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Another part of that same essay (from "Essays on Life, Itself")
that speaks to John K.'s concerns:
Robert Rosen said:
"There are many, seemingly different,
disciplines or areas of human
knowledge and endeavor that share striking similarities between them. These similarities, or analogies, are
often useful and illuminating because the lessons learned from one can often be
applied successfully to many others. This is particularly true, in my
experience, with the lessons learned from Biology.
For example, one would not be alone in the belief that biology and economics are
markedly different disciplines. However, many years ago, in 1975, I was invited
to participate in a meeting about ?Adaptive Economics?, despite my protests that
I knew nothing about economics. Clearly, the organizers were of the opinion that
?adaptive? is universally good; a word impossible to use pejoratively, and what
was wrong with our economic system was, in some sense, its failure to be
sufficiently adaptive. Equally clearly, they wanted me only to provide some
biological examples of adaptation, to lend indirect support to this view. I
thought I could easily provide a catalog of such, and set out to write a paper
in this vein. However, I ultimately found myself writing something quite
different. The lessons from biology turned out to be that ?adaptiveness?, while
useful in economic systems, is not
universally good; too much of it, in the wrong places, will tear cooperative
structures apart.
Indeed, it turns out
that organism physiology is very careful in its apportionment of adaptivity;
survival depends on it. This is not the lesson the organizers wanted me to
deliver from biology, but it is the one which biology itself wanted to deliver;
one small excerpt from its Encyclopedia. To ignore these lessons is to invoke
another situation that has come out of my work: the subject of side-effects.
Side-effects are
unintended and/or undesirable
consequences that arise inevitably whenever attempts to use simple controls on a
complex system are employed. As I show in the following, these side-effects
generically cascade into a devastating infinite regress. Biology, seen in this light, consists of
illustrations of how such cascading side-effects can be forestalled or avoided; however,
the result is, inevitably, a system with relational properties very like my
(M,R)-systems, which are a model of the essence of ?Complexity? in my use of the
term. Specifically, there must be a characteristic ?backward loop?, relating a
?next stage? in such a cascade with earlier stages; a future with a past. This,
it should be noted, is the hallmark of an impredicativity; one of the
characteristics of a ?Complex?
system itself, and one of the main pillars on which my work defining
?Complexity? is built."
So, if modelling some complex biological system like global weather, the
place to use the information about complexity is in developing models that
reflect the basic hallmarks of organismic levels of complexity. Relating a "next
stage" with earlier stages is anticipatory. Therefore, anticipatory means of
control are what he is saying are called for in therapies and cures. In
order for your model to be of help to you in the design of these therapies, the
model has to show the anticipatory aspect of living
systems.
Judith
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