Online research in philosophy

I distinguish Nature from the World. I also distinguish development from evolution. Development is progressive change and can be modeled as part of Nature, using a specification hierarchy. I have proposed a ‘canonical developmental trajectory’ of dissipative structures with the stages defined thermodynamically and informationally. I consider some thermodynamic aspects of the Big Bang, leading to a proposal for reviving final cause. This model imposes a ‘hylozooic’ kind of interpretation upon Nature, as all emergent features at higher levels would have (...) been vaguely and episodically present primitively in the lower integrative levels, and were stabilized materially with the developmental emergence of new levels. The specification hierarchy’s form is that of a tree, with its trunk in its lowest level, and so this hierarchy is appropriate for modeling an expanding system like the Universe. It is consistent with this model of differentiation during Big Bang development to view emerging branch tips as having been entrained by multiple finalities because of the top-down integration of the various levels of organization by the higher levels. (shrink)

This paper compares the two known logical forms of hierarchy, both of which have been used in models of natural phenomena, including the biological. I contrast their general properties, internal formal relations, modes of growth (emergence) in applications to the natural world, criteria for applying them, the complexities that they embody, their dynamical relations in applied models, and their informational relations and semiotic aspects.

Foremost among the tasks facing a semiotically-informed modeling of natural open systems is the recognition and representation of self-organization. This forces attention on process, time, and energetics to complement the conventional semiotic bias toward structure, space, and informatics. While self -organization might be captured in numerous operational idioms, we suggest that the fundamentally distinctive formal structures of (a) development (intrinsic predictability) and (b) evolution (unexpected change through change in contextual meaning) constitute thewarp and woof of virtually all observations on systems (...) undergoing change, and that, since these represent complementary orientations toward phenomena generally, interaction of these styles of change within systems can lead to generic models of enormous utility in many fields. (shrink)

The canonical developmental trajectory (CDT), as represented in this paper is both conservative and emergentist. Emerging modes of existence, as new informational constraints, require the material continuation of prior modes upon which they are launched. Informational constraints are material configurations. The paper is not meant to be a direct critique of existing views within science, but an oblique one presented as an alternative, developmental model.

In this paper I provide a framework—what I refer to as ‘development theory’—for Ulanowicz’s ascendency theory of ecosystem development. Development theory is based in thermodynamics and information theory. A prominent feature of development theory is an understanding of senescence.

This article traces my attempts to come to grips with the problem of change. Systems science deals with general principles, but, as with science in general, is wedded to mechanistic models. Natural systems are not machines, are generative, and can change unpredictably. An example is given showing that explicit dynamical models are subverted by the present moment, which is non-existent in them. This moment can be modeled by a compositional hierarchy, but no change happens therein. Subsumptive hierarchies can serve as (...) metaperspectives on change, modeling stages of development. The Second Law of thermodynamics provides the motivation for development, which can be modeled generally using thermodynamic and information theoretic (infodynamic) concepts. Development is progressive change, constitutive of different systems, and goes from vagueness toward increasingly more definite embodiment, ending up in senescence, which derives from information overload. While becoming increasingly burdened with information, the present moment, as such, still evades this developmental systematicity. Internalist thinking has emerged as an attempt to further come to grips with it. (shrink)

Levels of reality reflect one kind of complexity, which can be modeled using a specification hierarchy. Levels emerged during the Big Bang, as physical degrees of freedom became increasingly fixed as the expanding universe developed, and new degrees of freedom associated with higher levels opened up locally, requiring new descriptive semantics. History became embodied in higher level entities, which are increasingly individuated, aggregate patterns of lower level entities. Development is an epigenetic trajectory from vaguer to more definite and individuated embodiment, (...) punctuated by the emergence of new integrative levels. It is constrained by being subsumed by lower levels (e.g., physical dynamics) and may be guided by structural attractors as well as by internally stored information (e.g., genes) in the higher levels. I conjecture, on a thermodynamic basis, that the number of levels that become manifest in an expanding universe depends upon its rate of expansion. (shrink)

We can revive Natural Philosophy using thermodynamics and information theory. In constructing an intelligible picture of the world, Natural Philosophy systematizes information from all the sciences so that every field of knowledge of nature supports every other as parts of a concept of general evolution. Change in material systems involves both development and evolution. General evolution is primarily developmental; the specification hierarchy of integrative levels can be used to model it. In this hierarchy, biology is seen as a kind of (...) material system, and social phenomena as kinds of biological systems. This pattern implies that there was a preferred tendency toward psychology in the history of the earth. This scheme is biased by having been produced by psychological, social, biological beings-ourselves, and so it embodies valuation, integrating humans with the rest of the world. Natural Philosophy welcomes the effect of values upon its constructions. There has never been a culture without an origination myth, but the one we call general evolution will differ by referring to its own genesis within a picture of the genesis of the world. (shrink)

We are concerned with two modes of describing the dynamics of natural systems. Global descriptions require simultaneous global coordination of all dynamical operations. Global dynamics, including mechanics, remain invariant in the absence of external perturbation. But, failing impossible global coordination, dynamical operations could actually become coordinated only locally. In local records, as in global ones, the law of the excluded middle would be strictly observed, but without global coordination it could only be fullfilled sequentially by passing causative factors forward onto (...) subsequent contiguous operations.The local dynamics of sequential operations would be indefinite with regard to how commitments will be made which will avoid violating the law of the excluded middle, but any resulting record will be as definite as if there had been global coordination. While maintaining an agential capacity for making contingent choices internally, local dynamics could be cumulated into a global record of seemingly simultaneous operations. Natural selection within a framework of local dynamics would have a capacity for making opportunistic commitments, but its effects in a posterior record can be reduced to the mechanistic neodarwinian version as if there had been a global dynamics. However, the resulting global description falsifies the actual material nature of the dynamics. (shrink)

Appeals to science as a help in constructing policy on complex issues often assume that science has relatively clear-cut, univocal answers. That is not so today in the environmentally crucial fields of ecology and evolutionary biology. The social role of science has been as a source of information to be used in the prediction and domination of nature. Its perspectives are finely honed for such purposes. However, other more conscientious perspectives are now appearing within science, and we provide an example (...) here in rebuttal to the claim that there is no warrant from within ecology for ecosystem moral considerability. (shrink)

Recognition that biological systems are stabilized far from equilibrium by self-organizing, informed, autocatalytic cycles and structures that dissipate unusable energy and matter has led to recent attempts to reformulate evolutionary theory. We hold that such insights are consistent with the broad development of the Darwinian Tradition and with the concept of natural selection. Biological systems are selected that re not only more efficient than competitors but also enhance the integrity of the web of energetic relations in which they are embedded. (...) But the expansion of the informational phase space, upon which selection acts, is also guaranteed by the properties of open informational-energetic systems. This provides a directionality and irreversibility to evolutionary processes that are not reflected in current theory.For this thermodynamically-based program to progress, we believe that biological information should not be treated in isolation from energy flows, and that the ecological perspective must be given descriptive and explanatory primacy. Levels of the ecological hierarchy are relational parts of ecological systems in which there are stable, informed patterns of energy flow and entropic dissipation. Isomorphies between developmental patterns and ecological succession are revealing because they suggest that much of the encoded metabolic information in biological systems is internalized ecological information. The geneological hierarchy, to the extent that its information content reflects internalized ecological information, can therefore be redescribed as an ecological hierarchy. (shrink)