Rosen Enterprises

There’s a William Blake poem, entitled “Auguries of Innocence”, which reminds me of my father, Dr. Robert Rosen. It begins:



To see a World in a Grain of Sand

and a Heaven in a Wild Flower,

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

And Eternity in an hour.



I miss you, Dad.



The website for Rosen Enterprises is being redesigned, finally. Massive learning curve, there. But at least it’s progress! I have great hopes for what this website could be: A place for brainwaves to connect. An alternate place for living the inner life/lives. A source of revenue. An access point for Rosennean Complexity Theory. And my father’s unborn brainchild, BioTheory will finally be brought into the world. He intended to create BioTheory as a subscription service/journal which would allow him to leave Academia and still follow his muse, while earning a living. With Robert Rosen gone, the subscription aspect is also gone, but some form of journal or webpage marketplace for Rosennean ideas in infinite applications or new theory will be taking shape here. Someone recently told me that I am becomming a “mother to my father’s ideas”. Hmmm, sounds rather incestuous to me. But I understand the concept—and she was right.



Welcome to the Rosen Enterprises stream of consciousness (also known as a “blog”, so I’m told). Please forgive the awkward stages as the website goes through its metamorphosis.



Slainte,

Judith Rosen

What do you do when you discover that someone’s old MIScharacterization of a scientific theory gets reproduced in a new work as if it were an accurate representation of that scientific theory itself?



That’s the question I’m wrestling with today. I discovered that my father’s work was being represented according to words “ascribed to Rosen” by someone else. That someone else shall remain nameless, at least for now, because if I start talking about him, I’ll blow political correctness to smithereens and say what I REALLY think (a la Sam Kineson!). Heaven forbid! This nameless person has done a LOT of describing of my father’s work, in the recent past, and has often done it couched in terms that put forward his own “take” on my father’s work… but he leaves my father’s name on it. I told him flat out that was not acceptable and there was mayhem and mushroom clouds, but the truth is the truth. People are more than welcome to develop some aspect of my father’s work in new ways—but when they do, they must put their own name on the new stuff. That’s all I require. This guy wasn’t doing that. In my opinion, he was trying to use my father’s scientific reputation as a shield for work of his own that he was trying to protect from being riddled with bullet holes.



That’s all old news. But in the midst of doing some research on the internet this morning… there it was again! In what appears to be a Masters Thesis on Complexity by someone who comes across, to me, as both intelligent and articulate… right in the middle of things, there’s this old, stupid misrepresentation of my father’s work… Even worse, now it is being elevated by virtue of publication to confirmed status and represented as “Robert Rosen said…” Except that he did not say that.



The garbled quote had to do with one of my father’s partial definitions of complexity. I will reproduce the accurate version here (and then include the inaccurate version afterwards):



Robert Rosen wrote, on page 83 of Anticipatory Systems...

“We are subsequently going to relate our capacity to produce independent encodings [different models that are not reducible to one large, all-encompassing model] of a given natural system N with the complexity of N. Roughly speaking, the more such encodings we can produce, the more complex we will regard the system N. Thus, contrary to traditional views regarding system complexity, we do not treat complexity as a property of some particular encoding, and hence identifiable with a mathematical property of a formal system (such as dimensionality, number of generators, or the like). Nor is complexity entirely an objective property of N, in the sense of being itself a directly perceptible quality, which can be measured by a meter.”



This was intended by my father to be an example of one way to look at the total concept of Complexity in the Rosennean sense; in Anticipatory Systems there are quite a few others. In his subsequent books, there are a few more. None of them contradict one another, a fact which is significant. It illustrates the point: that complexity, as my father developed the concept, is approachable from many different directions, generating equally many different—but complementary—ways to characterize it.



However, the erroneous reference that ended up in the document on the internet was this one:



“According to [he who shall remain nameless], Rosen points out that even a stone, which seems simple to us, will be a complex system to a geologist merely because of the myriad ways a geologist has of interacting with the stone.” That is utterly BOGUS. It reflects a poor understanding of what my father wrote, and it is a sentiment that my father would reject entirely. If he were going to rephrase that sentence so that it would be consistent with his scientific views, it might read “A stone is a simple system. However, if a geologist picks up the stone and throws it at a fellow geologist, you then have the chimerical complex system of an organism incorporating a technology to augment its natural abilities. In this case, it is the geologist which represents a complex system and brings complexity into the chimerical system of geologist/rock.”



In order to determine whether any given system is complex or not, my father developed several tests or modes of analysis. I wish the young person who wrote the thesis paper that I found on the internet had gone to the trouble of looking things up in original sources for information rather than relying on second hand information about it. The second hand information cited was, unfortunately, inaccurate. There are many available sources, including two of my father’s books that are still in print: Life, Itself: A Comprehensive Inquiry Into the Nature, Origin, and Fabrication of Life and Essays on Life, Itself (A Companion Volume) both published by Columbia University Press. I have begun republishing all the out-of-print work and some is already available on this website.



