Re: Greetings

["Tim Gwinn" <***>]

Hi John,

Welcome to the group!  Thanks for including your bio and interests regarding
Rosen and his ideas.

Your remarks bring up some points for possible discussion:

1) MR as ontological
I am unsure about the idea of interpreting the modelling relation
ontologically (as a "foundational principle"). To me, the modelling relation
is intrinsically epistemological, especially insofar as the
encoding/decoding are unentailed within the MR itself and must be imputed to
the MR from an external source. Rosen refers to this as a "creative act" on
the part of the person building the MR.

Further, the choice of a certain collection of percepts into a system is,
according to Rosen, an entirely arbitrary choice on our part - one that is
guided only by our consensus or intuition that those percepts seem to us to
belong together. I do not see how this can be turned into an ontological
principle.


2) Kay & complexity
I tried to read up on Kay, but alas, it seems the links from his page
(http://www.jameskay.ca/) to his papers are down. However, from this page on
thermodynamics and ecology (http://www.jameskay.ca/about/thermo.html), it
seems that he is deeply entrenched in the idea of thermodynamics as being
key to self-organization: "The emergence of self-organizing structures
provides an avenue for dissipation that otherwise would not exist". The idea
being that dissipation toward equilibrium is not only inevitable, but that
self-organizing structures are generated naturally by this dissipative
tendency towards optimizing the rate of dissipation. At least, that is what
I gather from it.

But this tendency toward equilibrium is based upon a thermodynamics of
closed systems as *the* standard, in which equilibrium is an attractor for
the dynamics of *the* system. The use of the properties of closed systems as
a paradigm for all systems is, however, a poor one. To quote Rosen: "The
entropy function, which was a Lyapunov function for the autonomous dynamics
when the system was closed and isolated, will in general have no special
relation to the new dynamics [of the opened system], and loses thereby all
its original theoretical significance." [EL p. 251]

There are in nature no ecosystems that are closed thermodynamically and
therefore, those ecosystems will not have equilibrium as an attractor the
dynamics within it. So, the use of entropy (based on closed-system
thermodynamics) as a causal agent for promoting self-organization within any
given ecosystem is invalidated. As Rosen says "the problems associated with
open systems are dynamical problems and not thermodynamics ones." [EL p.
252]


I am interested to hear your comments on these or other topics. Thanks for
participating. :)
Regards,
Tim



> -----Original Message-----
> From: ROSEN Forum [mailto:*** Behalf Of John
> Kineman
> Sent: Thursday, August 14, 2003 2:21 PM
> To: ***
> 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