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Re: MR as ontological

Hi Judith,

It is really great to have someone who interacted with these ideas directly. What a shame to now have to do detective work on his opinions. I am personally of the view, however, that a person's greatest contribution may not be in providing the exact statement of reality (RR himself seemd to prove that would be impossible), but to raise the right questions. In the meley of discussion that follows, his work thus lives on in many forms, there not being a single right statement.

Some notes below:

Judith Rosen wrote:
I think my father did, indeed, believe that "life" emerges as an effect of
the particular "complex" organization of the system we call "organism".
However, he did not see any contradiction in the fact that life, or
livingness, is a "general principle" in the universe and it is also an
emergent characteristic of a certain level of complexity.
This makes a great deal of sense to me. I believe it has to be viewed as both. It also seems that his preference was clearly for associating life with organization, hence seeing it as an emergent wholistic phenomenon. For my part, I agree, but also find "emergence" to be somewhat unsatisfying. I prefer to think that the organization of a living systems "magnifies" a natural process (which I think is represented by the MR) which we may then recognize as life because its behavior becomes so obvious and present in everyday experiene. I am not suggesting that Dr. Rosen had this specific idea as well, but that it is a logical extension of these views that resolves the problem of ontology, much as you imply in the above description. It is at least, I believe, compatible.
The more general
principle here is his definition of complexity, of which life is a
consequence or effect. Consciousness is another one. Not all organisms are
conscious, and it is a matter of degree or magnitude of complexity that is
at work in the reason why.
Is it degree, or did he imagine that some organisms can be absolutely un-conscious??? Conscioiusness is another term that gets defined on different levels. Human consciousness is more limited than the idea of general awareness or entailment with functional relations. In the later case, I would doubt that he could say anything is completely unconscious, i.e., devoid of all functional entailment.

 In conversations we had about life on other
planets in other solar systems and galaxies; he was sure it must exist, but
speculated that it may be so completely different from us that we may not
recognize it as life. It would, he was sure, exhibit exactly the kind of
complexity in its own way, as life on Earth does. In other words, it may be
made of other "stuff" but the quality of livingness would be due to its
organization in exactly the same way as an Earth organism's life is.
Since his view establishes the unknowability of reality, and the existence of multiple, simultaneous, and equally valid (for their own pruposes) perspectives, it would be understandable to imagine a life form that is so totally different than us in its awarenesses and interactions with nature that we could not even be able to recognize it as aware. Again, this would seem to preclude any statement that we could now something to be "not aware", i.e., not conscious in the general sense.
My father believed that there IS a difference between an organism and a
complex system that is not an organism (but full of life). He said that in
the latter case, (eg: the global ecosystem), the system is not "living" as
in "alive", but is full of living things. The language he used would be more
along the lines of what Tim was saying. This is where the levels of
complexity that I posted once before comes in handy. My father said,
specifically and in so many words to me, that the global ecosystem was not a
living organism and therefore was not as complex as a single celled
organism. I was amazed by that statement, and it was discussed at great
length, believe me. Size really doesn't matter!

This also makes immanent sense to me. I think what he must have been expressing is the degree to which a system achieves closure to various causes. Ecosystems contain whole organisms that are more closed than the ecosystem itself. Ecosystems (my specialty) are a mixed bag of physical processes and biological components. Even the idea of  self-maintaining ecological communities is seriously challenged these days, although there are certainly many negative feedbacks in an ecosystem or community that provide stability, resiliance, etc. Ecosystems are arbitrarily defined (by us) and don't have exact boundaries. The Gaia hypothesis and ideas of the global ecosystem constituting a "super-organism" are primarily  metaphorical in the case of the Earth. Perhaps, some spectulate, it will acheive the status of an organism through the global electronic brain we are building - who knows. That could establish sufficient entailment in the Earth's ecology to allow its repair functions to achieve the level of replication,  and thus to evolve as an organism. An intriguing possibility in the direction of human evolution. But meanwhile, in that sense it is not yet as fully entailed as an organism.

-jjk

Judith


----- Original Message -----
From: "John Kineman" <***>
To: <***>
Sent: Monday, August 18, 2003 5:48 PM
S
  
Here I disagree with your division into "living/complex phenomena" and
"organism". To me, the division is "complex phenomena" and
"living/organism".



      
Then we would have to claim that everything living is an organism??? My
statement is that all organisms are living, and that everything living
is complex. But I would advise holding out the possibility that "life
itself" - defined according to principle - could preceed organisms. The
alternative view is that life emerges with the organization of an
organism - that life is associated with that type of organization, not a
more general one.

We should also keep the distinction between "what is alive" = a life
form, and "life itself" which refers to a principle or general phenomena
of which oganism is an instance. Rosen implies this distinction. So then
the question we have identified in this dialog is if life exists as a
general principle, or if it "emerges" (definition?) a part of the
organization of an organism.
    

  
J. Kineman