ARISTOTLE, COMPLEXITY, AND ECOSYSTEMS: A SPECULATIVE JOURNEY

摘要

Aristotle provided a means for understanding natural systems in terms of four kinds of causes. Modern science has focused on the first two of these, material and efficient, roughly corresponding to the Newtonian view of objects in space (material) and processes (efficient). The laws governing transformations in this view are not themselves considered to be part of realized nature, but part of a Platonic realm analysis. Complexity can be understood in a deep sense with regard to Aristotle’s original causal structure, readmitting the second two causes, formal and final, which were eliminated from mechanistic science to make it computationally simple (Rosen, 1991). While scientists hoped in vein for several Centuries that nature itself would turn out to be computationally simple, that now appears to not be the case. Life, psychological choice, quantum phenomena, and the origin of the universe each raises questions of causal origins, which cannot logically be addressed from the mechanistic viewpoint. An understanding of formal and final cause is therefore needed to understand what is life and living. This is most apparent in regard to emerging interests in ecosystem complexity, necessitated by issues of ecosystem management that have been intractable from purely mechanistic frameworks. Ideas of deep complexity may be extended to understand ecosystem complexity in terms of natural information, including feedback of scientific information through management.