Re: Operational Closure

[Howard Pattee <***>]

Tim wrote:
I don't think of Rosen as "more of a Platonist" because he focused on system
organization. I think his argument was quite the opposite: that organization
was as physical as anything else, and therefore models of organization were
valid models, and belonged to an expanded view of physics.

HP: Of course, forms have physical realizations. By “more of a Platonist” I 
was not denying Rosen’s recognition of physical realizations of forms any more than 
Plato did. The issue is what is considered ontologically more fundamental, form 
(organization) or matter (specific realizations). Most theoretical physicists are 
Platonists in this sense. They don’t deny matter, or think of it as unphysical, but 
they think of it more as “derived” or “realized” from abstract 
mathematical forms (e.g., string theory and Wheeler’s “It from Bit”). 
This is similar to how Rosen thought.
 
Rosen: “As we have seen, reductionism dispenses with organization as the first, 
essential step in its analysis. It expects to recapture organization later, as I have 
indicated. In the relational approach, it is the matter that is dispensed with. But the 
concept of realization allows us to, in a sense, recapture matter from a bauplan.” 
[snip]
“However, there is nothing in the relational strategy that is unphysical, in the 
sense of ideal physics. The organization of a natural system (and in particular, of a 
biological organism) is at least as much a part of its material reality as the specific 
particles that constitute it a a given time, perhaps indeed more so.” (LI, p. 119)

Howard