Re: Greetings

["John M" <***>]

Welcome, John, I know you are busy but it was just about time to
"reactivate" you in Rosenland.
The best
John M
----- Original Message -----
From: "John Kineman" <***>
To: <***>
Sent: Thursday, August 14, 2003 2:20 PM
Subject: Greetings


> 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
>