Greetings

["John Kineman" <***>]

Greetings,

I would like to introduce myself to the members of this list, some of
whom already know me from previoius discussions. I am an avid follower
of Rosen's work and am applying it in the field of ecosystem informatics
at NOAA and the University of Colorado. I became aware of Rosen's work
in 1998 as I was revising a 1991 paper on the Gaia hypothesis.  I
presented that paper at the 1999 annual meeting of the ISSS at Asilomar.
It was  titled "Non-mechanical ontology in the explanation of organism
and evolution." I had also arranged a panel discussion for that meeting
as a SIG sponsored activity, which Dr. Rosen himself, despite his
failing health, had agreed to attend. His health gave out that year. Don
Mikuleckey agreed to attend the session in his stead, but obviously the
event took on a very different character. I regret that I was not
fortunate enough to have met Rosen in such a venue.

One result of this initial activity was to create a Special Integration
Group of the ISSS called "What is Life/Living" at the 1999 meeting. My
original idea for the SIG was to focus on Rosen's concepts and to relate
them to other ideas. However, the SIG has covered many different ideas
and only a few of the participants knew of Rosen. The SIG has now had 5
annual meetings and there are about 40 contributed papers on varioius
aspects of life. It is not focused specifically on Rosen's work, but I
am more convinced than ever that only Rosen's approach can bring harmony
to all the diverse approaches and help relate them. We may eventually
attempt some kind of synthesis in which I will try to weave the
fundamental concepts together. Meanwhile, I participated in the VCU
discussions, so many of my comments can be found in that archive, and at
PCP-L.

Rosen's philosophy and theory (I belive it was both) pervades all of my
current work and I plan that it will now be the foundation for
completion of a Ph.D. dissertation, that I abandoned 18 years ago when I
joined NOAA, partly because I was disappointed in the view of life being
presented at the University at the time. Perhaps now I can help change
that view. What I have found is that these ideas are appropriate for
today's issues regarding ecosystem complexity and management (and of
course, much more). I am developing these ideas in the context of my
paid work, providing information services to support "Integrated
Regional Assessments," such as the Millennium Assessment and a number of
regional assessments sponsored by NOAA, called "Regional Integrated
Science and Assessment" programs. All of this is still developmental,
but I do manage to get funding from time to time, for practical
applications. One application I have been developing over the past 4
years is a Rosenesque approach to mapping ecosystem functions and
ecological potentials. It has yet to be published.

In later ISSS papers, I applied my interpretation of Rosen to modify my
previous thoughts and create the concept of "autevolution"
(self-evolution); a term I havn't seen used and thus tried to define. I
then took a wild excursion thinking about cosmology, and I developed a
meta-model based on a modeling relation between imaginary and real
numbers to describe space-time. This turned out to recapitulate much of
E.A. Milne's Kinematic Relativity, which was never fully evaluated as
far as I can determine. Some predictions of the model are testable and
it continues to intrigue me.

A particular feature of my interpretation (which was challenged by
Mikuleckey) was to expand on the idea of embedding modeling relations
within modeling relations, thus building a picture of an infinite
hierarchy of "larger" and "smaller" systems, as I believe Dr. Rosen saw
it and expressed it. This takes the modeling relation out of the
epistemological realm and treats it ontologically -- i.e., as a
foundational principle in how we might think nature operates. So, a
particular result of these explorations was to form the belief that, for
the true life scientist, life should not be seen as  "emerging" from a
physical reality (that is not the parsimonious view of life), but rather
the universe should be seen as fundamentally (ontologically) describable
as a living reality based on Rosen's modeling relation, from which
physical nature can be extracted, as Rosen described in the definition
of a mechanism. This places reality on a perceptual basis, which is then
consistent with perrenial philosophies of the East and some newer
concepts of reality emerging in the West.

These thoughts are now leading me to consider the role of "information"
(as a partial label for the formal domain) in nature in more practical
modes, particularly in regard to ecosystems, their management, and
informations system supporting management and decision making. In this
regard I have found the work of James Kay and Robert Ulanowicz extremely
interesting. Both are followers of Rosen's ideas.

I am very excited to see this list and associated web pages, and the
direct participation of the Rosen family. The archive so far is already
extremely interesting. I look forward to future discussions.

Sincerely,
John J. Kineman