[FRIAM] On old question

Wed Oct 24 17:01:43 EDT 2018

I remember reading, or trying to read, Rosen's "Life Itself". For a long time it seemed like Rosen was onto something very important and exciting but, to my mind, he never even came close to delivering. The conclusion of "Life Itself" was, for me, a complete disappointment.

The material presented here seems similar. I can feel the same kind of excitement, but I wonder if any real progress will be made on the issues that are raised.

I guess I have missed much of the conversation on this issue. Maybe my comments are way too late, but I would appreciate it if someone with a more positive view of Rosen would try to explain what it is that Rosen achieved.

--John

________________________________
From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> on behalf of Nick Thompson <nickthompson at earthlink.net>
Sent: Wednesday, October 24, 2018 4:42:18 PM
To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group'
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] On old question

Thanks, everybody, for your responses.

Most of them are way above my pay-grade, but watching you all work together is inspiring, and I always, ALWAYS, get a rich harvest of crumbs off your table.  Back in old days, I did a brief visitorship at the Philadelphia Child Guidance Clinic, toying with the idea of giving up ethology to be a family therapist.  They quickly sent me back home to academia, insisting that I would more good for group therapy theory by pushing on as an ethologist.  I took that as a compliment, at the time.  (}8-0]

A few years later, a clinical graduate student came to me and asked me to help her think about the problem of “function” in the family therapy literature.  At the time, Salvador Munichin, Jay Haley, and others were toying with the idea of the Indicated Patient.  The notion was that every troubled family designates one of its individuals to be the patient, and unites in support of that person’s illness.  Because the family has a stake in the illness, the illness cannot be cured without the whole family present.

This entailed the notion that the patient’s illness FUNCTIONED to hold the family together.  The patient, and his/her illness were like an organ of the body, or like a soldier ant in a colony, etc.  The patients served their families and their families directed or regulated their service.  I thought it was a fascinating theoretical problem, but the Department stopped hiring family systems people, and that was the end of that.   Another lesson noted.

So here it is.  The problem of defining the system and what

it means for a system as a whole to cause changes in one of its components.  I sent the graduate student off to find a simple, straightforward biological model, and she never came back and was rumored to have had a nervous breakdown and left graduate school.

Let that be a lesson to you.

Here is another example to chew on.  It is often said that young male baboons serve as the patrols of a baboon troop, a kind of trip wire over which attacking predators have to pass in order to attack the troop.  The mechanistic explanation is that a young maturing male baboon is seen as a threat to the dominant males and is kept away from the females (at the center of the troop) by his betters.  He is certainly not a trip wire by choice; but is he so by design?   Presumably his “trip-wire-ness” is a spandrel.  So, in what sense is he functioning for anything?

Nick

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam [mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com] On Behalf Of Prof David West
Sent: Wednesday, October 24, 2018 12:16 PM
To: friam at redfish.com
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] On old question

Glen, I was trying very hard to be metaphorical and general and avoid addressing details, like the one you raise, that would require pages to discuss properly. But,  I would definitely and immediately concede that Rosen, in particular, recognizes and deals with, sometimes more cleverly than others, with the kind of qualitative differences I mention. But, even there, I would suggest that the foundations of his work are still primarily derived from "Entropic Sciences" and their concepts and formulations.

davew

On Wed, Oct 24, 2018, at 11:07 AM, uǝlƃ ☣ wrote:

> So ... Rosen's openness to material flow, closure to operational flow,

> allows *both* endo- and exothermic sub-systems.  But his (M,R)-systems

> focus on maintaining organization using energy-material harvested from

> the gradient, ignoring sub-systems that produce energy-material?

>

> On 10/24/18 9:20 AM, Prof David West wrote:

> > I am pretty sure that the questions you pose, and the ideas of

> > people like Rosen, arise from a failure to recognize the qualitative

> > difference among structures and therefore miss the essence of "organization."

> > This, in turn is largely attributable to the fact that we enjoy a

> > highly developed "science" of Entropy and Entropic Structuralism

> > (Physics, Chemistry, Astronomy, etc.) but almost no equivalent

> > science of Anentropy. Recombinant DNA and CRISPR are at the level

> > of alchemy in this regard. Sociology, Anthropology, Psychology,

> > Ecology, etc. are, at best, aspiring to alchemy.

> > pretentiously yours,

>

>

> --

> ☣ uǝlƃ

>

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