Re: Operational Closure

[Howard Pattee <***>]

Steve, Tim, and Judith,

In my opinion, Rosen’s “closed to efficient causation” and 
Varela’s “operational closure” refer to different models of life. As I 
have pointed before, Rosen’s relational view of life was essentially timeless or 
synchronic. Relational biology models focus on abstract forms, not molecular structures. 
In this sense, Rosen was more of a Platonist than a Materialist. That is why at a basic 
conceptual level he did not see physics as the best language to talk about life. That is 
also why Rosen’s models did not address the problem of individuation or how 
populations of individual organisms behave, as Tim pointed out. Relational models do not 
view creative evolution as central to life, because evolution depends on the statistics 
of populations, and neither statistics nor populations are addressed in relational 
models. 
 
Varela was a combination of somewhat mystical philosopher and experimental 
neurophysiologist. The following passages give a rough idea of his basic motivation.

Francisco Varela: "I guess I've had only one question all my life. Why do emergent 
selves, virtual identities, pop up all over the place creating worlds, whether at the 
mind/body level, the cellular level, or the transorganism level? This phenomenon is 
something so productive that it doesn't cease creating entirely new realms: life, mind, 
and societies. Yet these emergent selves are based on processes so shifty, so ungrounded, 
that we have an apparent paradox between the solidity of what appears to show up and its 
groundlessness. That, to me, is a key and eternal question."
 
"The idea arose, also at that time, that the local rules of autopoiesis might be 
simulated with cellular automata. At that time, few people had ever heard of cellular 
automata, an esoteric idea I picked up from John von Neumann — one that would be 
made popular by the artificial-life people."

"In order to deal with the circular nature of the autopoiesis idea, I developed some bits 
of mathematics of self-reference, in an attempt to make sense out of the bootstrap 
— the entity that produces its own boundary. The mathematics of self-reference 
involves creating formalisms to reflect the strange situation in which something produces 
A, which produces B, which produces A. That was 1974. Today, many colleagues call such 
ideas part of complexity theory."
 
Howard