I’ve also made the personal commitment to talk to anyone who asks for clarification regarding my father’s work. It’s important to me that people get it right. That way, if people want to get mad about what my father was saying, at least they’ll have legitimate reasons!



Judith

“The Surreal Times” was one of my creations for inclusion in the literary magazine I generated in 1996, called “The Rosen Chronicles”. In that magazine, which was a vehicle for all my creative work up to that point, I also created a comic strip which I called “The Surreal Times/ Rosen County News”. It was inspired partly by “Bloom County”, from the mind of Berkeley Breathed, and it will always be one of my all-time favorites. (Incidentally, for those interested; the Chronicles will be available on my page of the Rosen Enterprises website, as soon as I get my father’s stuff up and running. Heaven knows when that will be, but it’s on my list of things to do.)



Anyway, the title “The Surreal Times” refers to a fictional newspaper covering both the infinite (and infinitely crazy) universe called the “real” world we are all supposedly living in AND the infinite universe/s inside my head (whether it/they are crazy or not… isn’t really for me to judge). The first set of the comic opened with a quote from Alice In Wonderland: “In MY world, nothing would be what it is, and contrary-wise, everything would be what it isn’t…” (OK, well that’s from memory and it’s not quite right, but you get the idea…) My favorite character in the entire comic strip turned out to be Ivy Greene, who was the first plant on Earth to evolve with a central nervous system. She was a mutation that spontaneously grew in the organic garden of one of the other characters, Martha Greene. Because this plant was the first of her kind, Martha named her Ivy, a plant version of the biblical Eve. Ivy Greene developed into a fascinating character, full of wonder and joy and innocence. The situation was pregnant with aspects to develop, from Ivy’s biology as an intelligent plant able to communicate telepathically, to the relationship between Ivy and Martha (a middle-aged, childless, lonely spinster) to the many dangers that could develop and confront a newly evolved species such as this in the middle of American suburbia. The trick was to keep it comedic when it kept wanting to become profound. I think I managed to achieve both.



I mention all this by way of context. My father’s health crashed at the end of 1996, he died at the end of 1998, and I had a third child, born in the spring of 1999 with significant medical issues and permanent physical disabilities. So, needless to say, I didn’t get much creative work published after the innaugural year (six issues in total) of The Rosen Chronicles!



The times, though… y’know… they just keep on getting more and more surreal.



Hey, look! What’s this new technology? Weblogs? You mean, like a diary or journal, but automatically published in cyberspace (a surreal universe, if ever there was one)? Self-therapy? Publishing tool? Place to put thoughts! Well, DAMN, I can always use another one of THOSE. (Particularly now that the ol’ brain is coming back to life again after the “Double Whammy”.)



Voila’



The Surreal Times is back in circulation. Welcome to MY world.

I recently had a thought-provoking conversation, via email, with a bloke from down under about a statement I made that Rosennean Complexity Theory constitutes the mythical “Theory of Everything” that Physics has been searching for. He said I was “brave” to make a statement like that. I said, “Either brave or foolish, eh?” and went on to say that I can only make a statement like that because Rosennean Complexity Theory is not MY work! However, I clarified what I meant: that Rosennean Complexity Theory constitutes a sound foundational theory of reality, material or otherwise, in the universe. It doesn’t “explain” everything, though… not even close. Indeed, while it explains an awful lot of phenomena that Physics has been unable to even approach, my father’s work raises infinite new questions. Copernicus’s realization that the world was round, not flat, must have led to similar kinds of new question.(See the note about Copernicus at the end of this entry.)



The need humanity seems to have for a unified “theory of everything” has led to an awful lot of theories. I tend to view the development of religions as part of this same basic human need: “Why universe?” “Because God.” It seems odd to me that science is often put forward as the “opposite” of religion. I think that is due partly to the stormy nature of the relationship between the two throughout the history of the Roman Catholic Church and Science. Furthermore, my father certainly saw firsthand the religious ferver with which some scientists regard “their traditions”! Einstein had a great deal of trouble being accepted by mainstream science in his time, and I think it’s significant that Einstein never won the Nobel Prize for his Relativity Theory. He won for something completely minor, by comparison, almost mundane (in other words, not controversial).



My father set out to figure out why living things were alive, from a scientific perspective. He realized, at a certain point, that the physics of his time (which he refers to in his work as “contemporary physics”) had certain built-in flaws in the logic of its foundations. Those flaws were the impediment to finding the answers to his question. So, because he needed scientific tools to do the work he wanted to do, he had to de-bug the tools.



What he concluded was that the first flaw in the foundaations of science was the assumption which placed the importance of any given thing entirely on what that thing was made out of.



The second flaw, which compounded the first, was the refusal to accept the existence of anything until it could be quantified in some material way.



A third flaw was the comparison of all systems to machines, whereby the assumption became that all systems ARE machines.



A fourth flaw is the collective vagaries of human nature which interfere profoundly on every level with scientific pursuits and yet are also what gave rise to science in the first place. Science is, after all, a human construct.



