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Forgive the mass mailing but it's sometimes hard to decide who
would be interested in these ideas. Robert Rosen's work has many ramifications
and has something to offer in solving seemingly unrelated problems. If you
received this, then I thought you might be able to put some of these ideas to
good use. (Please let me know if you would prefer not to receive such messages
in future-- and accept my apologies for the intrusion.)
Rosennean Introspection:
Robert Rosen's scientific ideas can have the most unusual applications!
I've discovered this for myself, in the past couple years, and this morning I
had another breakthrough... Ultimately, it comes down to Time, Relational
Causality, and Optimality.
This morning's reflections began, as they often do these days, with the
conundrum of how to help my littlest daughter with her physical disabilities
without doing any further harm. In the case of most medical
therapies/interventions, for example, it seems there is no way to achieve
benefit without pain/injury. Even the alternatives to surgery (currently; botox
injections into spastic calf muscles which are pulling her ankle joints out of
alignment, in conjunction with serial casting of the feet/calves, with extensive
physical therapy after that...) are often a misery. When there is no guaranteed
pay-off at the end of it (in other words, surgery might still be necessary
if we want her to have normal range of joint mobility--
whatever normal means), it becomes a very difficult decision to
make and even harder to carry out. But I made the decision, I tried to help
her through the first round of botox injections and weeks of serial
casting and physical therapy, but it is becoming clear that we will need another
round of all this to even hope to succeed in avoiding surgery. The poor
little kid! I don't want her to jump to the conclusion that life always stinks,
but lately... I confess I have moments where I seem to have arrived at that
conclusion privately, myself.
Ah, but I am Robert Rosen's daughter. To wit; a few of my
scribbles from my private journal...
We are alive. Life has causal entailments and
entails other phenomena/effects/processes/etc. That's how causality works in a
relational universe.
My little Kyrie' was a victim of causality, damaged
in utero by some unknown series of entailments.
But what does it mean to be "a
victim"?
All entailments in life have positives and
negatives. It all depends on which end of the relation you're looking at it from
and what your definition of "optimality" is. Positive is only positive in terms
of how it relates to that definition, negative is only negative, the same way.
If some situation is negative, in the sense of
"sub-optimal"... does that mean that the negative aspects themselves
are always negative? Of course not! Nothing is ever always good or always bad.
Water is necessary for life but a little of it in the "wrong" relation can drown
a human being. Too much of something necessary can kill you. Too little of it
can also kill you. In living systems, any important relation has to be
constrained so that it stays within some narrow band of optimality.
Life specifies what "optimality" means.
It's a definition that is context dependent. Since
context is continually changing over time, the definition of optimality must
also change or else the organism must find some way of influencing the behavior
of the immediate context in order that it will remain within the definitions of
optimality that it has. This is why humans build houses and have thermostats in
them and talk about "air quality", etc..... It's also why beavers build dams in
little creeks; to influence the immediate context so that it will conform to
some inner notion of optimality...
Optimality, clearly, is a "living" concept; it's a
quality entailed by life-- co-emergent with life and specific to each specific
pattern of entailment which is specified, in turn, by the different types
of living organization. Non-living systems have no context for optimality! What
is optimal food for a single celled phytoplankton is not the same for all other
living systems.
Optimality also clearly has a temporal aspect to it.
The "right" thing at the "wrong" time isn't the right thing anymore. What is
optimal food for a Monarch butterfly as a caterpillar is not optimal for the
same organism after it pupates. Time is so much a part of living system
organization that it's really no surprise that living systems would exploit that
relation with time and use it to advantage. Thus;
anticipation.
So, how does this all apply to my daughter's
troubles? Well, among other things, I may be able to change her sub-optimal
aspects for the better by manipulating the contextual constraints. But it looks
to me that there may be other ways to handle her situation besides thinking only
in terms of "fixing" HER to make her conform to some set notion of
"normality".
Forget "normality".
Think "optimality".
Since I don't know what else to do with insights such as this,
aside from informal mass mailings or discussion list postings, I put it up on my
blog at the website. In fact, I think the blog may become more and more an
outlet for such things. That way I won't irritate people in my address book who
really don't want to receive these messages!
Regards,
Judith Rosen
BioTheory: An E-Journal of General Science in the Rosennean Complexity
Paradigm http://www.rosen-enterprises.com/RobertRosen/BioTheoryLaunch.htm
Website address: http://www.rosen-enterprises.com/ My favorite discussion list (Independent-- Not part of Rosen Enterprises): *** |