Hi Robert, I haven’t read your book yet, but thanks for the link. You have certainly thought through these issues much more deeply than I have and I appreciate your perspective. I am trying to parse the meanings of your three fundamentals, so please let me know if I am getting the main ideas right.
“Aleatoricism” seems to reflect the creativity associated with dynamics at ‘the edge of chaos’, or inherent to self-organization. I would strongly agree with this as an essential fundamental that was not explicit in my formulation. I would argue that aleatoricism and feedback are implicit in the notion of metabolism, but I like that you pull them out. I’m not sure what you are suggesting with the term “centripetality’. Is this meant to reference the functional and dynamical coherence of self-organizing systems? Regards, Guy > On Mar 29, 2016, at 3:39 PM, Robert E. Ulanowicz <u...@umces.edu> wrote: > > Dear Guy, > > Please allow me to respond to your invitation to Terry with my two cents. > > My triad for supporting the dynamics of life is a bit different. I see the > three essential fundamentals as: > > 1. Aleatoricism > > 2. Feedback > > 3. Memory > > Just to briefly elaborate on each: > > 1. I use aleatoricism to avoid the baggage associated with the term > "chance", which most immediately associate with "blind" chance. The > aleatoric spans the spectrum from unique events to blind chance to > conditional chance to propensities to just short of determinism. > > 2. More specifically (and in parallel with autopoesis) I focus on > autocatalytic feedback, which exhibits the property of "centripetality". > Centripetality appears on almost no one's list of properties of life, > despite its ubiquity in association with living systems. > > 3. Memory (and information) likely inhered in stable configurations of > processes (metabolism) well before the advent of molecular encoding. Terry > speaks to this point in Biological Theory 1(2):136-49. > > My fundamentals do not include reproduction, because I see reproduction as > corollary to 2 & 3. > > I propose a full metaphysics for life predicated on these three > assumptions. > <http://people.clas.ufl.edu/ulan/publications/philosophy/3rdwindow/> > > Looking forward to what others see as fundamental. > > Peace, > Bob > > >> I personally consider metabolism to be at the core of what constitutes >> â?~lifeâ?T, so the notion of autopoeisis is very attractive to me. It is >> also possible that the richness of life as we know it depends on having >> metabolisms (activity), genomes (memory), and reproduction combined. The >> reductionistic approach to singling out one of these three pillars of life >> as its essence may be futile. However, I want to point out that the most >> reduced version of â?~lifeâ?T I have seen was proposed by Terry Deacon in >> the concept he calls â?oautocellsâ?. Terry has made great contributions >> to FIS dealing with related topics, and I hope he will chime in here to >> describe his minimalist form of life, which is not cellular, does not have >> any metabolism or genetically encoded memory. Autocells do, however, >> reproduce. >> >> Regards, >> >> Guy > > _______________________________________________ Fis mailing list Fis@listas.unizar.es http://listas.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis
