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James Rose wrote:
Car= mobile container
an entity may have a majority usage (one final cause; transporter) but it can also have other 'final causes' which include all possible use/application of the nature of its components -and- compounded/emerged aspects. cars have served as 'homes', beds for lovers, ambulances, changing rooms, delivery rooms & operating rooms, eating rooms it can also be thought of as a self-contained self delivery system .. which eventually drives itself to a recycling center where its composition can be de-structured for other uses .. having subsequent other 'final causes'. Yes, but then it's not "a car". Cars were designed for a purpose,
and their organization reflects the purpose, but the purpose comes from outside
the system called "car". To change the use, which as you noted happens rather
often, is sort of like the "change-of-function" that my father described in
evolutionary processes in biology. "Re-purposing" a car, though, isn't evolution
as far as the car is concerned: the entailment structures are all externally
derived.
Most cars make lousy beds for lovers-- lousy delivery rooms...
lousy changing rooms... lousy homes. And the main reason is because cars
were not designed for those functions. Most of the entailment has to do with
transportation and the body shape this is usually accomplished in is folded
("sitting"). (Which probably explains why cars are not too bad for eating
in!)
But, again, when a car is re-purposed like that, it's not anything
about the car that's making it happen, it's about the human need to put a car to
other uses. When a hermit crab uses a dead snail's leftover shell as a "house",
that has almost nothing to do with the snail anymore (and it's certainly
not about the snail's evolution)-- it's about the hermit crab and ITS
requirements/entailment-relations/etc.
I think it's also worth reiterating the concept of "chimera" that
was discussed at length in most of Robert Rosen's books. I tend to conclude,
based on that, that all human-created machines are really "sub-systems" of a
larger chimerical system: human being plus technology/tool. Unlike the snail
shell that the hermit crab repurposed (which will reveal nothing about the
hermit crab's use of it once the crab outgrows it and moves on to a new shell),
a car has all its original entailments intact and this makes using machines
(which human beings create for our own purposes) very bad "models" for natural
systems in general.
Judith
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