Re: Raising Issues - complexity and health

[Tim Gwinn <***>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: ROSEN Forum [mailto:*** Behalf Of Dan
> Fiscus
> Sent: Thursday, April 01, 2004 9:21 AM
> To: ***
> Subject: Re: Raising Issues - complexity and health
---snip---
> 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.

Dan,

Perhaps what is needed is a methodology for linking models at different
levels, which allows for models to alter other models. By this, I do not
mean simply alter the states or values of variables, but to alter the model,
the inferential structure, itself. What should guide the specifics of that
alteration process is not obvious to me. It could be a preprogrammed set of
inferential structures that a model switches between, but this is rather
simplistic. Further, as inferential structures change, so too would the
inferential relations to other models likely change. One could think of it
as an inferential network with loops, where the inferential relations are
changing as well as the inferential structures at the "nodes".

Regards,
Tim