Re: Relational "Space"

[Tim Gwinn <***>]

Dan,

Do you know of any online webpages or docs that describe Ulanowicz's
"coordinate system" and its usage? There is a link on his homepage to a page
on "Ecosystem Network Analysis"
(http://www.cbl.cees.edu/~ulan/ntwk/network.html), Is this the best (only?)
place to start?

Regards,
Tim

> -----Original Message-----
> From: ROSEN Forum [mailto:*** Behalf Of Dan
> Fiscus
> Sent: Wednesday, March 17, 2004 12:25 PM
> To: ***
> Subject: Re: Relational "Space"
>
>
> Tim,
>
> Re: relational forcing functions - yes I think of constraints too.
> And I should not have used force or forcing really, but propensity
> is likely more general term/concept as used by Bob Ulanowicz
> and Karl Popper - like an influence or tendency but not a 1:1
> mapping of cause to effect like a force would be (a maximally
> constrained propensity such that if A happens then B must always
> happen, no exceptions. For a propensity, if A happens B may
> happen but occasionally something else can happen, there is
> contingency and chance and wiggle room).
>
> Bob U. has also made nice graphs with some good candidate for
> kinds of axes we might consider for a relational space. The two
> axes he uses are for ecosystem trophic flow networks, but these
> are likely extendable to other types of flows as well as interaction
> networks, are 1) effective connectance per node, and 2) number
> of trophic levels. We might generalize these a bit to think of axis
> 1 as being degrees of freedom or perhaps number of variables
> that are interdependent, and axis 2 as hierarchical levels of
> organization or interactions between flows or influences of
> significantly differing rates of flux or residence time or turnover
> time (like matter turnovers much faster, resides a shorter time in
> 1-celled algae than for killer whales, and these rates and all those
> in between in the food chain/web are "related", since they are all
> connected via feeding relations - killer whales, in terms of their
> mass/matter, are just accumulated carnivores who are
> accumulated herbivores who are accumulated algae, and killer
> whales also release inorganic nutrients that feedback to keep the
> algae going, plus they alter the dynamics of their prey, and so on
> going back down the food chain, etc).
>
> Within the space of these two axes - like number of trophic levels
> on the X axis and number of effective connectance per node on the
> Y axis - Bob finds that all real ecosystems (he has charted 37 or so)
> are constrained and exist in a small region this coordinates system
> bounded by 3.01 as the max. effective connections per node, 1 as
> the min. effective connections per node, 2 as the min. number of
> trophic levels (i.e. autotrophs and heterotrophs - why I say life is
> always ecosystemic, not really (just) organismic) and about 4 or 5
> as the max. number of trophic levels. Other people find this same
> last limit of 4-5 to the number of trophic levels and attribute it to
> resource limits and also dynamic stability limits. No one else that I
> know of has framed in all 4 sides of this region, an area Bob U. calls
> the "window of vitality".
>
> Within this window we might say that relational conditions within a
> network of interactors, or the parameters or "measures"/metric/indices
> describing the relations, interactions are suitable for life, and outside
> this window they are not suitable for life. We can have other types of
> systems (a gas in a beaker might have much more than 3 connections
> per "node" or particle, as in many more degrees of freedom; and a
> crystalline quartz lattice might have fewer than 2 "trophic levels" - a
> single rate/frequency of oscillation, or single level of hierarchy of
> order), but these are not alive.
>
> We might also say that within this window it is the relational
> parameters or "relational dynamics" or topology that determine what
> happens with matter/energy/space/time - life makes these physical
> parameters or measures conform to its needs by the way it is organized
> in relational space. These could result in "folding" of these physical
> measures as in cause flowing from the future or function differing
> depending on folding in space or energy appearing to be created or
> not being conserved, as in a spontaneous tendency to order that runs
> counter to the arrow of time suggested by entropy and the assumption
> that energy only decays in quality during any transformation.
>
> Some rambling thoughts that may be :-) related...
>
> Dan