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I have a few comments on Dan's interesting post:
Dan F. wrote:
>on the thread of material entailment I was
reminded that I have heard that the four causes of Aristotle are considered by some to operate in parallel and be interdependent and entangled. This as opposed to merely linear and/or linearly hierarchical or to operate in serial or sequence as in final -> formal -> efficient -> material cause, or the reverse for a bottom up linear series.> What RR said about these four categories of entailment is that each
represents a distinct mode, or direction of approach, for
scientific analysis into aspects of entailment. He further said that each mode
will generate answers to the overall question "Why does this system exist?" and
that those four categories of information are not reducible to one another. So,
we can conclude that all four directions of approach are required in
order to understand something of the entailment underlying the system's
existence and, therefore, all four are interdependent.
>D.F. wrote: I think in the RR
metabolism-repair model this entanglement is present in the form of an ambiguity or dual role for one of the functions or mapping being both an efficient and a material cause (I forget which at the moment).> The ambiguity comes from the fact that the relations between the
entailments in a living organism are every bit as important to the total
entailment picture as the relations between the ingredients of the
intact system, as organized. That's because the placing of
entailment to physical parts is only possible in a reductionist framework.
Physical parts/components of an organism change roles, in many respects--
sometimes playing many different roles simultaneously, within the overall
organization. So the labels become very difficult to place and/or quantify and
to get too caught up in trying to label and quantify misses the
point. Such an exercise (how we label or quantify) would depend on
many things-- contextual aspects like where, within the system,
itself, one is conceptualizing/observing from... It's like trying to decide
whether a cell membrane, say, is a material aspect, a functional aspect,
part of metabolism or part of repair... It's all of the above and more.
Furthermore, would any single answer (or set of answers) to that list
of questions tell us everything that the cell membrane entails and/or
what entails IT...? Or why? >D.F. wrote: Modeling requires material, energy, physical "stuff" for its process - it requires "building blocks" or "modeling clay" of some kind or other. And for life modeling over eons and billions of years it requires such materials to be found, acquired, ingested, assembled, utilized, ("thinking materials") and then discarded, emitted into the environment so that a new, improved, updated model can be built (partly or largely based on the prior version or its aspects that "worked"). These material aspect of modeling is to me crucial, it is also a link to nitty gritty details of sustainability like energy and matter and food needs, and it is also why, ultimately, all modeling is inherently ecological.> My translation of what Dan is saying above is that modeling complex
systems requires an understanding of complexity, particularly the
entailments in relational causality.
Judith |