Re: Could you give me your analysis of this?

> Conform with your additional defining: this is a necessary, but by far not
> sufficent description. ("one of") - IMO complex systems (any, as everything
> else) have open connections with 'the world outside our model', do we
> recognize them, or not. We cannot list all sufficient causes, unless we
> restrict the topical view to be explained. I still doubt the 'working'
> closed loops without (un)closed triggering, maybe indirectly. "A system does
> not DECIDE by itself."

In the discussion about atomic organization and its similarities to the organization of living systems:
> John M. wrote: In my reductionist chemistry, however, I can condone a "repair" of an
> atom: - from its anion-form, ('plus' electron) by discharging that electron
> for certain stability -reconfirmation into the more stable (?) (neutral)
> atomic format. In certain cases it goes spontaneously as rearrangement.
> (Indeed a stability-induced "closed to efficient causation"). However the
> opposite process: to take 'in' an electron from the 'environment' into its
> 'body' is metabolism at its best.
> Restoration is repair, just as "imbibing" from the environment and building
> it into its body is metabolism. Should we call an atom "alive"? I may do it.
> Maybe you can paste other 'necessary' conditions into the satate of 'being
> alive' to exclude atoms.
I believe what you are seeing is complexity. That's the similarity. Not life. In my father's work, life or "livingness" is an extension, a magnification, of the effects of complex organization in a system.

The stability of atomic structure is very different from the behavior of living organisms, even though both are due to complexity. Complex systems do manifest a stability that is not found in simple systems or mechanisms. However, atoms do not "repair" themselves anymore than water does when it is displaced by an object and then the displacement is removed. That is not repair, as the term was intended in an (M,R)-System. There is far less entailment in an atom than in an organism and thus what I'm going to call a "lesser magnitude" of complex organization.

Neither is "ice absorbing heat from the sun on a spring day and melting" a description of a process comparable to "metabolism". You may say these are just language distinctions, but language is intended to mean something. It refers to qualities in the natural world; those qualities are what they are, regardless of what we call them. As Shakespeare pointed out; "A Rose, by any other name, would smell as sweet." But, if we are both supposedly speaking English, and you tell me there is a "skunk" in my garden... we will not be communicating very well.