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Dave Macy wrote: ...while speaking with a guy who had
a
Ph.D. in philosophy he asked, "where is the beginning and ending of organism?" I still think it's a pretty good question. It IS a good question, but the thing about it that sets off
experimentalists and reductionistic scientists is that it seems to be
self-contradictory to think of a discrete system, like an organism, in
terms of environmental connectedness. Particularly since we take organisms out
of their natural (evolutionary) habitat all the time and they do just fine (er,
that is... as long as we maintain their particular basic requirements...
which refers back to aspects of their environment, doesn't it).
The perspective RR offered was one that tied it all together in a
scientific manner: He said that organisms incorporate
multiple aspects of their evolutionary environment into themselves.
He referred to such incorporated aspects as "information" encoded into
their organization. There is also information regarding the relation
between environment and "self". [In this situation, "self" can refer either
to aspects of the individual (organism) or to species aspects (organism
as part of a whole species) . One example would
be reproductive information of both genders encoded into each
individual when the species is bi-gender. This can be seen in things like
male deer going into rut at the same time of year that female deer are about to
go into estrous.] Collectively, he referred to all of this encoded
information as a set of "internal predictive models".
What this means is that there are semantic elements to organism
that cannot be understood without taking into account knowledge about the
referents. In each species, that means evolutionary environment and whole
species (interestingly, the chicken-and-egg conundrum disappears when we do so).
The aspects of organism structure, behavior, etc which reflect this information
will be unfathomable without an understanding of these relational aspects. How
do we make sense of gills unless we take into account an environment of water,
for instance?
So what it boils down to is that you can take the organism out of
its environment, but if you want to understand the "why" of things regarding
that organism, you have to recognize the fact that you can't take its
environment out of IT.
Judith
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