Re: [Fis] Economic Networks

Stanley N. Salthe wrote:
> Aristotelian idea that a final cause is that FOR WHICH something occurs.
> Given that (because of its accelerated expansion) the Universe is very far
> from thermodynamic equilibrium, all events tend to contribute to Universal
> equilibration, and locally this goes by way of entropy prduction. Nothing
> happens irreversibly without producing entropy, and in usual cases more of
> available energy goes into entropy than into exergy. Because of this
> generally poor energy efficiency, it is legitimate to say that whatever
> occurs does so IN ORDER TO PRODUCE ENTROPY.

I'd like to thank Stan for a very nice overview of different terms
people use for the concept of the "final cause". I will go on a tangent
here, apologies to Bob and Igor.

It's the chicken-and-egg problem of what was there earlier, entropy or
the final cause. I tend to view things from the epistemological
standpoint, and I perceive Aristotelian causality as a construct.
Because we're habituated to think in terms of the
subject/object/how/why, we seek to answer these questions. Entropy is an
approach to explaining the "why"-aspect of a phenomenon in a formal
fashion.

So while Stan sees entropy as an answer to "why", I see entropy as a
particular model of "why". Structural attractors are also models of
"why", for example. By the way, "why" is not as precise as the actual
definition of the final cause. In all, I'm quite confident in the
Aristotelian model, but I feel I can arbitrarily redefine what entropy is.

All the four causes are equivalent. Trying to derive one of them
(entropy) from another one (gravity), or vice versa (gravity from
entropy) is a proven way of achieving splits between scientific and
philosophical communities. Unless we transcend Aristotelian causality,
let's not try to order the causes or eliminate them. It's been tried too
many times, to no avail.

However, there are examples of imbalance among the causes. For example,
if you have a lot of energy (growth), it will disperse into a lot of
entropy. If you have a lot of entropy, there is a lot of likelihood that
some local gradient will get amplified and possibly self-organize. It's
not that the model would "force" this to happen, it's just that our
reality is such that all causes are needed.

As for Soren's concern about the meaning: we're in-system, our models
are intrinsically imperfect, but some models are useful than no models
at all, as the statistician Box used to say. You cannot liberate
yourself from models, just as you cannot liberate your existence: give
up reason and instinct, and you'll be ruled by your reflexes and
sensations, give up reflexes and sensations, and if you've survived this
far, you'll be consumed by those who haven't given up the reflexes and
sensations, and your philosophy will perish along with you.

-- 
mag. Aleks Jakulin
http://kt.ijs.si/aleks/
Department of Knowledge Technologies,
Jozef Stefan Institute, Ljubljana, Slovenia.
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