[FRIAM] On old question

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My comment may be addressed a bit by the 2nd paper Roger posted (DGI).  But my 1st reaction to your comment was an attempt to reconstruct what Rosen *might* have intended re: function and organization.  I'm running with my gestalt memory, but I'll challenge it against his text later.  A relational conception of function and organization would necessarily be temporal and situational.  So, the function of any one component would depend fundamentally on how the components were related in that *specific* context (either a good colloidal mix or segregated).  And such definitions would not be (arbitrarily) dependent on how the system is observed (as long as the system is robust to any manipulation involved in the observation).  E.g. the role/function of a vortex in a sink drain isn't "to drain fast", perhaps it's to equalize pressure. And it may not even be that.  These purposes/roles/functions are examples of preemptive registration ... imputed by the observer.

The (M,R)-system model is (I think) an attempt to describe organization such that it is robust to changes in both material components (N different things playing the same function/role) and situational context (persistence over time and robust to "damage").  If I'm right, then Rosen's conception of organization wouldn't credit salad dressing to be more or less organized in either the settled or shaken state.

To boot, his ideas around closure imply that components would be defined in a particular way.  For example, your idea of "draining the water out" treats the water layer as a component, rather than treating each H2O molecule as a component.  Obviously, the ontological status of the "water layer" is fragile, whereas that of the molecules is robust.  Your idea of hierarchy should play well, here.  Except that a *strict* hierarchy disallows heterogeneous operands. If a closure happens to rely on components that are also closures, then the you'd expect the functions/roles of those components to have inputs/outputs that are mixed, some of the functions operate over simple materials (like molecules) and others operate over closures.  And some functions would operate over a mix of simple components and whole closures.  A strict hierarchy would only allow, for example, a 2nd order function to operate over 1st order components.  I've only skimmed the DGI paper.  But it seems like the patches were defined homogeneously (e.g. 2 hop subgraphs), rather than allowing any sub-graph to be of arbitrary topology.



On 10/23/18 11:21 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:
> Dear Roger, and anybody else who wants to play,
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> While waiting for my paper, /Signs and Designs/, to be rejected, I have gone back to thinking about an old project, whose working title has been “/A Sign Language/.”  And this has led me back to Robert Rosen, whose /Life Itself/ I bought almost 9 years ago and it has remained almost pristine, ever since.  In the chapter I am now looking at, Rosen is talking about “organization.”  Now, I have been thinking about organization ever since I read C. Ray Carpenter’s early work on primate groups back in the late 50’s.  It seemed to me at the time, and it seems to me reasonable now, to define the organization of a set of entities as related in some way to the degree to which one can predict the behavior of one entity from knowledge about another.  Now the relationship is not straightforward, because neither total unpredictability (every monkey behaves exactly the same as every other monkey in every situation) nor total unpredictability (no monkey behaves like any other monkey in ANY
> situation) smacks of great organization.  The highest levels organization, speaking inexpertly and intuitively, seem to correspond to intermediate levels of predictability, where there were several classes of individuals within a group and within class predictability was strong but cross-class predictability was weak.  On my account, the highest levels of organization involve hierarchies of predictability.  Thus honey bees and ants are more organized than starling flocks, say. 
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> This is where the matter stood at the point that I came to Santa Fe and started interacting with you guys 14 years ago.  You-all introduced me to a totally different notion of organization based – shudder – on the second law.  But I have never been able to deploy your concept with any assurance.  So, for instance, when I shake the salad dressing, I feel like I am disorganizing it, and when it reasserts itself into layers, I feel like it ought to be called more organized.  But I have a feeling that you are going to tell me that the reverse is true.  That, given the molecules of fat and water/acid, that the layered state is the less organized state. 
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> Now this confusion of mine takes on importance when I try to read Rosen.  He defines a function as the difference that occurs when one removes a component of a system.  I can see no reason why the oil or the water in my salad dressing cannot be thought of components of a system and if, for instance, I were to siphon out the water from the bottom of my layered salad dressing, I could claim that the function of the water had been to hold the water up.  This seems a rather lame notion of function.  
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> Some of you who have been on this list forever will remember that I raised the same kind of worry almost a decade back when I noticed the drainage of water from a basin was actually /slowed /by the formation of a vortex.  This seemed to dispel any notion that vortices are structures whose function is to efficiently dispel a gradient.  It also violated my intuition from traffic flows, where I imagine that rigid rules of priority would facilitate the flow of people crossing bridges to escape Zozobra. 
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> It’s quite possible that my confusions in this matter are of no great general applicability, in which case, I look forward to being ignored.  


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