Homeodynamics not Homeostasis

[Guest guest]

Mcsiff@... wrote:

> Now, I note that some authors have coined a word for what quite a few

> of us have been discussing for several years now. They call it

> " homeodynamics " , but also imply that their ideas are unique. This is

> incorrect, since the pioneers of the field of applied chaos theory and

> nonlinear dynamic theory, including one of its most prominent Nobel

> laureate leaders, Ilya Prigogine (whom they do not even mention in

> their summary), wrote about dynamic equilibrium processes long before

> these new authors wrote their article a few weeks ago. All that they

> did was create a useful name for the concept, namely " homeodynamics " .

> They can hardly claim originality for much more than that.

<http://216.25.242.189/tsw/iPublish/articles/Aon/Aon.htm>

Overall, I'd say they didn't do a terrible job, although I am

bothered by a few points. One is that they refer to 'emergence', a

concept of complex systems theory that is exceedingly slippery and

disliked by many serious researchers in NLD. Emergence is the

tendency for a collection of many interconnected agents to behave in

an apparently organized fashion at a global scale (e.g., an economy

behaving in a certain way as a result of the behaviors of many people

in the economy). The problem is that there is no strict definition

for emergence, and it's even been suggested that a behavior is

emergent when it is surprising. The natural comeback to this idea

is, " OK, but what if my imagination is much better than yours, so I'm

not easily surprised? " The bottom line is that this concept doesn't

actually buy us anything: it recognizes the fact that coherent

behaviors occur in complex systems, but doesn't provide any clues

whatsoever about when such behaviors are likely to occur or, just as

importantly, when they won't.

Another thing that bothers me is their geometric interpretation of

homeodynamics. They say that, when one state of a system becomes

unstable, the system flies off toward a different attractor. This

idea (multiple attraction wells embedded in a given space) is not

necessarily wrong, but is not necessarily right, either. This

concept requires that the dynamics move to a different 'place' in the

state space, but this is not necessarily the case (in fact, for many

systems it is exceedingly unlikely). The other possibility, which I

believe is probably more representative of reality, is that the

attractor changes 'under' the dynamics, i.e., that the system's

trajectory changes without leaving the subspace that it inhabited in

the first place. There really is a fundamental difference between

these two concepts, and their selection of this particular concept as

describing homeodynamics is highly questionable.

This and other papers on the subject could open the eyes of some

researchers to different ways of interpreting the behaviors of living

organisms. I just hope people don't get bogged down in poor jargon

and limited concepts.

- Wayne Hill

Westborough, MA