Re: anticipatory models of ecosystems

["Dan Fiscus" <***>]

John,

Re: your post excerpts below, I would be very, very interested to hear
more about your work with ecosystems, the infinite set of models
approach and the anticipatory model for management of ecosystems.
This is the general area I am trying to work in, too.

Thanks for any more info, pointers to papers, etc.

Dan


John Kineman wrote:

snip

> Here I think there may be a mis-step. There are many indications that
> all formal descriptions, taken alone, must be simple. We thus cannot
> create a complex model of anything, as a purely formal entity. Rosen
> mentions this problem and says, at best one would have to create an
> infinite set of models to capture the complex behavior. This is the
> principle on which I am constructing a modeling/mapping system for
> ecosystems.
>
> I have speculated about complex models as you seem to be doing here. By
> including human intuition and judgement in, say, a decision support
> system, we can regain complexity in the model, which now becomes a
> complete natural system, not just a formal representation. Rosen's
> references to the power of analogy now become highly relevant, because
> one can argue that the full set of complex possibilities humans may
> generate may in some important ways represent the possibilities of
> nature, simply because we are products of nature and share many similar
> properties. So, in this way, we can get an anticipatory model for
> managing ecosystems. In the first way we can get a multitude of simple
> representations that answer specific questions or represent the range of
> possibilities, as we fill out the infinite set, presumably establishing
> some priorities.

snip