As I stated in my other message "life" is a human invention, a classification of
arbitrary dynamic emergent patterns into the common concept of life. And
naturally the human is at the very center of this class. The most living thing
there is. But throughout the western history the concept of life has expanded.
Pasteur opened up the gate to the world of micro-organisms, in this century
humans have become more aware of the conscious abilities of our cousin
creatures and in the latter part of this century we have discovered the
life-like properties of viruses (including computer viruses). We seem to be
finding lifelike properties in more and more "primitive" systems. Who are we to
tell if not atoms are alive as well? The random nature of atoms at a quantum
level might very well be the dynamics of a lifeform we have not yet learned to
understand.
But enough about atoms, back to the life _we_ call life. The major thesis in
systems theory is that of stability/survival. Structures that survive are per
def
stable. Now, life seems to be the mysterious cumulation of such structures
into a gigantic ecological conglomerite of surviving structures. Some structures
fade away while others persist. The huge question is why and how this mysterious
cumulation takes place. The "why" is usually designated to "emergence", which is
equally mysterious. And the "how" has many answers, one of them which is
Heylighen's meta-systems transition theory. I'll try to substantiate the "why"
and the "how" a bit. I'll do so by departing from the human centered concept
of life. And maybe, just maybe, I'll end up with a concept near Rosen's. (I
don't know him well enough to tell.)
A parasitic concept of life
---------------------------
I start with the claim that all organisms are parasitic by nature. ALL. What
this
means is that no organism are independent entities. Some people would say that
this is obvious, others would strongly disagree, depending on whether they have
a sociological or a biological stance. No-one would argue that we have basic
dependencies, we all need food, water and reproduction to survive. But to go
from here to saying that all organisms - humans included - are parasites (i.e.
they don't have an existence independent of other life) is a great leap that
many have problems with. However, a few examples are enough to prove my point.
In the human stomach there lives an ecology of bacteria. Our functioning greatly
depends on these because they are an important part of our digestion system.
Likewise, our body is made up of billions of single-celled organisms --cells--
that make up our body, organs and limbs. Without the pieceful co-existence
between the cells and the meta-structure they make up (the body) we could not
have existed. Need I say more?
As I said, these are obvious dependencies but due to the nature of our
concepts we tend to deny/neglect them. Sure, at moments we might focus on
individual dependencies but we fail to see that all of life is a complex
ramification of parasitic relations. The reason is that our conceptualization is
resonant in nature. That is, significant information is boosted while
"background noise" is filtered away. For instance, if there is a static sound
humming in the background it will become invisible to us after a while, filtered
away from our consciousness. This is indeed why we usually don't see the
parasitic nature of life. What an organism is parasiting on is always something
stable, and because of its stability it will appear to us exactly as the static
humming sound. We don't realize that the background noise, or in this case the
background stability, which we filter away when we conceptualize life is in fact
a *necessity* for the existence of life. The socalled independent entities we
see
are gestalts, ripples on a background of dependencies. Without the background
the foreground could not have existed. It's basic gestalt theory. The
independent properties of an organism are those which stick out of the
background of dependencies, and we naturally focus on the foreground.
Heylighen wrote an excellent paper called "Fitness as Default" in which he
states that knowledge can only exist in a low-entropy (read:stable) environment,
and that life provides exactly that kind of stability. Thus, he really uncovers
the parasitic nature of knowledge, which is in fact the basis for my book,
_The Origins of Knowledge_. Anyway, Heylighens argument can be expanded to all
of life as the following statement:
Life exists and thrives in environments containing stability.
Without stability life would collapse. But where does all this neat stability
come from? Well, some come from geological, atmospheric and physical conditions.
But most of it comes from life itself. For what is life if not structures of
stability? And this is where parasiting enters the picture. Parasites can only
survive if their host system is stable. And that is exactly the condition for
all of life. This very much explains why surviving structures tend to cumulate
over the years. If fundamentally new structures are to arise they need to
parasite on an alrady existing stable context. Therefore surviving structures
tend to co-exist. (recall my definition of life as a gigantic conglomerate of
surviving structures)
Ok, now we've answered _why_ cumulation of surviving structures takes place.
What remains is _how_. As I said, Francis' meta-system transition theory
partially explains this. I split parasiting into two classes: horizontal and
vertical parasiting. These can somewhat inaccurately be seen as outward and
inward parasiting respectively.
_Horizontal parasiting_ is close to the original concept of parasiting, an
outward dependency. That is, a dependency on stability in the environment of
some kind. _Vertical parasiting_ on the other hand is close to the concept of
meta-system transitions, an inward dependency. That is, dependency on stability
in the elements which the organism itself is built up from. Examples of
meta-system transitions are Eukaryotes (built up of Prokaryotes), multicellular
organisms (built from eukaryotes), superorganisms (built up of individual
organisms), ecologies (built up of species), minds (built up of neural
networks) and knowledge (built up of many communicating minds).
The above list of vertical parasiting shows that dependencies ramify
through all living creatures at all levels. But in addition life is "flavoured"
by horizontal parasiting as well. Most organisms parasite on some stable
component of its environment. This component is generally called a niche.
Together horizontal and vertical parasiting cover all the pattern productions of
life.
But the party isn't over yet. Life is not easily divided into two
classes, vertical and horizontal. No, these classes smear into each other in a
very complex manner. The problem is that the parasitic relations between
different organisms tend to change over evolutionary time. Let's look at an
example. Multicellular organisms obviously depend on the cells they are built
from - a vertical dependency. But evolution has shifted this dependency. Much
like moles have gone nearly blind by living so long in the dark, cells have
lived in a multicellular environment so long that they are horizontally
dependent on it. They can't live outside their context in the multicellular
machinery. Although the multicellular organism is dependent on its cells
evolution has managed to trap the cells in a vortex of dependency. An even
clearer example of this is the ant colony where the soldiers have lost their
original reproductive abilities. They totally depend on the colony for survival.
This dynamics of dependency is better captured by the concept of POWER. But that
is another story.
Onar.