Re: Operational Closure

[Tim Gwinn <***>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: ROSEN Forum [mailto:*** Behalf Of Howard
> Pattee
> Sent: Wednesday, December 01, 2004 9:21 PM
> To: ***
> Subject: Re: Operational Closure
>
>
> Tim,
>
> I?m not sure where or if we disagree. Let?s leave Plato out of
> it, since we may disagree on how he thought.
>
> What do you think Rosen means by ?material reality? if it is not,
> as you say, what we impute back to the natural system from our
> models? Rosen says that organization (or form or relation) is as
> much or more a part of reality as particles. I am quite sure he
> means that there exists in reality (that is, ontologically)
> something that corresponds via encoding to the mathematical model
> of organization, and that this is what is important. Of course,
> this is in addition to other encodings that model particles. It
> makes no sense in his epistemology to speak merely of ?alluding
> to the relative importance of a model,? as you say, without the
> necessary implication of the corresponding importance of what the
> models encodes. Only a solipsist can omit such an implication,
> and Rosen was not a solipsist.
--snip--

First of all, I think you misconstrue my remark about "alluding" or perhaps
I was unclear. I meant that the phrase "perhaps indeed more so" in his
sentence "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 at a given time, perhaps indeed
more so." is not an assertion that organization is more fundamental
ontologically than the particles. Instead, I think the phrase is a reference
to the relative importance of organization in understanding some natural
system, especially biological organisms.

Certainly I agree with you that if congruence in our modelling relations
between formal and natural systems means anything, then our formal models
are congruent with counterparts in the external world. My concern is with
how much we can say about those counterparts. Rosen was quite cautious,
though, even in his assertion of there being an external world. Our
certainty of its existence is not provable, it is dependent on our
subjective certainty of our our self, our inner world, our cogito. [LI 40]
He is further cautious regarding what we encounter in the external world.
Here he invokes Kantian terminology and says: "The things themselves,
noumena, as Kant called them, are inherently unknowable except through the
perceptions they elicit in us; what we observe are phenomena...." [LI 56].
Since noumena are inherently unknowable, then so are relations between them.
So, we are limited to attempting to perceive relations between phenomena.
But even those relations we do not perceive directly -- our organizing mind
actively processes perceived phenomena and creates relations between them.
We further believe - but cannot prove - that such relations are in fact
representative of relations between phenomena. Based on this belief, we then
impute these relations back to the external world.

Because all of this rests on so much indirect and unprovable evidence, along
with an inability to pierce the noumenal veil, then I feel that ontological
questions such as whether form or matter are more fundamental ontologically
cannot be answered within this kind of epistemology - they are nonsensical
questions in my view. The best we can do is build models based on phenomena
and the relations our minds detect between them, always with the cautious
understanding that *what* we are modelling is far removed from whatever is
the fundamental - and ultimately unknowable - ontological composition of the
external world.

Regards,
Tim