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Hi Glen,
I think the main source of disconnect between your view of machines
vs. living systems and the Rosennean one is based on the different definitions
of complexity. The reason Robert Rosen defined it the way he did was because he
was trying to answer a question, and that question required him to address
issues that may not be central to your own interests. His focus was biology;
specifically living organisms. His question was "Why are organisms alive?" It
became necessary to put a name to the quality he was studying, which didn't have
a name in science yet because it had never been addressed in any kind of
methodical way.
Rashevsky, my father's PhD advisor, talked about "relational
causality" but life is a consequence of more than just that. Complexity refers
to the power in a relation; how one relation can change everything in the
expressed behavior of a system. Complex systems incorporate relational aspects
into systemic organization such that the relations ramify into a balanced,
self-reinforcing "internal universe," in a sense. Living systems take this
kind of relational power (complexity) to the Nth degree: their
organization actually exploits relational causality and
incorporates the effects of it in ways that maximize the
impact to their own benefit. Living systems seem to incorporate an
inner-universe/outer-universe dialogue into their organization. Among the
relations that living systems incorporate/exploit are multiple relations with
different aspects of time-- which allows living systems to be anticipatory. What
it all means is that the ramification effect of all these interacting
specific relations and parts, including the dialogue between inner and
outer universe, and multiple aspects of time... ultimately is responsible
for what we call "life" in an organism.
GR wrote: I seem to lack a facility that you guys
seem
to have, namely the unadulterated ability to tell the difference between a machine and an organism... and complete confidence that you're right in your judgement. Ah, well... speaking for myself: It's not that "I'm" right. I
didn't develop these ideas. And while I can certainly understand your hesitation
to just accept what Robert Rosen concluded without doing your own thinking first
(I respect that, in fact)... in my case, I had the opportunity to ask a zillion
questions, run his statements through my own logic meter, and learned over time
that his credibility was pretty amazing. He never said he knew something if he
didn't. He had no problem saying "I don't know" to me. He even says it in his
published work, in various places-- He saw no shame in admitting what he didn't
know. But if he said he was sure about something, I knew from experience
that he had done very thorough and detailed thinking, learning, and testing
before he would say something like that. So, that's the source of my
"faith" in his capabilities.
I would say that your questions are appropriate for this forum, and
the answers could be both illuminating and useful... as long as you are willing
to look at complexity from a different point of view. I think a good in-depth
discussion of the differences between various different definitions would be a
valuable exercise.
Judith
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