Re: Operational Closure

[Steve Johnson <***>]

I apologize for a stupid question. On this list people
often use the word "form" in a way whose meaning is
often elusive to me. Just in this thread Howard and
Tim used multiple times. Can someone define what is
the precise meaning of the  word "form" in the
following sentences. Two are from Howard's last email
and one if from Spencer-Brown's Laws of Form. 


"My own favorite analogy is natural language where
only form generates 
meaning."


"Rosen says that
organization (or form or relation) is as much or
more a part of reality as particles."


"To experience the world clearly, we must abandon
existence to truth, truth to indication, indication to
form, and form to void." p.101, Laws of Form




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

> 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.
> 
> The reason I am quite sure of this is that
> epistemology and the requirements of the modeling
> relation were central to our discussions at Buffalo.
> In fact, that is where they were developed,
> stimulated primarily from reading Hertz?s Principles
> of Mechanics. The central idea is based on the
> limitations of what we observe, what Rosen called
> encoding, and what is also called measurement or
> pattern recognition. To put it bluntly, we say what
> our models tell us depends entirely on how we encode
> our observations.
> 
> One of Rosen?s favorite examples was the active site
> of an enzyme where an ontological form is recognized
> by the enzyme, leading to its specific catalytic
> action. One way of encoding this site is by x-ray
> diffraction leading to a molecular (particle) model
> of the site. But it is known that different
> molecules can produce the same site and the same
> action, so it is not the particles but the site that
> biologically is the more important. Physical
> observables do not measure or encode such an
> organized form.
> 
> Rosen explains this in LI, pp. 272-275, but here is
> a much earlier quote:
>  
> ?If you take something like an enzyme, which you
> feel is carrying out some kind of measurement, it?s
> got a particular mode of functional activity which
> has a description. That description, as I said, is
> very far from the description of the molecule which
> carries the site.?
> [snip]
> ?Again, I suggested that the kinds of observables
> that were involved in the action of such a thing as
> an active site were not the ones that were
> conveniently measured in physics; that the
> biological systems saw each other through different
> eyes than we would use if we were looking at these
> systems. So, I suggested that there were other
> observables that were involved explicitly in these
> biological interactions, biological measurements.?
> [Rosen and Pattee on CBC-FM IDEAS. Published as A
> Question of Physics: Conversations in Physics and
> Biology, Paul Buckley and David Peat, eds. Univ. of
> Toronto Press, 1979]
> 
> My own favorite analogy is natural language where
> only form generates meaning. A sentence, like an
> active site, cannot be fractionated, and the same
> meaning can be expressed in words of thousands of
> different languages. Studying individual words
> (reductionism) is utterly useless. This is the view
> that motivates the new field of Biosemiotics that I
> think Rosen would appreciate.
> 
> Howard 
> 



                
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