Sent: Thursday, August 21, 2003 6:13 PM
Subject: Re: [ROSEN] MR as ontological
JK:
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.
YES!!! I think you have exactly the idea of what my father believed on
this subject and also my own hopes for his work, namely that other "thinkers"
will be able to use them to find other truths farther down the road.
[Incidentally, my father was never really in danger
of being thought infallible by me. Not since my preschool years, anyway. I
never could believe that my father was always right. He hated saxophone music.
What's up with that? He liked to watch boxing on tv. Yuck. These are two
superficial examples, but there were others. He was aware of his own
prejudices and he poked fun at them on occasion. But I knew him well and he
was too broad in his qualities to be infallible. To borrow some of
my father's language-- I think infallibility can only exist in a formalism!
Either that, or in a population of one.]
JK:
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
I found that statement to be a fascinating point of
view. It sounds quite logical to me. The only question that it brings up
in my mind is; How do/will you describe the process-- the "natural process
that the organization of a living system magnifies"? Yes, "emergence" is an
unsatisfyingly vague term. How it happens or what exactly happens are
things that need to be figured out. My father either didn't get that far or
else was too busy looking at other aspects (of the scientific basis of the
quality we call "life"). I'm hoping that perhaps someone in this group
may come up with further work on this part of the mystery. I also want to know
what "time" is! Anybody here interested in taking my father's work on that one
and running with it???
JK:
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.
Here we are defining "consciousness"
differently than one another, I believe. My use of the term refers to
intellectual consciousness or an ability to think in abstract terms, which
is an ability many living organisms (and perhaps even a few humans?!
I saw several on the news this morning....) don't possess. "Entailment
with functional relations" is outside of my purview! I can't help you there.
What my father thought about that particular subject isn't something we talked
about. If you are talking about something that I would call ..."sensory
interaction with environment" or an organism's ability to perceive and respond
to environmental stimuli...? I guess I wouldn't have thought that is
"consciousness". In my definition, "consciousness" refers to something purely
of the mind, rather than sensory input (plants growing towards light) or
reflex or some other mindless activity that has a purpose (like sperm
swimmingtowards an egg). If consciousness means "possessing functional
entailment", then you are right; I don't think my father would say any
living organism is devoid of that.
JK:
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.
Wow. That, I have to tell you, is exactly what I was
trying to explain on the other list. You have said it much more elegantly than
I did, John. I kinda wish you had been there! I also said that it is what my
father believed to be the truth and what he was saying in his work. Some folks
don't believe the "Gaia Hypothesis" is metaphorical. My father
would say that if it isn't metaphorical, then it's hogwash or something
worse. Having grown up in Brownsville, Brooklyn, he knew all kinds of naughty
words he never used-- at least not around
me!
Judith
PS: Since your specialty is the subject of
ecosystems, I would like to ask you some questions-- my oldest daughter,
Rachel, is trying to find her niche going into second year at university and
she's looking in environmental science but she's interested in it from a
particular angle. I don't want to bore the list with the very off-topic
subject, so-- if you have some free time and you don't mind, email me, will
you? I would appreciate it.