Meaning of liphe4

LIPHE4 is a new acronym proposed to characterize the class of self-organizing dissipative adaptive systems organized on nested hierarchical levels.

The acronym stands for:

L = Learning: Self-organizing systems use models for guiding their action and can adapt by expanding their information space. They can perform in parallel a semantic process (verifying and generating useful meanings) and syntactic process (verifying and generating useful rules). Adaptive systems are able to define useful identities for themselves on multiple-scales. These integrated set of self-entailing identities are becoming in time.

I = Individualities: Even though these systems show systemic properties associated to identities and can be characterized in terms of expected patterns and typologies, they are all “special” because of their peculiar history. Individualities are affected by the accumulation of internal “path-dependent” constraints. These systems can only be analysed by adopting a historic perspective;

P = Producing: Systems express agency, but are subject to biophysical constraints. The process of self-organizing (autopoiesis) can be viewed from a thermodynamic perspective in terms of capability of producing stable autocatalytic loops of energy forms. The creation of individuals belonging to given typologies can be described as an integrated series of predictable and controllable behaviours. The identity of self-organizing dissipative systems requires an expected pattern associated to their metabolism.

H = Holarchic: These systems are organized in nested “holons,” i.e. entities with a double nature of part and whole. Depending on how we look at them we can either see: (a) organized structures (realizations of types) made to perform a role within a specified associative context; or (b) relational functions played within a given context. Holons are components providing structural stability to their higher level holons, and represent the admissible environment providing functional meaning to their lower level holons.

E4 = The four “Es” stand for: The surviving in the context of holarchies requires the ability to preserve a coherent mapping between “a universe of ESSENCES” (an integrated set of useful semantic identities used by a population of non-equivalent interacting observers/actors when perceiving and representing the reality) and “a universe of EXPERIENCES” (the recognition of the validity of essences by a population of non-equivalent interacting observers/agents). The ability to maintain coherence between the two universes entails the correspondence between two other sets: “EXPECTED BEHAVIORS” (a valid information space used in the control of the autocatalytic loop of energy forms across scales) and “ESTABLISHED MECHANICAL SYSTEMS” (a viable thermodynamic realization of autocatalytic loops of energy forms across scales, based on the congruence of flows of energy and matter across levels). The metabolism of individual realizations and the networks made up of populations of equivalent classes must all be viable in thermodynamic terms.

Thus, using the metaphor proposed by Herbert Simon, the identity of this class of systems is generated by a self-entailing process of “recipes making processes” and “processes making recipes”. In more technical terms, they are stabilized through a mechanism of self-entailment of two types of language used to guide action: a syntactic language in use (the Objective Language generated by the effect of thermodynamic constraints operating on initiating conditions and boundary conditions), and a semantic process providing meaning and checking the validity of the language (the Meta-language of knowledge generated by the ability to assign meaning to symbols – encoding information).