The way my father saw it; science is the human pursuit of understanding Natural Law. Natural Law exists whether we acknowledge it or not, but science is of the mind: It does not exist outside of humanity. Many scientists begin to lose sight of that and equate science, itself, with Natural Law. I consider that a dangerous hubris.



So, to return to my question; “What is A Theory of Everything?”... Well, a theory that really does reflect basic aspects of Natural Law would constitute a sound foundation on which to develop the science of the details.



Judith Rosen



Note:

Copernicus had a student, named Rheticus, who wrote something about Copernicus’s way of working which reminds me so much of my father:



“... [Copernicus] always had before his eyes the observations of all ages together with his own, assembled in order as in catalogues; then when some conclusion must be drawn or contribution made to the science and its principles, he proceeds from the earliest observations to his own, seeking the mutual relationship which harmonizes them all; the results thus obtained by correct inference under the guidance of Urania he then compares with the hypothesis of Ptolemy and the ancients; and having made a most careful examination of these hypotheses, he finds that astronomical proof requires their rejection; he assumes new hypotheses, not indeed without divine inspiration and the favour of the gods; by applying mathematics, he geometrically establishes the conclusions which can be drawn from them by correct inference; he then harmonizes the ancient observations and his own with the hypotheses which he has adopted; and after performing all these operations he finally writes down the laws of astronomy …”



If we substituted a few different words for what was referred to, above, that would be a very accurate description of how my father worked, thought, and achieved what he achieved.

I recently had a discussion that got me to thinking about two concepts that need not be related in any way, concepts which are not mutually exclusive, and two equally serious concepts which are in fact both extremely desirable: Diplomacy and Integrity.



Diplomacy gets a bad rap sometimes because it is often regarded as the “rumble seat” off politics. As such, it is seen as being akin to lying, but with style and grace. Because politics is often without conscience OR integrity, diplomacy ends up sharing the tar brush. That’s the reason, I believe, for the lingering suspicion in some minds that diplomacy and integrity are incompatible.



I have never really shared that view, though. Diplomacy, in my experience, is just a more polished and experienced sibling to the concept of “tact”. Diplomacy is tactfulness raised to an art form and deployed in pursuit of more comprehensive human communication and more productive human interaction. The trouble starts when politics is brought into the mix and then diplomacy is prostituted as a means for political ends.



My father, Robert Rosen, used to say that whenever you get three or more human beings interacting together, you get “politics”. To be honest, I think that it is quite possible to have politics with only two human beings interacting together—particularly if sexuality can in any way be involved. In human relations, sexual politics are particularly treacherous, with “love” and “war” as two potential offspring… and those two can be identical twins. When that happens, ideals like truth and justice often wither away in such a toxic atmosphere. I find all of that intensely depressing and fatiguing.



Integrity is a far more straight forward and serene concept, for me. If I had to choose only one basket for my eggs, it would be “integrity”. Without integrity, nothing else matters much and once integrity is damaged it is very difficult to rebuild. Furthermore, other—equally necessary—concepts are attached to it; such as “Credibility”. (As a parent, “credibility” is one of the first big words I define for my kids—long before pre-adolescence—as part of the discussion on why their credibility is something they need to protect.) Navigating concepts like these gives rise to yet another related biggie: the concept of Self-Respect.



In contrast, Diplomacy can seem somewhat less than necessary. At the end of a long day, if you’ve maintained your integrity, your credibility, and your self-respect but sacrificed diplomacy… it may seem that little has been lost. But I have to admit… lately I have seen that there’s real value in making diplomacy a priority, too. Yes, it adds to the workload. But… if something is really worth doing, it’s worth doing with some style and grace. Aside from the aesthetic considerations, I’ve noticed that a little well-placed diplomacy can save effort in the long haul. People are complicated and a little diplomacy can prevent complications from getting in the way of life, down the road.



Bottom line is that I think I need to expand my meager diplomatic skills. Rest assured, I will never sacrifice Integrity for Diplomacy… however, I think it’s not only possible but desirable to incorporate both into my modus operandi. So that’s my newest ambition.



Judith

Well, I’m going to have to throw dipolomacy out the window again. We had our Presidential election last night. The results are in this morning and…. I have to exercize my freedoms before they are removed from me, forever. Sometimes, things just need to be said, straight out. I think this is one of those times. So, here comes a big dose of straight out opinion…

I’ll be watching a lot less T.V. for the next three years or so. I cringe whenever I see that smirking dimwit who is representing my country in the world and making decisions that will negatively impact my family—now and for many years to come….



The only news show I can stand to watch anymore is Jon Stewart’s “The Daily Show”.



Jon seems to share my horror that 51% of the voters in this country can’t recognize a few simple facts.



Fact Number 1.) George W. Bush is an indescribably mediocre human being.



