Re: Recycling, Rosennean Style...

[Dan Fiscus <***>]

Leo and Judith,

Good ideas and angles. Another one to consider is that
if we assume some "error" or uncertainty in the process,
it would be nice if the missed residue that is not
immediately recycled as employed into "active duty" of
the work of life (or business, or community or whatever)
actually improves itself or the environment as it sits
there and/or accumulates. Good examples from life are
soils - in which the "waste" or residue of community life
accumulates in beneficial ways that enhance water,
carbon, nitrogen, trace minerals and other key resource
relations - and fossil fuels - in which waste was acted on
by time, gravity, etc. to compress and amplify energy
density to provide the motherlode and seed germ of
energy that we (dependent infants that we are) now
live on so richly.

So the coupled complementarity of composer/constructor
and decomposer/deconstructor might be designed such
that its own residue or waste or intended consequences
or indirect effects are beneficial. It seems as we go now
the residue or waste or intended consequences or
indirect effects are detrimental and even lethal.

Another software realm is collective intelligence where
David Wolpert and others try to get communities of
adaptive software agents to avoid the Tragedy of the
Commons by over-emphasizing individual fitness at
the expense of collective fitness or utility. The
complement to this trap would be a Bounty of the
Commons, which I see forests and other natural systems
doing well, at least as far as the limited realm of
necessary life materials C, N, H20, etc. are concerned.

Dan

Leo Caves wrote:

> I agree that your more holistic view of "bioremediation", which would 
> require (as you state) a more systemic approach.
>
> A small comment: in software engineering it is considered good practice 
> to provide a "destructor" function for every "constructor" of data or 
> processes.   If you screw this up, you risk ill-defined, poor or even 
> fatal consequences in your execution!  This process can be automated by 
> providing your environment with a garbage collector - which recognises 
> the importance for this complementary pair of functions, and takes it 
> out of the hands of the feeble programmer and embeds it in the 
> underlying run-time system.