Re: Inequivalence of models

[James N Rose <***>]

> Judith Rosen wrote:
> 
>> 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.

I'd suggest you're falling prey to the conventional rational of science, Judith,
that "the presumption" of what a thing/process is considered to be, -is- the total
or fullfilling 'accurate one'.  

Natural systems don't -presume- singular "final cause" criteria as things
actualize into their plateaus of form and performance.  The environment may
continuously generate dominant stable/dynamic forms/functions, but evolution
shows us that  (sub)systems can be co-opted into serving quite different, new,
and novelly important uses.

Feathers began as improved thermal insulators.  That they eventually became
co-opted for use as flight devices once changes in bone structure and muscle
configurations happened, was an exploration of the form/function phase-space
of anatomy ... the native operation of "evolution" (c)Rose, 1973. 


 
> 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 this night is not like all other nights, and sometimes 'we recline'.
 
> 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.

So that's the fuller pictures of "complexity .. via alternative/optional
entailments"
isn't it?!  And most definitely, that snail is -still- involved.


> 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.

But you are tilting at a dominating windmill and aren't providing a total
alternative other than to say, 'this new thinking is more holisitic'.  That
isn't enough.  You aren't delineating guaranteed system functionality , or
creative new-organization potential , or pattern identifications.  You are only
emphasizing chaos, rather than complexity. and denigrating the power of
'predictability'.  These have their roles in the world, very important ones,
and you can't look to overthrow an established order of thinking unless you
provide -new- replacement capacities .. which for better or worse .. have
to be at least as functionall competent as 'the bad "old" system'.

If you can't then there's no incentive to change, be it science or a new 
kind of clothing to wear.  Get my drift?


> Judith

Jamie