Fact Number 2.) George W. Bush is not upholding his sworn duty to protect the United States Constitution, particularly as regards separation of church and state. He is using his position as President to inject his own personal religious views into public schools, civil laws, and into private lives and private medical decisions.



Fact Number 3.) To give the government the power to decide what religion the citizens should be is to give up your right to believe in whatever religion you would choose. Once the right to freedom of religion is gone, it’s GONE. There are no guarantees that the government will always be the same religion that YOU are….



Fact Number 4.) To vote for Bush on religious grounds is to commit blasphemy. Follow the religious logic: God gave humanity free choice, right? Any religious person who thinks God shouldn’t have given human beings freedom of choice is basically second-guessing God. To say that our country NEEDS Bush to outlaw abortion and gay marriage, etc. is tantamount to saying you don’t trust God to take care of judging people and righting wrongs. Blasphemy.



Fact Number 5.) To swear (on a bible, no less) that you will uphold the U.S. Constitution and then renege on that oath is IMMORAL.



Fact Number 6.) The single most important issue all Americans should have based their decision on is the welfare of our health and the related health of our planet. Without your health, what are your options? We can’t have the first (personal health) without the second. The environmental damage that George W. Bush is doing, in the name of profit, or of expediency, or of war, is damaging us all. It’s cumulative. Our children and grandchildren will pay even a higher price for it. What good is money if your children are dying of brain cancer? What good is taking down dictators in the Middle East if our country is still addicted to Middle Eastern oil? We are sending them money and burning what we bought with it; burning it pollutes our air, water, and soil. We would be better off burning our money—at least then dictators wouldn’t be able to buy mega-weapons or oppress their own people with our money anymore.



Fact Number 7.) If people are worried about the economy, why would they vote for George W. Bush??? He took office with a surplus and proceeded to run up the worst debts in history. My family is considerably worse off financially than we were four years ago. Is that a status quo worth preserving???



I have a question I would like to address to the 51% of American voters who inflicted this outcome on the rest of us:



WHAT’S THE MATTER WITH YOU PEOPLE????!??????



And the questions those of us who voted otherwise have to ask are… So, now what? What do intelligent people do when their freedoms are co-opted by a nominal majority of idiots?



I don’t have the answers to that yet. I’m working on it.



Disgusted!



Judith Rosen

This is a new category: Parenthood and Special-Needs Children



My reason for creating it is that my third child, born four months after my father’s death, is a special-needs child. She has numerous unrelated physical and medical issues which were caused by a malformed placenta during the pregnancy. She’s five now and we are able to tell that her mind is wide awake and very bright; it’s just her body that is compromised. The major areas of difficulty for her are weakness/paralysis of much of her oral motor capability, some strength/range of motion issues, and some musculo-skeletal problems. It’s the oral motor stuff that causes the most trouble though. Eating, protecting your airway, and speaking are all oral motor issues. As a baby, the weak swallow combined with typical baby reflux (spitting up) was almost lethal. In “olden days” she would have died. Current medical technology allowed some modifications: They cured the reflux, added a tracheostomy, and put in a gastrostomy tube. She also has braces on her ankles, a 2 inch lift on her right shoe to equalize her leg length, and we are all learning alternate modes of communication because speech is not possible at this time, for her. Our alternate modes are an assistive technology device (which I refer to as a “talk-box”) and Pidgeon Signed English (a hybrid of ASL and Signed Exact English).



The single biggest factor in saving my daughter’s life, however, was the home medical care that is possible and available in New York State. Medicaid covers a lot of it, along with our private health insurance. Without it, we would have been bankrupt in less than one year. We are given a monthly budget via Medicaid which we are to use to arrange nursing coverage, order medical supplies, maintain and rent medical equipment, etc. The combination of night nurses and medical equipment saved my little girl’s life many, many times. It would have been impossible for my husband and myself to alternate covering all the nights and when your body needs sleep badly enough, you don’t hear the equipment alarms when they go off.



Things have improved from the crisis-ridden early years, when I felt like the angel of death was constantly perched on my baby’s crib rail and I was forever shooing him away like a pesky bird. The biggest problems now are less urgent and less concrete. But they could easily dominate my every waking moment, and they already do invade and disturb my sleep. So many people are involved in my child’s care… now that she’s in preschool she leaves home (with our day nurse) for half the day and I haven’t even met all of her therapists, yet, this year. So many nurses are filling the schedule at home, now, that it feels like Grand Central Station here in my little house. The endless bureaucracies that have to be navigated… the paperwork that is required to be updated, maintained, distributed… Coordinating the nursing schedules, arranging the medical supplies, training new nurses in both the physical stuff PLUS the sign language… the egos and the personal issues involved because this is a private home with two other children who need some privacy and some attention…It can be, and often is, overwhelming.



