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Re: Rosen, Kauffman and compatibility

Tim,
I agree and disagree. See my comments below.

At 08:54 PM 1/26/05 -0500, Tim wrote:
It seems to me that Kauffman's inquiries are at a different level of
analysis of the organism than Rosen's. Rosen's focus in "Life Itself" is on
organization of biological functions. Kauffman is focusing primarily on two
things: thermodynamics and chemistry.

HP: This is true for Investigations (a book with generally bad reviews). However, Kauffman's earlier work focuses on abstract organization at three levels, origin of life, evolution, and development. All these involve biological function. His basic NK network model was entirely physics-free  -- no thermodynamics or chemistry.

TIM: The idea of the collectively autocatalytic network is interesting, both as a
mechanism for organism's normal operation and as part of the origin-of-life
problem, although I simply don't know how widely or seriously the idea of
collectively autocatalytic networks occuring in organisms is taken.

HP: Almost all origin of life models depend on some type of catalytic cycles contained within some type of membrane (e.g., Eigen's, Hypercycles. See Steps Toward Life, Oxford UP, 1992)

TIM: It is not clear to me how they would map to Rosen's (M,R)-system (or the "closed
to efficient cause" facet of that model)

HP: Me neither. I do not yet see how the existence of "closure to efficient causation" can be empirically decided.

TIM: As to "order for free", which as best I can tell is based on his work with
Boolean networks, seems to be a far cry from Rosennean complexity.

HP: True, "order for free" is a loose metaphorical interpretation of network behavior, usually pre-biological. It does not reach the level of Rosen complexity.

TIM: The Boolean networks are entirely "Newtonian" in the sense that they consist of
"forceless" syntactic symbols pushed around by state-transition rules. The
regularities which arise and pass for "order" suffer from an inability to
sustain themselves; instead, the "forces" maintaining the "order" are
external to the network: they come from the simulator.

HP: On the contrary, the organization of limit cycles originates and maintains itself. There are no external forces necessary to sustain the order. Not only that, but the order can be stable to noise in the state transition rules, the node functions, and the node outputs.

TIM: Rosennean complex systems, on the other hand, will generically be rife with forces coming from within the system itself (hence the impredicativities).

HP: All the forces in Kauffman's NK models come from within the system. Since all the transition rules and initial conditions (and any noise) are random it is clear that the simulator has nothing to do with the stable order. Is randomness in states and state transitions a kind of impredicativity?

TIM: All those kinds of approaches which don't incorporate the dual nature of matter (what Rosen called the "inertial aspects" and the "gravitational aspects" in Essays) as
capable of both imposing forces as well as having forces imposed on them are
doomed when they finally have to ask: "but how will it stay together!!??".

HP: I would guess that the cycle structures stay together because they are closed to efficient causation. By that I only mean that they form and maintain an autonomous stable order that does not need any external cause.

TIM: This seems to be what lead to Kauffman's use of the "edge of chaos" notion,
and his concern with the "work cycle" as a means of avoiding a systemic
deterioration into thermodynamics equilibrium.

HP: The "edge of chaos" metaphor arose from later evolution experiments in a fitness landscape with coupled NK networks essentially competing in a game-theoretic model. This is physics-free and has nothing directly to do with work cycles or thermodynamics. This is a complex model. See Kauffman and Sonke Johnsen, "Coevolution to the edge of chaos: Coupled fitness landscapes, poised states, and coevolutionary avalanches." J. Theoretical Biology 149, 467-505, 1991.

Howard