The meaning of the acronym 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 = they use models for guiding their action and they can adapt by expanding their information space.  This implies/requires the ability to perform in parallel a semantic (verifying and generating useful meanings) and syntactic (verifying and generating useful rules) process.  As a result means they are able to define useful identities for themselves on multiple-scale (for admissible inputs, components, wholes, and admissible environments/associative contexts).  These integrated set of self-entailing identities are becoming in time

I = Individualities = even though these systems show systemic properties associated to identities (they can be studied 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. This means that these systems can only be analyzed by adopting a historic perspective ;

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

H = Holarchic = these systems are organized in nested “holons” (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 (the functional role plaid by the type within a given associative context).  Holons are components (provides structural stability) to their higher level holons and represents the admissible environment (provides functional meaning) to their lower level holons.

E⁴= the surviving in time 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 by a population of non-equivalent interacting observers/agents of the validity of essences, since realizations of that essence prove, to them, the existence of the relative holon).   The ability of keeping 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, equivalence classes of individual realizations, networks made up of populations of equivalence classes must al be viable in thermodynamic terms.

Put in another way the identity of this class of systems is generated by a self-entailing process of “recipes making processes” and “processes making recipes” to use the metaphor proposed by Herbert Simon. In more technical terms they are stabilized through a mechanism of self-entailment of two type of languages 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 it (the Meta-language of knowledge generated by the ability to assign meaning to symbols – encoding information). 

The validity of these two languages depends on their ability to keep alive the LIPHE⁴system.

That is, the famous line of Traski:  “snow is white” is true if and only if snow is white,

can be translated into: “a LIPHE⁴system has meaning if and only if it is ALIPHE⁴