Then there’s the financial crunch. Medicaid and private insurance make this life possible, but there are still so many out-of-pocket expenses on top of the usual family of five needs… We have a small house (1200 square feet) but with so many nurses coming in and out, the wear and tear on our home is substantial. I’m trying to be a “work-at-home” Mom, because my husband and I both felt it was important, if at all possible, for one of us to be the home base. That’s me, partly because I’m female but it is also a fact that my husband is far better at the 9-5 slog than I will ever be. He actually likes the structure of a job, whereas I find it suffocating. So, we live on one salary and with the age spans of our children, our firstborn is now in college and the middle one is in Jr. High. Needless to say, we know what debt is and we laugh when we hear the advice that you’re supposed to keep three month’s worth of salary in a savings account for emergencies—what’s a savings account???



The hardest thing for me is finding, and keeping, my balance. If you’re the kind of person who thinks about what things MEAN… then this becomes an almost impossible situation. It’s a mess.



I have heard that as parents, we don’t need to be perfect, just “good enough”. With normal children approaching life the way I did as a child, I think that’s true. But what’s good enough for an ordinary parenting situation is inadequate for a special-needs child. So how does one add new skills to parenting job performance? That’s the question I’m trying to answer right now. If I figure it out, I’ll post it.



If anyone has any tips or advice, email me, would you?



Judith

What is a “specious” argument?

According to my Websters unabridged dictionary, it’s an argument: “...resembling, simulating, or apparently correspondintg with right or truth; appearing just, fair, or proper without really being so; plausible but not genuine”. (It’s always good to double check, just in case my internal dictionary somehow picked up a wacked-out definition… Fortunately, that doesn’t happen very often and in this case, my version was happily in complete agreement with Webster’s.)

How does one respond to a specious argument, productively? I’m not entirely sure, to be honest. I guess one must first ascertain whether it is, in fact, a specious argument. How does one do that? By treating it as if it’s NOT a specious argument. That’s what I did, anyway. But there comes a time (the “when” of which is a little hard to pinpoint) where one must conclude that no intelligent counter-argument will illuminate the points supposedly being argued. The trick is not to judge too quickly, lest it’s only a case of having really dense correspondants in the debate… and heaven knows I’m an impatient soul! However, I don’t think I fell prey to impatience in this case. When every intelligent counter-argument is met with the exact same response, combined with an avowed ignorance of the source material upon which the argument rests and an unwillingness to actually read the source material in question… what else is one to conclude? I’ve got better things to do than type the whole book into the discussion—and in a specious argument it wouldn’t do any good, anyway.

It all leaves a sour taste in the mouth, however. Especially when those making such an argument are too cowardly to stand and defend their position when they are called on it. Instead, they vamoose from the discussion, heaving snotty specious-argument-jargon over their shoulders as they depart. The only satisfaction is the imaginary one of watching the door smack them in the backside on their way out.

Ah well, perhaps it’s a good way to begin my first day of list-ownership and list-management??? We are, after all, living in “interesting times” as the ancient curse described. (The re-election of Mr. Bush Jr. was proof of that, if we needed any.) The upside is that life is not boring. Besides, I have it on good authority that an unfortunate beginning is actually auspicious. If fainting at my own wedding, twenty-four years ago this past July, can be taken as evidence… then there is every reason to believe that this will be as long-lived and spectacular a success.

Yes, I have assumed both ownership and management of the Robert Rosen discussion list from the man who founded it a few years ago; Tim Gwinn (whose website is at http://www.panmere.com). What the heck is an analogue girl doing getting ever more involved in digital activity and digital technology?! Beats the hell out of ME

If you haven’t taken a look or already subscribed to the discussion list, I invite you to do so. Here’s the link. The archives are currently housed at Tim’s panmere.com site, but I will be arranging for a full set to be accessible here, too. If you’ve come here looking for my father’s work, the discussion list is the place to ask questions and further your understanding of it. Just don’t subscribe if you’re into specious arguments, OK? I’ve had enough of those for a while.

Slainte,
Judith Rosen

Taken from the Robert Rosen/ Relational Causality Discussion List at lSoft, which I’m now the proud owner of, having been given the list in September, 2005, by the original founder; Tim Gwinn. Currently the archives are all at Tim’s site: www.panmere.com but eventually I will have a full searchable set of archives here at rosen-enterprises.com as well.

Hi Folks,

I’ve been engaged in a few discussions off list that have developed into something that I think should also become a discussion here. I know that several list members are interested in artificial life and quite a few are interested in applications from Rosennean theory for human problems and human systems, still others are interested in problems of entailment and mysteries of evolution, and a fourth category of interest has to do with the human mind, or psyche, and issues pertaining to that, including the interfaces between mind and computer, the limits of computation, AI… All of these are potentially impacted if the set of ideas articulated in Robert Rosen’s book; “Anticipatory Systems, Mathematical, Philosophical, and Methodological Foundations” are on the mark. In fact, if he’s correct in his interpretation of this aspect of biological phenomena, then most of the unanswered questions about the aforementioned will likely remain unanswered unless they are approached with an understanding of what anticipatory systems are like and why. From my own, more or less “common-sense” perspective, particularly as an avid gardener, I don’t see how certain behaviors in plants can be explained any other way. My feeling is; if plants are exhibiting anticipatory behavior, it has to be a built-in capability because there is no way to fob off their behavior on a thought process. If it’s a built-in capability that’s peculiar to all life forms, then it behooves us (as a life form, if nothing else) to figure out how WE work. Frankly, I don’t see how humanity is going to solve our own problems, most of our own creation, if we don’t really have a clue as to the causal basis of the side effects we always generate.

