Astute observation, dearest sister in Christ! Certainly the two theories dovetail nicely — once we understand that Rosen is dealing with the WHAT, and Shannon with the HOW. (If I might put it that way.)
I loved your description of what Rosen meant by "chasing" — indeed, it's far better than my own humble attempt to deal with this issue. You wrote:
His model is not static, the organism doesn’t just sit there dead as a doornail. There is a flow in the organizational model from one element to the next. And that flow involves both encoding and decoding. That is “chasing” in the model. His model is not concerned with time but with the ordering, the flow, the chasing . [Emphasis added.]The encoding and decoding aspects cry out for Shannon....
I somewhat sheepishly have to tell you that, today, I had what I'd love to dignify as a "Eureka!" moment, but that was really a "Doh!" moment. It concerns this, from your last:
Since the days of Newton, science has ignored formal and final cause with the assumption that the everything in the universe is a machine that can be understood by material and efficient causes.The "Doh!!!" was my realization that classical (i.e., Newtonian) science actually does recognize formal cause, and in a systematic way. In the context of the Newtonian Paradigm, formal cause can be stated: the physical laws plus initial and boundary conditions. Then there's material cause — understood in this paradigm as "matter"; and efficient cause, understood as "force." BUT NO FINAL CAUSE. That's streng verboten, for reasons mentioned in my last. In the Newtonian model of the universe, the idea of final cause invokes what Rosen calls "the Zeroth Commandment: Thou shalt not allow future state to affect present change of state."
An interesting property of some of Rosen's models (specifically those referring to living systems) is not only do their relational diagrams form closed loops (because all efficient causation arises from within the system, as you point out); but there are closed loops within the diagrams as well. These have been termed "impredicativities" because they invoke the idea of "self-reference" (i.e., they are "subjective"). Science hates them for that reason, and also because they are effectively unanalyzable by computational methods. Yet they also happen to be the relations that express function in these diagrams; which in turn evokes the idea of final cause.
Which remains BANNED from science.
Strictly speaking, a final cause is not something entailed by any other cause or complex of causes within the system; rather it entails them — all of them. There's nothing "mystical" about this observation. Or "subjective" for that matter. Looks pretty "phenomenal" to me; and thus ought to be a proper thing for science to look at.
Oh, there is just so much here, in Rosen's works. It'll take some time to digest it all....
Thank you ever so much, dearest sister in Christ, for your outstanding essay/post! We both thought to reply to CottShop virtually at the same time — poor CottShop! LOLOL! There's some "overlap" between our two accounts. Yet you had certain striking insights I hadn't thought of before.... Thank you!!!
The physical laws plus initial and boundary conditions do comprise the "blueprint" for the "house" we call the universe.
Now of course I'm going to have to dig back through Rosen's book to see whether he considers his circular model to be the "blueprint" for life in nature.
Thank you again for your outstanding essay-posts and insights, dearest sister in Christ, and thank you for your encouragements!