On Sep 6, 10:21 pm, kevirwin comcast.net> wrote:

Do you mean the band
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqi5P4gAvSY

Somehow they are interacting with the influences of the branches and
leaves which are influenced by the roots, in an interaction of
relationships,

Circular Organization

(1) Circular organization consist necessarily of components that
specify the circular organization and must also be produced and
maintained by it. The circulaity is maintained by the circularity
itself.

(3) Not only self-organizing but also continually self-referring, so
that perception cannot be viewed as the representation of an external
reality but must be understood as the continual creation of new
relationships within the neural network. Self-referenciality is
similar to observation or concern by attending to self-organizational
states.

(4) Memory is a bearing or keeping of a variety of organizational
states and relationships, that can bring to, bring back, take back,
prompt, jog, ring a bell, refresh, brush up, recapitulate, haunt,
remind, call up, summon up, conjure up, particular organizational
sates out of the gamut of organized states stored in the systems state
configuration or historical accumulation of states.

(4) [Cognition] consists of those processes involved in the gathering,
organization, and use of semi-stable and pre-cognitive organizational
states in the domain of representational states and processes guiding
and controlling potential organizational states.

(5) Systems are cognitive since changing organizational states as a
process is a process of cognition by self-referencial feedback loops
in processes and relations between processes realized through
components.

() A system's organization is independent of the properties of its
components, so that a given organization can be embodied in many
different manners by many different kinds of components. The
description of that organization is an abstract description of
relationships and does not identify the components.

(6) Dispositional properties, such as, capacity, tendency,
potentiality, or 'power' tend to act or be acted on in a certain way.
Non-dispositional properties, current system state of relations, are
sometimes called 'intrinsic' or 'categorical' properties.

.........................
Living systems are organized in a closed causal circular process that
allows for evolutionary change in the way the circularity is
maintained, but not for the loss of the circularity itself.

Since all changes in the system take place within this basic
circularity the components that specify the circular organization must
also be produced and maintained This network pattern, in which the
function of each component is to help produce and transform other
components while maintaining the overall circularity of the network,
is the basic organization of the living.

The nervous system is not only self-organizing but also continually
self-referring, so that perception cannot be viewed as the
representation of an external reality but must be understood as the
continual creation of new relationships within the neural network: The
activities of nerve cells do not reflect an environment independent of
the living organism and hence do not allow for the construction of an
absolutely existing external world.

Perception and cognition do not represent an external reality, but
rather specify one through the nervous system's process of circular
organization. The process of circular organization itself—with or
without a nervous system—is identical to the process of cognition:

Living systems are cognitive systems, and living as a process is a
process of cognition. This statement is valid for all organisms, with
and without a nervous system.

[Autopoiesis]; Auto, of course, means self and refers to the autonomy
of self-organizing systems; and poiesis—which shares the same Greek
root as the word "poetry"—means "making." So autopoiesis means "self-
making."

Mechanistic: no forces or principles will be adduced which are not
found in the physical universe, but not in the Cartesian sense of
mechanics but of systems:

Not in properties of components, but in processes and relations
between processes realized through components.

The important distinction here is between "organization" and
"structure."

The [organization] of a living system is the set of relations among
its components that characterize the system as belonging to a
particular class (such as a bacterium, a sunflower, a cat, or a human
brain). The description of that organization is an abstract
description of relationships and does not identify the components.
Autopoiesis is a general pattern of organization, common to all living
systems, whichever the nature of their components.

,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,
The [structure] of a living system, by contrast, is constituted by the
actual relations among the physical components. In other words, the
system's structure is the physical embodiment of its organization. The
system's organization is independent of the properties of its
components, so that a given organization can be embodied in many
different manners by many different kinds of components.

Having clarified that their concern is with organization, not
structure, the authors then proceed to define autopoiesis, the
organization common to all living systems. It is a network of
production processes, in which the function of each component is to
participate in the production or transformation of other components in
the network. In this way the entire network continually "makes
itself." It is produced by its components and in turn produces those
components. "In a living system," the authors explain, "the product of
its operation is its own organization."

An important characteristic of living systems is that their auto-
poietic organization includes the creation of a boundary that
specifies the domain of the network's operations and defines the
system as a unit. The authors point out that catalytic cycles, in
particular, do not constitute living systems, because their boundary
is determined by factors (such as a physical container) that are
independent of the catalytic processes.

It is also interesting to note that physicist Geoffrey Chew formulated
his so-called bootstrap hypothesis about the composition and
interactions of subatomic particles, which sounds quite similar to the
concept of autopoiesis, about a decade before Maturana first published
his ideas. According to Chew, strongly interacting particles, or
"hadrons," form a network of interactions in which "each particle
helps to generate other particles, which in turn generate it."