In that book, my father made several seminal observations about both science and about the nature of the universe. I will stick mainly to his points about the universe, in this discussion (unless others have a desire to branch out farther). Among the well-known ones (like his assertion that causality is a matter of relational interactivity as opposed to material particles) were his observation that the existence of the capacity for a modeling relation between two or more systems gives us a glimpse into one of the fundamental pieces of information about entailment in this universe. He viewed this as something so basic about the universe that he called it part of “Natural Law”. What it means is that relational entailment patterns (and, by consequence; Causality) are both consistent and “exportable”—Because of this, it is ultimately possible for a model to be constructed using the transplanted entailment pattern of a natural system, such that the model can accurately recreate (and therefore, accurately predict) the causal behavior of the system it models. All learning is predicated on this aspect of the universe and, indeed, science would be impossible without it. Because we can learn, and make models which accurately predict causal behavior of corresponding systems, this much must be true.

He further observed that one natural system can be similar in its entailment patterns to another. And, to the degree they are similar, they can both be modeled in some sense by the same model constructed for one of them. Because of this relational property, it can also be said that one of the natural systems can be used as a model for the other. We do this all the time in science, particularly in medical science, where we use one natural system as a surrogate (a model) for another. We interact with the entailment patterns of one (a chimpanzee, or a lab rat) in order to learn about the entailment patterns of the other (humanity), because by interacting with the surrogate, we provoke causal behavior. In other words, we induce the system to manifest the behaviors which are/were always entailed by it’s organization. That way, among other things, we are able to tell the difference between the entailment patterns of a sleeping dog, say, and those of a marble statue of one… or of a compu-pet. But, of course, this kind of surrogacy is only reliably accurate up to a point. According to his observations in biology, RR said this ultimate limit will be true of all models of complex systems. The fact that makes the case for me is to realize that even if we were to use one of a set of identical twins as a model of the other, we will still run into divergence between their behaviors. It’s guaranteed. That’s the nature of complexity. And it can be further predicted in modeling complex systems that the discrepancy between the behavior as predicted by the model and the actual behavior of the system being modeled will widen as a function of time. We’ve all see this in action, via the weather forecast for later in the week.

My father studied all aspects of the modeling relation because it is so important for science and because it also turns out to be a natural aspect of the universe that living organization exploits. The fact that entailment patterns are both consistent and exportable is an aspect of the evolutionary context of all living organisms and therefore I guess it shouldn’t really surprise us that it is an aspect that has been incorporated into living system organization, itself. Perhaps this is what makes a living system alive? (I would be asking my father if he were here.) All we can say for sure is that it is concurrent with life and both are properties which are representative of a particular type of complex organization. The inclusion of entailment patterns of our environment into our own organization also has multiple temporal aspects to it. Again, multiple temporal aspects are a natural aspect of the evolutionary environment, so it stands to reason that these could become part of newly developing system organization as well. In any case, the interactions between real environment-through-time with the temporally different behavior of the encoded information about the environment (fast-forward? rate-scaled? somehow ahead of “real time”) is what gives organisms their characteristic behavior patterns of preparing for changes before they happen such that by the time they do happen, the organism will be in an appropriate condition to maintain optimality (health) and system stability (survival).

The aspect of organism behavior that is the clue to the model-based nature of these behaviors is the characteristic errors that can be produced when the model and the system being modeled are not close enough in entailment. Because there is no thought process whatsoever involved in generating these behavior patterns, it’s “mindless” and can be easily interfered with or thwarted. If we take a plant out of its native environment, it will still be acting on the predictions of its models—but those models may no longer be appropriate, as in the case of a tropical plant being grown in my garden in Western New York. If I transplanted the tropical plant from the Amazon basin to a similar climate in Asia or Africa, it may thrive and spread all over the new environment within a decade as many invasive species of plant have done. In my garden it’s killed by the first freeze. It totally ignores all the daylength cues that are inducing the native plants to begin battening down the hatches and it keeps on blooming right up until the temperature dips below 32 degrees F. which kills it outright. Fascinating! That’s the reactive paradigm in action. If all living organisms were as science currently describes them, they would all suffer the same fate. But the native plants have been preparing for weeks, and we still have not had a frost here yet. They are not preparing because it’s “too cold for growth” or photosynthesis—the tropical plants are blooming up a storm right now. So what’s going on? I think my father had it right.

