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On a related note to Steve Johnson's post about menstrual cycles
and lunar cycles:
One of the things that fascinates me about how contexts get
encoded into living systems' organization is that the very fact that these
things INTERACT, or relate to each other, is also encoded!
That's the only explanation that makes sense in analyzing the entraining of the
menstrual cycles of women who are in close proximity. It's the only explanation
that makes sense of the co-evolution of various plants with the main
pollinators for each species. It's the only explanation that makes sense of
social behavior... The interactivity (or the "relational effect") is what
defines context dependence, what drives the potential, what creates infinity in
complex organization. This is why complex systems are inherently non-computable.
So that innate potential for interaction and resultant change of context is
encoded. We see it in heart cells that beat independently until they interact
with each other, whereupon they synchronize. The ability to send and receive
information, regardless of what kind it is (hormonal, chemical, visual,
auditory, electrical, etc), is evidence that this interactivity is yet another
aspect of the information encoded into our ourganization-- or, as my father
referred to that; "our internal predictive models".
This relational effect is the very same interactivity that
Physics currently disallows as a form of subjectivity or teleology, yet it is
also at the root of Einstein's discoveries. What does "relativity" mean? If you
need to know where something is in relation to another thing, before you
can understand it, then isn't that admitting that there is "information" in
that relationship?
Judith
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