Re: Howard's challenge #2/ Anticipation, etc...

[Judith Rosen <***>]

John Kineman beautifully expresses thoughts here that echo my own reaction
to being labeled a "follower of Rosen":
> John K. wrote: Each of us in the sciences on this list are researchers and
> practitioners in our own right. We are not following a religion or
> belief system. Whom do we characterize as the "followers of Einstein?"
> Many have read and commented on his work and applied it in their own
> way, and developed it further, but these are scientists who found the
> ideas valuable in their own work. We speak of "neo-Darwinists" but
> generally that is a pejorative term used to characterize a group
> following a particular philosophy that one is criticizing. The above
> language is often used loosly, but I would suggest some care in
> over-using it here, lest its use be taken as a slight on our
> professionalism and open mindedness.

I would like to add several things to that, namely: the fact that I have
been up front about my own motivations (what they are and what they AREN'T),
my own areas of interest (not science), and about the nature of my unusual
friendship with my parent. I have said that I'm the only person here who
LOVED the man. Even so, I am not a "follower of Rosen". That connotes blind
acceptance and adherence to another person's precepts-- a religious ferver.
It's no mistake that members of a congregation are called a "flock" (as in
"sheep"). The whole idea behind the exhortation "Just have faith!" in
orthadox religions (of any kind):  is "Don't Think. Just BELIEVE." My father
detested that whole attitude and lived his entire life THINKING. The only
reason that a list exists, which discusses Robert Rosen's scientific work,
is because everyone here is doing their own thinking and it led them to this
particular set of theories. This is not a cult of personality. That whole
idea frankly gives me the creeps!

> John Kineman wrote: Rosen's view does well with formal and final cause,
but
defaults to mechanical theory for M&E causes, with the modification of
adding semantic influences originating from the F&F causes - which is
what the mechanical theory leaves out.

John is correct here in that my father was NOT SAYING "Final cause is the
only cause and nothing can possibly be learned from looking at other areas
of Aristotelian Causation" Anyone who made that statement would, of course,
have their chest puffed up with hot air, thrust out, and a very strong stink
of superiority and conceit coming off their words. I assure the list that
does NOT describe my Robert Rosen! What my father WAS saying is that
comtemporary science leaves the whole category of final cause out which is
why biological systems are such a mystery to contemporary physics. Final
cause is the category that speaks about function. Function is a aspect that
is associated with the system complexity dimension/level of organisms, in
the Rosennean view. What he was saying was that he realized that living
systems could not be adequately approached or fully understood without
addressing this situation. When he applied the notions of Aristotle's "final
cause" to biological systems, he saw the universe (my interpretation).
Putting it another way; he saw that there are principles at work here that
are not observable when you are looking through the prism of the mechanistic
paradigm. The observables appear to be "anomolies", and paradoxes. They get
glossed over or shoved under the weight of all the stuff that DOES seem to
make sense, and are rarely ever seen again or given another thought until
the paradox becomes a brick wall to someone who's trying to find an answer
for why living organisms are alive.

>John K. wrote: The question of "what is life" would be
missing a great deal of useful data if we fail to use the fact that we
are life; or that all of our inner percepts, religious, scientific,
etc., are part of what life does, at least in our case, and probably
with precedents in other life forms, since we evolved and were not
created de novo out of dust, as it were. Blanket insistance that what is
revealed through introspection must be explained as products of life
form, and not in some way cause of it, are just another form of material
reduction. We don't know which between inner and outer views, between
functional specification and realization, is cause and which is result,
and by all that we are currently studying in R-complexity, we must count
among the greatest possibility the idea that they are both, both.

This is the proverbial "Chicken and Egg" question-- which, it so happens, is
the working title of my "plenary" talk/paper on my father and his work! This
is the reason I like the M.C. Escher drawing for the presentation-- the one
he did of the two hands each drawing one another into three dimensions (off
the page). Yin and Yang, each entailing the other, in a contstant cycle of
entailment based on functions. The closed "causal loop". The
"impredicativity".

> On Anticipation, John K. wrote: My speculation beyond this is to then ask
if any different result from the existence of a functional specification
(irrespective of its associated mechanisms) can be detected. Can we, for
example, show that evolution acting on functions is more efficient than
evolution acting reactively (essentially on only the realized structures)? I
can imagine - have been imagining - making this argument regarding plants.

My father did this already, in the book "Anticipatory Systems". Here is one
example, from page 352 (with the original mathematical notation "names"
replaced by blanks followed by a number like this: _______,#  Unfortunately,
my email program makes his original notation impossible. In my new
"notation", the blank #'s each represent a different 'name' for what he was
describing, such that blank _____,#2 is used more than once because that
specific notation of my father's is used more than once. I remain faithful
to the order he represented things in. Hopefully, it will become clear as
you read...):
[Robert Rosen wrote] "I is worthwhile to look more closely at the roles of
the initial substrate [he had been discussing a bio-chemical series of steps
in a specific process in an organism] in this pathway. Clearly     _____, #1
plays a double role here: it is on one hand a substrate for the entire
pathway, and on the other hand it is a predictor for subsequent values of
the specific substrate _______ ,#2 of the enzyme _______,#3 which it
activates. As a predictor, its role is essentially a symbolic one; it
represents, or encodes, or labels, a FUTURE property of _____,#2. In this
role, _____,#1 serves essentially as a linguistic object; it is a symbol, or
more precisely, a symbol vehicle, for the value of _____#2 to which it is
linked by the equation 6.2.6 above [not included here]. In a precise sense,
_____#1 in its capacity as activator of the enzyme _____#3 is a HORMONE
(messenger). This terminology is provocative in the present context, but it
is accurate, and is intended to be suggestive.

Let us also note that the homeostatis maintained in the pathway 6.2.1 is
obtained entirely through the modelling relation between _____#1 and
_____,#2 (i.e. entirely through symbolic processes) by virtue of the
relation [6.2.7] which links the prediction of the model to the actual rate
at which the enzyme _____#3 operates. That is, the homeostatis is maintained
entirely through pre-adaptation generated entirely on the basis of a
PREDICTED value for _____#2. In particular, there is no feedback in the
pathway, and no mechanism available for the system to "see" the value of the
quantity which is in fact controlled, or indeed any feature beyond that
embodied in the predictive model relating _____#1 to _____#2.

Let us make one further observation. The discussion so far has been couched
in terms of a property "P", which can be defined entirely in terms of the
pathway considered as an independent system. But in fact, such a pathway can
be regarded as a single component in a larger biochemical network, which
itself comprises a functional unit of an intact cell. Thus, the property "P"
of the pathway can be directly related to the properties "P' " of the
successively larger systems with which it interacts, and ultimately to
properties pertaining to the viability of the cell itself. Conversely, we
may say that, at the level of the intact cell, there will be properties
pertaining to its viability which are directly linked to the property "P" in
the pathway 6.2.1 [above]. This kind of "cascading" of properties, by means
of which properties of subsystems can be linked to properties of larger
systems not directly visible from within the subsystem, will become most
important to us shortly."
***********
I hope that wasn't completely impossible to follow! Dang that mathematical
notation. If Tim knows a way to input the equations that are referenced in
this excerpt and also the math notation "names" to the substrate, the
enzyme, etc... that might help. If you have the book, you just need to look
at the pages 349-352.

Judith