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Sorry about the ghost message with only my (decidedly political)
signature on it-- I clicked reply and must have triggered it to send as well,
before I had a chance to either actually say something or delete the signature
for the list. My apologies.
To REPLY, then...
Chains of entailment are the main issue, when looking at the
organization of complex (or non-complex, I suppose) systems and
when creating accurate models of them. In complex systems, most of the
chains of entailment exist as unbroken loops such that "causes" and "effects" do
double (or triple, or infinite) duty in the sense that they are more than
the cause of an effect, and more than the effect of some cause, all at the same
time. In organisms (which are "anticipatory systems"), you have the further
aspect that time, itself, is part of the organization such that the future is
causing effects in the present-- and this is also a causal loop whereby the
present is causing effects in the future. I think logic dictates that while the
future is involved in a causal way in the organization of living organisms, it
is the future as predicted by internal models of the past (past behavior of the
environment over time, i.e.; past cycles of time interacting with the
environment in which an organism evolved). But science needs to study this
aspect of organismic behavior and understand how these aspects of time are
encoded into the organization itself. I have to say, if I were going into
science right now, this is where I'd be going!
So, to answer John M.'s question: Impredicativities refer to loops
of entailment in models of (the causal loops in) complex systems. The word
can, and has been, applied to the quality of those causal loops in the natural
world, but this is why it gets confusing. My point for writing that post was
that in my father's written work he DOES specify a difference and because he
does, I know he had a reason. Therefore, it is important to maintain the
difference in discussion and hopefully motivate people to go back into the
original material and re-read these aspects.
Every time I go back into my father's written work, it gets clearer
and more of his vision gets integrated into my comprehension, so I encourage
folks to always refer to the source.
Judith
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