Phil, Everybody needs to remember that this is my synopsis of Rosen, not Rosen.
Also, I am starting my synopsis on Chapter Five. I have read the previous chapters with great care and understand things abut them, but the synopsis of chapter five will never settle down until somebody has written synopses to the earlier chapters. Now substance. I am not sure the word "realize" is causal in Rosen's lingo. He just means that some tangible object or process in our worlds has the same formal structure. Am I wrong about this???/ For him, causality consists of entailments in the world "out there". If it is the case that hitting the ball entails the ball dissappearing over the fence, then he would say that the hit caused the ball to fly over the fence. Physical laws get their implication only when they display "congruence" with events in the world. This, according to Rosen, is why Newton can disclaim an interest in causality. Do you have the book at hand? Am I wrong about this??? Have I misjudged the group's interest in Rosen? I have imagined by now that others would be beavering away at synopses of other chapters and/or been so seduced by my incompetence that they would have taken over the synopsizing of chapter five. I dont know any other way to come to understand a difficult book. Nick Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology, Clark University ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) ----- Original Message ----- From: Phil Henshaw To: [EMAIL PROTECTED];The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: 8/3/2008 5:36:00 PM Subject: RE: [FRIAM] Rosen, Life Itself I find it interesting that he seems to establish the applicability of his formalism to physical systems with the casual word realize as in Any two natural systems that realize this formalism as if no demonstration was required. There seems to be no instrumentality for such a transference, the same difficulty of there being no information input-output device for a human mind, just each persons original recreation device. Whenever natural systems adopt a structure from some other place they do so by reinventing it for themselves, from scratch, which costs you your basis of proof it would seem to me. From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Nicholas Thompson Sent: Friday, August 01, 2008 1:02 AM To: [email protected] Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [FRIAM] Rosen, Life Itself Dear Anybody Interested in Rosen, I have continued to plug away at the task of writing a synopsis of the crucial chapter 5 of Rosen. As you see if you go look at http://www.sfcomplex.org/wiki/RosenNoodles#Comments_on_chapter_5.2C_Entailment_Without_States:_Relational_Biology the chapter is in danger of defeating me. Is the passage below any clearer to anybody else than it is to me??? Because of the difficulties of distinguishing my words from Rosen;s, reading of the passage below will be GREATLY facilitated by reading it in HTML. Rosen writes, "Now let us suppose that [there is a formalism, F] that describes a set of formal components, interrelated in a particular way. Any two natural systems that realize this formalism can they be said to realize, or manifest, a common organization. Any material system that shares that organization is by definition a realization of that organization." Rosen now precedes build such a formalism. We have by now said enough to clearly specify what the formal image of a component must be. It must in fact be a mapping (sic!) f: A-->B This formal image clearly possesses the necessary polar structure, embodied in the differentiation it imposes between the domain A of f and its range B. It also posses the necessary duality; the identity of the component is embodied in the mapping f itself, while the influence of larger systems, O, in which the component is embedded, is embodied in the specific arguments in A on which the mapping can operate. In what follows, I shall never use the term function in its mathematical sense, as a synonym for mapping; I reserve it entirely as an expression of the relation of components to systems and to each other. p. 123, LI. I have reproduced, rather than summarize this passage, because its meaning is opaque to me. The first two paragraphs seem to be saying that components map but the last paragraph seems to insist that the function of a component is not to map. What follows in the text is a two-page orgy of notion in which organization is expressed as a series of mappings and metamapping in the manner outlined below. Given the disclaimer in the last sentence above, I havent a clue what he could be saying. But when the orgy of notation is over, he is clear about what he THINKS he has said. organization involves a family of sets, a corresponding family of mappings defined on these sets, and above all, the abstract block diagram that interrelates them, that gives them functions. p.126, LI. Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology, Clark University ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
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