Re: Operational Closure

[Steve Johnson <***>]

One 


--- Howard Pattee <***> wrote:

> 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
> 
> 
>                    
>        
> 


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