Dear Bob,
If you start with the "walking", you will be able in the long run to
understand the "running". But neither walking nor running have anything to
do with an economy. From a biological perspective, it is unclear why we no
longer have to fight among us for food. We just walk (or run) to the
supermarket and buy some. We pay a price with money. The value of the
banknotes (pieces of paper) is highly symbolic. (There is a signature on the
piece of paper.) These phenomena are cultural phenomena.
Nowadays, you don't even have to walk to the supermarket, but you can order
your groceries sitting behind the screen. Then, you pay through a card or
account number. Thus, these cultural phenomena are transformed by manmade
constructs without the biology of the men and women who do the transactions
being relevant. In sum, I would stop trying to understand the walking in
order to understand these phenomena. The systems of reference are different.
Perhaps, we can use the mathematical theory of communication for
understanding cultural phenomena, but only if we are able to free it from
its physical (thermodynamic) and biological (Darwinian) connotations. The
problems have to be specified at the systems level relevant to the research
question and then some math can sometimes be imported from other relevant
sciences.
With kind regards,
Loet
________________________________
Loet Leydesdorff
Honory Chair of the City of Lausanne (March - July)
Universit� de Lausanne, School of Economics (HEC),
BFSH 1, 1015 Lausanne-Dorigny, Switzerland
Tel.:+41-21-6923469
Amsterdam School of Communications Research (ASCoR)
Kloveniersburgwal 48, 1012 CX Amsterdam
Tel.: +31-20-525 6598; fax: +31-20-525 3681
[email protected];
http://www.leydesdorff.net
> -----Original Message-----
> From: fis-bounces@listas.unizar.es
> [mailto:fis-bounces@listas.unizar.es] On Behalf Of Robert Ulanowicz
> Sent: Wednesday, May 25, 2005 4:49 PM
> To: fis@listas.unizar.es
> Subject: Re: [Fis] leteral comment
>
> On Thu, 19 May 2005, Pedro Marijuan wrote:
>
> > Economy is not a domain of energies and entropies but of
> information
> > and knowledge --entirely within the symbolic realm. Only
> one species
> > among 10 millions on Earth (over 40 or 50 millions?) has developed
> > such sumperimposed world of "economy". Why? Just for the
same
> > entropy/energy "reasons" applying to any happenstance? One
needs a
> > robust language, artificial ecosystems, a counting system, a
> > socialization network, elementary institutions, etc., in order than
> > one can progressively assist to the emergence of universal
> > equivalents, currencies, values, markets, "economic
> networks", cultures, etc...
>
> > Unfortunately, social information is misunderstood yet (and
> > pragmatically mistreated by social disciplines). How could
> one run a
> > discussion on computing &software in entropy grounds?, not much
> > practically indeed. The same are we trying here, treating
> the "soft"
> > with merely the concepts of the "hard", with an arbitrary
> concoction.
> > Today, the physicalist cult is in-built in most ways of thinking
> > yet--and it leads to a ping-pong game that obliterates the
> emergence
> > of more multimensional, multidisciplinary reflections, badly needed
> > for the extraordinary problems ahead: The new "invisible
> hand" needed previously demands a conceptual revolution.
>
> Dear Pedro,
>
> I receive your message loud and clear! It is one that has
> been sent to me by many biologists as well -- "How can you
> concentrate on flows of palpable material or energy and
> disregard all the informational and non-material clues and
> triggers that occur in an ecosystem?" I should say right off,
> that I have always had much sympathy with those who pose this
> challenge, and recently I have found myself coming over to
> the view of the semioticists.
>
> That having been said, I don't think it futile to continue to
> work with networks of material, energetic or cash flows, so
> long as one maintains the phenomenological perspective. In my
> first book, "Growth and
> Development: Ecosystems Phenomenology" (iUniverse.com), I
> attempted an apology of my approach as follows (pp29-30.):
>
> **************************************************************
> **********
> "Now, the thrust in thermodynamics towards generality
> runs counter to the direction of most biological description,
> which strives to differentiate life forms and processes to
> the greatest degree possible until each observation can be
> uniquely catalogued. The resulting picture is one of a
> living world so manifold, intricate, and complex as to
> seemingly defy any hope of uniform quantification. It is
> also, at times, a picture of extreme beauty; and anyone
> needlessly rejecting all detail does so at the peril of
> justifiably being labelled boorish and insensitive.
> Therefore, it is categorically stated here that this effort
> to portray ecosystem dynamics in terms of "brute" flows of
> material and energy (Engelberg and Boyarsky, 1979) is not an
> attempt to abnegate the value of descriptive biology or of
> matters numinous. Most will agree that an individual's
> creations in the arts or literature are valued more than his
> ability to consume food. Still, if the artist does not eat
> over a long enough period, he/she dies. Similarly, the
> members of an ecosystem may behave in bizarre and intricate
> ways in response to a myriad of nonmaterial cues in the
> environment. Most such behavior can be shown to affect the
> pattern of material and energetic exchanges in the ecosystem.
> Still, these extremely intriguing actions remain contingent
> upon the underlying networks of brute flows. Just as the
> phylogeneticist observes that those traits shared by the
> greatest number of species are the most primitive, so the
> phenomenological ecologist points out that those attributes
> shared by ecosystems with the rest of the universe are also
> the most elemental and, in at least one sense of the word,
> the most essential.
>
> "The flows make possible the higher level behaviors,
> which in turn help to order and coordinate the flows. So
> reflexive is this couple that the description of one member
> lies implicit in the description of the other element. It is
> in this reflexive sense that a key postulate in the
> development of the current thesis should be understood; to
> thermodynamically describe an ecosystem, it is sufficient to
> quantify the underlying networks of material and energy
> flows. A more general form of the postulate would read: the
> networks of flows of energy and material provide a sufficient
> description of far from equilibrium systems."
> *********************************************************************
>
> Note that the phenomenologist strives only for a sufficient
> description and not for causality. Once one discovers a
> regular pattern, one can then embark upon an invesigation of
> causalities that lie behind it (as I did in my second book.
> :) My attitude has been that we must learn to walk before we can run.
>
> The best,
> Bob
>
> --------------------------------------------------------------
> -----------
> Robert E. Ulanowicz | Tel: (410) 326-7266
> Chesapeake Biological Laboratory | FAX: (410) 326-7378
> P.O. Box 38 | Email <ulan@cbl.umces.edu>
> 1 Williams Street | Web
> <http://www.cbl.umces.edu/~ulan>
> Solomons, MD 20688-0038 |
> --------------------------------------------------------------
> ------------
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> fis mailing list
> fis@listas.unizar.es
> http://webmail.unizar.es/mailman/listinfo/fis
>
_______________________________________________
fis mailing list
fis@listas.unizar.es
http://webmail.unizar.es/mailman/listinfo/fis
Received on Thu May 26 07:07:22 2005
