Re: passing the moderation

At 10:33 AM 21/03/02, Pedro wrote:
>Dear colleagues,
>
>Some days ago Wolfang was proposing reflection on a couple of points:
>
> >- try to identify common and general obstacles to an over-arching
> >concept of information, on the one hand, in a kind of top-down manner;
> >- and, on the other hand, in a bottom-up way try to find concrete
> >obstacles in certain areas.
> >
>
>I would respond to the former suggesting "THE PARTICULATE COMPLEX", as a
>Western cultural trait that emphasizes atomistic constituents almost
>everywhere: physics, chemistry, biology (genes as particles for heredity),
>behaviorism, social sciences (social atomism--utilitarism), even in
>linguistics (phonems),and of course, reductionism in philos. of sci...
>
>As for the second, lack of a parsimonious info view of the cell, and of the
>human nervous system.

In addition, and related, I would like to mention the fascination with
explicit definitions. These are possible only when the introduced
terms can be eliminated in favour of the defining terms. Definitions
that do not fit this model are implicit, or more broadly, impredicative.
An impredicative definition is one for which the defined term can only
be defined in terms of itself. Recursive definitions are someplace
in between. If the base term is a primitive, then recursive definitions
are simple constructions. But if the base term is itself defined
impredicatively, the whole definition is impredicative.

A structure is impredicative if and only if it has only impredicative
definitions. Something is impredicative if and only if it contains
in some essential way and impredicative structure.

Robert Rosen suggested that all irreducibly complex systems
are impredicative. Note that if this is so, then a demand for
explicit definitions of all terminology ensures that the terminology
will not be applicable to the most interesting aspects of complex
systems.

John
Received on Tue Mar 26 15:45:16 2002