Re: [Fis] leteral comment

On Thu, 19 May 2005, Pedro Marijuan wrote:

> Apologies for all this info-fundamentalist preaching. And thanks to both
> chairs for their recent responses--with a lot of good stuff to ponder. I
> will return to the mainstream, but always rebellious against the
> cornering by entropy enthusiasts!

Pedro,

I can well-understand your frustration. I have recently been reading
materials about and by the late Gregory Bateson, and he offers a
nomenclature that might be pertinent to your concerns and to those in the
"entropy" debate.

Bateson distinguishes between "pleroma", which are the mindless,
indistinguishable elements of physics, and "creatura" which in my lexicon
translates as configurations of processes occuring among distinguishable,
complex entities. Of interest here is that Bateson allows that pleroma
can be treated adequately using only material and efficient causalities.
It is ONLY when one regards creatura that the need arises to invoke final
causality.

So I discover a new way of expressing what I have been trying to say in
this discussion, namely that the proper agency behind final cause (i.e.,
that which calls the system into the future) should be a creatur (like
autocatalytic configurations inherent in ecological and economic systems)
and not a pleron(?) (like entropy.)

(For Peircian enthusiasts, Jesper Hoffmeyer identifies Peirceian
"thirdness" with creatura. Whether or not entropy qualifies as an example
of "firstness" or not, I am not qualified to say.)

Maybe Wittgenstein was right? -- It's all words! :)

The best to all,
Bob

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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 |
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Received on Thu May 19 15:52:19 2005