Ricardo Ribeiro Gudwin wrote:
> Followin the discussion over "Non Physical Experience", I noticed
> another
> interesting theme being carried in parallel, that maybe we should
> discuss in
> a more deep form.
> Don has talked about Rosen's view of complex systems, and how his
> (Rosen's)
> view contrasts with current views of complex systems. The current view
> and
> research on complex systems, really try to apply the reductionist
> paradigm, in
> which something complex is broken (through analysis) into simpler
> components,
> interacting among them, and emerging the complex behavior due to this
> interaction.
> So, the interaction of simpler things, in a particular way, leads to a
> complex behavior.
> Don alludes to a non-decomposable type of complexity, that I would call
> here
> hollistic complexity. This type of complex system would have to be
> understood in
> its entirety, because we cannot apply reducionistic analysis methods to
> understand
> them. It seems that the study of systems of this type comprises the work
> of Rosen
> (if I understood right what Don said).
Yes...and thank you!
> I can understand the current approach of studying complex systems, and
> can imagine
> examples of such approach. But I was trying to visualize what would be
> those
> hollistic complex systems, that can not be decomposable into simpler
> components,
> and could not make a clear, sharp example of such systems.
The approach goes like this.....it has two prongs......rather than asking
mechanistic "how?" questions we ask Aristotealian "why?" questions. second,
we do not look at the material aspects of the system, but at its functional
aspects. We quickly learn that these functional aspects DO NOT neatly
decompose into the material parts and in fact usually DISSAPEAR when such a
fractionation is carried out.
Rosen reformulates schroedinger's "what is life" question as " why are
organisms different from machines, or non-orgamisms?" He then procedes to
look at causal relations and answers the question in a way which gives a
clear categorization of the two entities.
> Maybe someone
> on the
> list that is more used in dealing with such systems could present some
> illustrations, just
> in order to clarify our thoughts. We have to remember that this list
> have elements from
> different formations (we have engineers, biologists, philosophers, etc),
> and maybe
> something that is cristal clear to someone could not be like that to
> others. This is an
> excelent opportunity to share our own knowledge, and either check the
> consistency
> of our own paradigms, trying to explain them to someone not used to
> them.
OK........but you will be caused some discomfort...this approach is not
harmoneous with the reductionism we all are used to...
in the organism....there is a function called "metabolism"
for years biochemists and others have worked out the mechanistic details of
these reactions step by step.. to deal with metabolism more holistically we
define a mapping
f:A-->B to represent ALL of it. where does that get us? next we take a
big step.
A and B are sets of real biochemicals...molecules. f , however is a
mapping. It is not "physical" in the sense that it itself has no material
aspects even though it operates on physical things. However, one important
function in an ORGANISM is to repair f continually! Thus we can envision
mappings on mappings and we now are discussing vital life processes far
removed from details about the physical constituents.
I'll stop there...but it goes much further and the results are profound!
>
>
> --
> //\\\
> (o o)
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Regards,
Don Mikulecky