to rely on components that are
> also closures, then the you'd expect the functions/roles of those components
> to have inputs/outputs that are mixed, some of the functions operate over
> simple materials (like molecules) and others operate over closures. And some
> functions would operate over a mix of simple components and whole closures.
> A strict hierarchy would only allow, for example, a 2nd order function to
> operate over 1st order components. I've only skimmed the DGI paper. But it
> seems like the patches were defined homogeneously (e.g. 2 hop subgraphs),
> rather than allowing any sub-graph to be of arbitrary topology.
>
>
>
> On 10/23/18 11:21 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:
>> Dear Roger, and anybody else who wants to play,
>>
>>
>>
>> While waiting for my paper, /Signs and Designs/, to be rejected, I have gone
>> back to thinking about an old project, whose working title has been “/A Sign
>> Language/.” And this has led me back to Robert Rosen, whose /Life Itself/ I
>> bought almost 9 years ago and it has remained almost pristine, ever since.
>> In the chapter I am now looking at, Rosen is talking about “organization.”
>> Now, I have been thinking about organization ever since I read C. Ray
>> Carpenter’s early work on primate groups back in the late 50’s. It seemed
>> to me at the time, and it seems to me reasonable now, to define the
>> organization of a set of entities as related in some way to the degree to
>> which one can predict the behavior of one entity from knowledge about
>> another. Now the relationship is not straightforward, because neither total
>> unpredictability (every monkey behaves exactly the same as every other
>> monkey in every situation) nor total unpredictability (no monkey behaves
>> like any other monkey in ANY
>> situation) smacks of great organization. The highest levels organization,
>> speaking inexpertly and intuitively, seem to correspond to intermediate
>> levels of predictability, where there were several classes of individuals
>> within a group and within class predictability was strong but cross-class
>> predictability was weak. On my account, the highest levels of organization
>> involve hierarchies of predictability. Thus honey bees and ants are more
>> organized than starling flocks, say.
>>
>>
>>
>> This is where the matter stood at the point that I came to Santa Fe and
>> started interacting with you guys 14 years ago. You-all introduced me to a
>> totally different notion of organization based – shudder – on the second
>> law. But I have never been able to deploy your concept with any assurance.
>> So, for instance, when I shake the salad dressing, I feel like I am
>> disorganizing it, and when it reasserts itself into layers, I feel like it
>> ought to be called more organized. But I have a feeling that you are going
>> to tell me that the reverse is true. That, given the molecules of fat and
>> water/acid, that the layered state is the less organized state.
>>
>>
>>
>> Now this confusion of mine takes on importance when I try to read Rosen. He
>> defines a function as the difference that occurs when one removes a
>> component of a system. I can see no reason why the oil or the water in my
>> salad dressing cannot be thought of components of a system and if, for
>> instance, I were to siphon out the water from the bottom of my layered salad
>> dressing, I could claim that the function of the water had been to hold the
>> water up. This seems a rather lame notion of function.
>>
>>
>>
>> Some of you who have been on this list forever will remember that I raised
>> the same kind of worry almost a decade back when I noticed the drainage of
>> water from a basin was actually /slowed /by the formation of a vortex. This
>> seemed to dispel any notion that vortices are structures whose function is
>> to efficiently dispel a gradient. It also violated my intuition from
>> traffic flows, where I imagine that rigid rules of priority would facilitate
>> the flow of people crossing bridges to escape Zozobra.
>>
>>
>>
>> It’s quite possible that my confusions in this matter are of no great
>> general applicability, in which case, I look forward to being ignored.
>
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