John J. Kineman wrote:
> At 10:41 AM 3/11/99 +0000, you wrote:
>
> I was pondering a related question just before these posts, so I'll try to
> tie it in. My thoughts were related to the Aristotelian causes and the
> definition that Don often quotes from Rosen for an organism, i.e., a
> natural (complex) system that is "closed to efficient cause."
>
> This is related in the following way, if I understand these causes and what
> we mean by closure: Efficient cause, in this case, I take to mean the
> metabolic and repair agents, or "functional components" of the system. In
> other words, whatever performs the functions of mapping "inputs" to
> "outputs" and maintaining the operability of the system. What we include in
> this mapping, however, seems to me to depend on our opinion about the
> organism and what we consider its essential functions. Rosen's mathematics
> seem to allow us to lump conceptually everything (because his formalism
> addresses "why" not "how," we can sweepingly say that all possible "how"
> answers are included in a "why" formalism; just as the mechanists have done
> the opposite), and thus the statement about closure can be made with
> certainty. But I question this certainty. As Francis points out, the
> separation of organism and environment is largely a metaphor - one that has
> definite limits to its usefulness. To what extent can we truly say that a
> cow is closed to efficient cause?
Only to the extent that we have posed the question in such a way that the
"why?" is answered this way. If we lapse back into syntactic content and
loose the semantics, none of these things will make sense any longer. Rosen
made the same comment you are making, by the way...but in other words...when he
cautioned his readers that there was much to be done about interactions with
the environment. In the formulation you are refering to the "metabolism was
represented as f:A--->B and all the environmental interactions were included
in A. Clearly a LOT of semantics must accompany such a formulation!
respectfully,
Don