[FRIAM] Any non-biological complex systems?

[glen ☣]

On 05/29/2017 12:01 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> There is surely more to it than just one directional layering, though.

And there's more to it than the omnidirectional layering (like an onion), too.  I'm happy that y'all are using the word "layer" rather than "level" (despite that the unfortunate concepts of macro and micro crept in).  But even swapping out layers for levels isn't enough.  The idealistic conceptions of bottom-up vs. top-down causation have always seemed to miss the underlying point, which is the idea of a diversity of layering.  That a boundary can be closed to one type of thing and open to another begins to address the deeper issue.  Rosen cherry-picked and fixated on the one Aristotelian cause (agency).  But that's only one way to decompose the problem.  There are plenty of ways to either refine that (typology of agency) or abandon that and go with another categorization.

But the essence of it is right.  To go beyond the naive up/down or onion-based conceptions of layering, one has to _close_ off regions.  If you do that, then you can suggest things like region A is closed to X, region Y is closed to Y, and region Z is closed to Z and Y, but not to X.  You can even approach complicated composite boundaries where, say, an apical part of the boundary is closed to X and Y, but the basal part is closed to Y and open to X.

In this way, the slight relaxing of Russ' idea from agents to closable boundaries allows us to escape the limited (directional) layering.

-- 
☣ glen