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To continue with some fundamental descriptions, on page 41 of
"Life, Itself":
Robert Rosen wrote: "Our first basic dualism has separated the
universe into a self and its ambience. For each of us, this separation is
absolute, indubitable, and unequivocal, though it may be different for different
selves. Our second basic dualism concerns the way we partition our ambiences,
the way we manage our perceptions of the external world.
At this level, we have no universal principles to guide us,
nothing given to us, like the distinction between the inner world of the self
and the outer world, what we called the ambience. It rests rather on a consensus
imputed to the ambience, rather than on some objective and directly perceptible
property of the ambience. It is the dualism between systems and their
environments.
Roughly speaking, a system in the ambience is a collection of
percepts that seem to us to belong together. It would be hard to imagine a less
precise definition of anything, but that is inherent in the very idea of system.
The abstract concept of systemhood is indeed a very difficult one to grapple
with, as is the related notion of set-ness. It is at the same time familiar in
the concrete garb of everyday experience and alien when we attempt to
characterize it in isolation, as a thing in itself, apart from any specific
material embodiment.
Indeed, in mathematics, set-ness is such a basic and familiar
notion that it took two thousand years for it to be recognized explicitly; even
then, it took a strange mind (as contemporaries reported Cantor was) to see it
and to deal with it. Once it was pointed out, and its central role in
mathematical thought made explicit, then everyone saw it. Indeed, within a
generation, and in the teeth of paradoxes it had already spawned, David Hilbert
was saying, "From the paradise created for us by Cantor, let no man drive us
forth."
The notion of system-hood is at that same level of generality
and plays the same kind of role in our management of the ambience. As noted it
segregates things that "belong together" from those that do not, at least from
the subjective perspective of a specific self, a specific observer. These things
that belong together, and whatever else depends on them alone, are segregated
into a single bag called SYSTEM; whatever lies outside, like the complement of a
set, constitutes ENVIRONMENT.
The partition of ambience into system and environment, and even
more, the imputation of that partition to the ambience itself as an inherent
property thereof, is a basic though fateful step for science. For once the
distinction is made, attention focuses on system. Systems and environment are
thenceforth perceived in entirely different ways, represented and described in
fundamentally different terms. To anticipate somewhat, system gets described by
"states", which are determined by observation; environment is characterized
rather by its effects on system. Indeed it is precisely at this point that, as
we shall see, fundamental trouble begins to creep in; already
here.
The growth of science, as a tool for dealing with the ambience,
can be seen as a search for special classes of systems into which the ambience
may be partitioned, such that (1) the systems in that special class are more
directly apprehensible than others, and (2) everything in the ambience, any
other way of partitioning it into systems, is generated by, or reducible to,
what happens in that fundamental class. Newtonian mechanics, for instance,
thought it had found such a class; so, today does quantum theory. But it is,
above all, a special class, embodying an equally special way of coping with the
system-environment dualism itself. Whether this is enough is, at root, the basic
question."
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