However, there are two key differences between the hadron bootstrap
and autopoiesis. Hadrons are potential "bound states" of each other in
the probabilistic sense of quantum theory, which does not apply to
Maturana's "organization of the living." Moreover, a network of
subatomic particles interacting through high-energy collisions cannot
be said to be autopoietic because it does not form any boundary.

According to Maturana and Varela, the concept of autopoiesis is
necessary and sufficient to characterize the organization of living
systems. However, this characterization does not include any
information about the physical constitution of the system's
components. To understand the properties of the components and their
physical interactions, a description of the system's structure in the
language of physics and chemistry must be added to the abstract
description of its organization. The clear distinction between these
two descriptions—one in terms of structure and the other in terms of
organization—makes it possible to integrate structure-oriented models
of self-organization (such as those by Prigogine and Haken) and
organization-oriented models (as those by Eigen and Maturana-Varela)
into a coherent theory of living systems.

==============================

The Importance of Pattern

The recent advances in our understanding of living systems are based
on two developments that originated in the late 1970s, during the same
years when Lilienfeld and others were writing their critiques of
systems thinking. One was the discovery of the new mathematics of
complexity, which is discussed in the following chapter. The other was
the emergence of a powerful novel concept, that of self-organization,
which had been implicit in the early discussions of the cyberneticists
but was not developed explicitly for another thirty years.

To understand the phenomenon of self-organization, we first need to
understand the importance of pattern. The idea of a pattern of
organization—a configuration of relationships characteristic of a
particular system—became the explicit focus of systems thinking in
cybernetics and has been a crucial concept ever since. From the
systems point of view, the understanding of life begins with the
understanding of pattern.

We have seen that throughout the history of Western science and
philosophy there has been a tension between the study of substance and
the study of form, The study of substance starts with the question,
What is it made of?; the study of form with the question, What is its
pattern? These are two very different approaches, which have been in
competition with one another throughout our scientific and
philosophical tradition.

The study of substance began in Greek antiquity in the sixth century
B.C., when Thales, Parmenides, and other philosophers asked: What is
reality made of? What are the ultimate constituents of matter? What is
its essence? The answers to these questions define the various schools
of the early era of Greek philosophy. Among them was the idea of four
fundamental elements— earth, air, fire, water. In modern times those
were recast into the chemical elements, now more than 100 but still a
finite number of ultimate elements out of which all matter was thought
to be made. Then Dalton identified the elements with atoms, and with
the rise of atomic and nuclear physics in the twentieth century the
atoms were further reduced to subatomic particles.

Similarly, in biology the basic elements were first organisms, or
species, and in the eighteenth century biologists developed elaborate
classification schemes for plants and animals. Then, with the
discovery of cells as the common elements in all organisms, the focus
shifted from organisms to cells. Finally, the cell was broken down
into its macromolecules—enzymes, proteins, amino acids, and so forth—
and molecular biology became the new frontier of research. In all
those endeavors the basic question had not changed since Greek
antiquity: What is reality made of? What are its ultimate
constituents?

At the same time, throughout the same history of philosophy and
science the study of pattern was always present. It began with the
Pythagoreans in Greece and was continued by the alchemists, the
Romantic poets, and various other intellectual movements. However, for
most of the time the study of pattern was eclipsed by the study of
substance until it reemerged forcefully in our century, when it was
recognized by systems thinkers as essential to the understanding of
life.

I shall argue that the key to a comprehensive theory of living systems
lies in the synthesis of those two very different approaches, the
study of substance (or structure) and the study of form (or pattern).
In the study of structure we measure and weigh things. Patterns,
however, cannot be measured or weighed; they must be mapped. To
understand a pattern we must map a configuration of relationships. In
other words, structure involves quantities, while pattern involves
qualities. The study of pattern is crucial to the understanding of
living systems because systemic properties, as we have seen, arise
from a configuration of ordered relationships. Systemic properties are
properties of a pattern. What is destroyed when a living organism is
dissected is its pattern. The components are still there, but the
configuration of relationships among them—the pattern—is destroyed,
and thus the organism dies.

Most reductionist scientists cannot appreciate critiques of reduc-
tionism, because they fail to grasp the importance of pattern. They
affirm that all living organisms are ultimately made of the same atoms
and molecules that are the components of inorganic matter and that the
laws of biology can therefore be reduced to those of physics and
chemistry. While it is true that all living organisms are ultimately
made of atoms and molecules, they are not "nothing but" atoms and
molecules. There is something else to life, something nonmaterial and
irreducible—a pattern of organization.