Re: Raising Issues - complexity and health

[Dan Fiscus <***>]

Judith, Jack and all,

Re: attempts to apply complex, Rosen modeling and push things
forward, to give Jack a picture to use as basis to "cut metal", to
start out with medicine, a comment re:

Judith Rosen wrote, Rosen quotes:

> "On the other hand, we are now free to envision control strategies involving
> controllers that are themselves complex. On the face of it, there is nothing
> to prevent such controllers from constituting the desired magic bullets. In
> fact, for complex systems in general, complex controls offer the only
> reasonable hope."
>
> "It is to early to tell how such ideas will develop in the future. My
> purpose here has been to introduce some of the flavor of the concept of
> complexity, how it pertains to basic biological issues, and how it may force
> a complete reevaluation, not only of our science, but of our concepts of art
> and craft as well. Indeed, it may turn out, as it has before, that the
> pursuit of craft may provide the best kind of probe to guide our science
> itself."

I have studied the concept of health in general, qualitative ways and in
specific, quantifiable ways for quite a while. My masters degree work
was toward developing a measure of soil health useful to aid assessment
of total agro-ecosystem health on individual farms and as an operational
aspect of an EPA program to monitor status and trends in agro-ecosystem
health nationally. The difficulty of this task of "quantifying quality" led
me to deep issues like complexity, origin of life, What is life?, Rosen,
etc.
One thing I would offer now is that I think both health and any
corrective actions hoping to restore health (and any models of either)
must be complex in the sense of bridging two extremes of perspective or
reference frame that are part space-time scale and part causal hierarchy
- the local (perhaps approximately mechanistic, less cycling and
impredicativity, more linearity and predicativity) and the global (systemic
and not anywhere near to mechanistic, lots of cycling and impredicativity,
little or no linearity and predicativity). I know these issues are
ecological,
but I think they are key to any ideas/models of organismal
health/medicine as well, and our neglect of them in the past has led to
issues like antibiotic resistance, systemic diseases such as multiple
chemical (environmental) sensitivity and perhaps autoimmune diseases
and many other examples where local/organismal health has advanced
while global/systemic health has lost major ground.

So the central crux becomes how to model health and health correction
or maintenance in such a way to cover both bases - the local/organismal
and the global/biospheric. Unless we get both right from the start and
maintain correct inter-relations and inter-dependencies, the two will
always be at odds, in conflict, one will eventual drag the other down,
degrade health, etc. While we explore these issues, it may help to
consider how both causes and effects related to health can be non-local
(and even non-localizable), diffuse, distributed, systemic,
non-mechanistic, non-linear, impredicative.

There are some other topics that may be relevant, like the first step to
systemic healing may need to be a healing of the mind as in healing the
"epistemic cut", and a perhaps related link to the work on "collective
intelligence" in software that deals with interplay between individual
(single agent) versus collective (multi-agent) "utility functions", but
I'll
save those for another post...

Some thoughts,

Dan