Further proof that living systems incorporate aspects of their evolutionary environment into their own organization can be seen in the fact that plants which evolved in a climate like Western NY State actually require a cold phase before they will enter a bloom phase. Not only do they survive harsh winters, they actually depend on them in order to reproduce. If the cold phase doesn’t happen, the bloom phase won’t happen. This is easily tested and anyone who gardens has seen proof of it firsthand. This can be very frustrating for gardeners who want to grow tulips on the Gulf coast; they have to “pre-chill” their bulbs in a refrigerator for a specific length of time before planting them or else there will be no bloom. In other words, they have to change their environment to be in congruence with the plants evolutionary models in order to trigger the desired behavior to manifest itself. The plant trade does this all the time with bloom cycles and the way it does so is by mimicking each species environmental triggers.

So, how does experiencing a frigid winter trigger a bloom cycle? There is no way to explain this behavior via a reactive paradigm. Only by viewing the evolutionary environment’s “normal” cyclical behavior can the causal mechanism be seen. The mechanism has several temporal aspects to it, such as sequence and length of cold-phase. The connection is, of course; SPRING. Spring doesn’t happen unless winter happens, in a tulip’s native habitat.

Once I began looking for aspects of environmental context that are visibly incorporated into living organism “design” I began to see evidence all over. People make these logical connections all the time, even scientists (“...the wolf is a carnivore; we can see this in the shape of the teeth and the design of the digestive system…”) but don’t follow the logic where it leads. This is one reason why evolution is so “murky”—there is no factoring in of the entailments of how selection would act on anticipatory systems—it’s all been done with an underlying assumption of purely reactive systems. The reactive paradigm is the model that has been used and the entailments are off; science can’t explain how the heck we got here from “there” and I think it’s because the model doesn’t predict this.

Well, I think it’s time for coffee. Any comments from the group? I can never tell whether I’m being clear or not, and if I’m being clear; how clear?

Judith

One of the aspects of information transfer that always bothered Robert Rosen was the closed, specialized nature of most professions which limited or prohibited cross-pollination between them. This includes education—how we structure our education systems—plus such things as scientific publications, conferences, professional organizations, university inter-departmental communication, etc. He felt that multi-disciplinary cross-pollination would allow for enormous breakthroughs in just about every field so involved, because of the fact that there are entailment patterns which consistently appear/repeat in multiple settings and levels (for instance; the fact that too simplistic a model used in a decision-making process invariably leads to widespread side-effects). Some fields have dealt far more constructively than others with the multiple aspects of learning about these patterns and therefore with generating useful applications and solving problems related to interaction with these patterns. But there’s no way for any other groups to connect with that information unless they have some means for access. So there is a lot of re-invention of the wheel, so to speak (and some of those wheels aren’t round).

I’ve had an example of this phenomenon, yesterday morning. In a private email, there was a comment that a particular legal term seemed to have some application to Aristotelian analysis. The term was “proximate cause”. So I researched it (part of the information at one of those links is copied in at the bottom of this message) and in legalese, proximate cause means the cause closest to the effect, which has the primary impact on the effect. However, it turns out that there are many other fields using this term and there were numerous links to follow for further information on them. Among the links I followed was one which led to chemistry websites, which spoke of “proximate analysis” vs. “ultimate analysis”... In chemistry, ultimate analysis is the archetypal “reductionist” approach; a breakdown of a given material into the most basic particles of which it was composed. In contrast, proximate analysis, while still somewhat reductionist in approach, uses the approach in a far more intelligent way: proximate analysis searches for the most recent, causally active ingredients of that given material, based on the the relation of the causal impact of those ingredients to the nature/properties of the given material. So, in proximate analysis of “salt water” (where salt = sodium chloride) we would end up with salt and water whereas in ultimate analysis of the same material we would end up with hydrogen, oxygen, sodium, and chlorine.

This struck me like a little bolt of lightning. First of all, I’m surprised (although pleased) that the field of chemistry has incorporated this distinction into their modus operandi—chemists could sometimes be among the most reductionistic folk my father ever had to deal with (he also joked, in a thick German accent, that “some of my best friends are chemists”. A twist on a line from Stalag 17?) But, he actually had chemists tell him that “life is reducible, ultimately, to chemistry”! Physicists might come back with the retort that “chemistry is reducible to properties of atoms.” Wars have been generated out of less than this. The problem is they both have a grain of truth to cling to and yet if they think that truth is all they need to understand their respective fields, they are both wrong. Where they see differences that are certainly observable; my father was looking at equally “real” similarities— similarities that were/are in coexistence with the differences: In both cases, the entailments are relational.

It’s true that chemistry doesn’t apply—doesn’t even come into play—with atoms except when atoms interact with one another or with us in lab experiments. However, the operative word is “interact” and in any interaction, the relations of their interaction specify the effects. By the same token, atoms don’t even exist as atoms unless their constituent particles are organized together in a particular way such that they all constantly interact and balance one another as a cohesive “system.” Thus, it is the entire organization (inclusive of all relations) which collectively generates the behavior of the “atom”.

