This is a retrospective of week 8, 2024 (2024-02-19–2024-02-25).
I have been reading Anticipatory Systems by Robert Rosen this week. The book is an inquiry into what makes anticipation a characteristic of the living.1 Rosen explains:
We seek to encode natural systems [N] into formal ones [F, such that] the inferences or theorems we can elicit within such formal systems [F] become predictions about the natural systems we have encoded into them.2
Robert Rosen emphasizes that simple formal systems are too impoverished to accommodate life. Rosen writes:
…just as the “closed system” is too impoverished, to special, to be a bases for (say) the physics of morphogenesis, exactly so is the simple system, one which can be describe entirely as software to a machine, too impoverished to accomodate the living.3
Robert Rosen views “the reductionism and materialisms rampant in biology” as “scientifically inadequate”.4 Rosen doesn’t mince his words. He writes that “excessively positivist, algorithmic, brute-force people” only succeed in “committing blunder upon blunder”.5 Rosen believes that the “world” of the machine, or “simple systems”, is “an artificial human limitation on reality”.6
…simple systems are extremely poor, or limited, in entailment and hence extremely nongeneric.7
Robert Rosen calls systems which are not simple “complex”.8 He writes:
Complex systems cannot be exahusted by any finite number of simple (mechanical) models; they cannot be described as software to a “machine”.9
“[L]ife, anticipation, and many other things” cannot exist in simple systems.10
Judith Rosen describes her father with the following words:
…his strategy…was not only to scrutinize each dictum…, but look all the way back at what the original creator of the dictum was trying to accomplish and then follow the logic (or “illogic”) of the origins of it. He did this with many of the accepted traditions in science. What he discovered by doing so is that a large number of the seemingly ironclad tenets, or rules, of science were merely habits based on flawed premises.11
I am deeply impressed by Robert Rosen’s work.
I have also listened to podcasts with the following people during the week (paraphrases mine):
- Steven Thayer & Reid Robinson on psychedelic experience.
“Feel it to heal it.”
“See it to free it.” - Iain McGilchrist on a revolution in though.
- Christopher Bache on the psychedelic universe.
“Psychedelics is just an amplifier; it’s consciousness that does the work.” - Jon Young on reawakening deep nature connection.
“We build threads with all the beings around us.” - Stephen Kotkin on how not to win the war, but the peace?
“Empathy is the hardest thing to achieve, but it is the most powerful.” - Leanne Whitney on yoga and the power of the mind.
“You can always find your back home through to stillness.”
Here is, by the way, my review of Whitney’s book. - Brad Laughlin & Anna Breytenbach, a BatGap interview.
“Sinking into the feeling and five-sensory relationship with the landscape.” - Stephan A. Schwarts on how to create individual, social, and planetary wellbeing?
“Non-violent change is more successful and lasts longer.” - Basil Hiley on how the classical [Newtonain] world emerges from the implicate order?
“One of the characteristics of life is intention.”
“The idea of implicate and explicate order is an overarching philosophy.”
“In-formation, to form from within.” - Jonathan Allday on quantum questions.
“Consciousness is far more than just simply computation.”
“There is an aspect of reaching into the nature of reality directly, in a nonrational, but that doesn’t mean irrational way. It cannot be programmed.” - Michael Levin on the collective intelligence of cells during morphogenesis.
- F. David Peat on synchronicity.
- Matthew Segall & Bonnitta Roy & Gregg Henriques on what is good metaphysics?
“Good metaphysics is the attempt to be as explicit as we possibly can about everything we’re presupposing.”
“A new paradigm is a Gestalt shift in our whole perception of the world.”
Notes:
1. Robert Rosen, Anticipatory Systems, p. l
2. Ibid.., p. lii
3. Ibid., p. 430
4. Ibid., p. 434
5. Ibid., p. 435
6. Ibid., p. 436
7. Ibid..
8. Ibid..
9. Ibid..
10. Ibid..
11. Ibid., p. 437
Updates:
2024-02-29, Link added to my review of Leanne Whitney’s book.