Secondly; I’m amazed that these two types of analysis have been in existence in the field of chemistry for however long (?)... and no one has investigated the significance of the fact that there is a huge difference between them. They’re talking about causality, dammit! In order to determine what level of interaction in a causal chain is “proximate,” it seems to me that one has to examine relational aspects in a big way and integrate them with the whole approach. The aspect they’re after with proximate analysis is that which has the most direct causal impact—(and the word “direct” can refer to temporal elements as well as other relational interactions). So, returning to the salt-water example, if we want to know proximate cause for salt water, we want to know why this water is the way it is, compared to pure water. The only causal impact that we’re interested in is that which comes AFTER whatever it is that makes pure water the way IT is. So we isolate sodium chloride and, while we may be curious about what the compound is created out of, what we really want to know is what gives salt water its qualities different from pure water. So we would be reducing no further than the properties of the constituent ingredients which shed the most light on this.

In biological investigation of living organisms, this approach would have long ago shown that there is no material proximate cause of “life” to break down to. Therefore, the conclusion has to be that the proximate cause of life is not material. Additionally, the realization that reductionist techniques would not yield answers in this area of investigation of living systems would also have to be concluded. There is no other scientific conclusion to make. And that’s the thing that zapped my attention; this clear recognition, in the field of Chemistry, of a limit on the usefulness of reduction and the creation of “work-arounds” which not only deal effectively with the nature of the problem but are also beyond reproach as “scientific.” I think if they really took a look at what they’ve been doing in “proximate analysis”, and followed the logic to find the answer to “why is this necessary?”.... they would have arrived a long time ago at the place my father found.

The machine metaphor would have been discarded, because it asserts that reductionism can yield all we need to know about a system. But this aspect of the foundations of current science is not only still here, it’s creating terrible side effects in every single field and it’s blocking attempts to figure out why. Meanwhile, all this time, the field of Chemistry has recognized this limit to reductionism as a scientific approach and incorporated relational considerations into their practices. Relational discernment has to be used for assessing causal impact, in order to make decisions such as the “epistemic cut”. Ultimately, they’ve had to assess the effects, not the material parts/particles.

This is a big deal, because it’s perhaps one perfect example for illustrating the very principles of relational causality that my father worked so hard to elucidate, and this example already exists within accepted science.

Judith

Definition of “Proximate”
Copied from: http://dict.die.net/proximate/
Source: WordNet® 1.7
proximate
adj 1: closest in degree or order (space or time) especially in a
chain of causes and effects; “news of his proximate
arrival”; “interest in proximate rather than ultimate
goals” [ant: ultimate]
2: very close in space or time; “proximate words”; “proximate
houses”

Source: Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913)
Proximate Prox”i*mate, a. [L. proximatus, p. p. of proximare
to come near, to approach, fr. proximus the nearest, nest,
superl. of propior nearer, and prope, adv., near.]
Nearest; next immediately preceding or following. ``Proximate
ancestors.’’—J. S. Harford.

The proximate natural causes of it [the deluge].—T.
Burnet.

Proximate analysis (Chem.), an analysis which determines
the proximate principles of any substance, as contrasted
with an ultimate analysis.

Proximate cause.
(a) A cause which immediately precedes and produces the
effect, as distinguished from the remote, mediate, or
predisposing cause.—I. Watts.
(b) That which in ordinary natural sequence produces a
specific result, no independent disturbing agencies
intervening.

Proximate principle (Physiol. Chem.), one of a class of
bodies existing ready formed in animal and vegetable
tissues, and separable by chemical analysis, as albumin,
sugar, collagen, fat, etc.

Syn: Nearest; next; closest; immediate; direct.

Analysis A*nal”y*sis, n.; pl. Analyses. [Gr. ?, fr. ? to
unloose, to dissolve, to resolve into its elements; ? up + ?
to loose. See Loose.]
1. A resolution of anything, whether an object of the senses
or of the intellect, into its constituent or original
elements; an examination of the component parts of a
subject, each separately, as the words which compose a
sentence, the tones of a tune, or the simple propositions
which enter into an argument. It is opposed to
synthesis.

2. (Chem.) The separation of a compound substance, by
chemical processes, into its constituents, with a view to
ascertain either (a) what elements it contains, or (b) how
much of each element is present. The former is called
qualitative, and the latter quantitative analysis.

3. (Logic) The tracing of things to their source, and the
resolving of knowledge into its original principles.

4. (Math.) The resolving of problems by reducing the
conditions that are in them to equations.

5.
(a) A syllabus, or table of the principal heads of a
discourse, disposed in their natural order.
(b) A brief, methodical illustration of the principles of
a science. In this sense it is nearly synonymous with
synopsis.

6. (Nat. Hist.) The process of ascertaining the name of a
species, or its place in a system of classification, by
means of an analytical table or key.

Ultimate, Proximate, Qualitative, Quantitative, and
Volumetric analysis. (Chem.) See under Ultimate,
Proximate, Qualitative, etc.