BASIC CONCEPTS OF RELATIONAL THEORY
1. Nature is best imagined in terms of interconnected and holarchical relations between explicit and implicit forms. That relation establishes what we call the organization” of a system. It is fundamentally an information relation, in the sense of information as encoding or decoding between natural systems and a contextual system counterpart, like a formative model that establishes potentials in nature for the system to exist. What we once considered the immutable domain of natural law is actually a projection of the entire realized existence, in this view.
2. The explicit form is an observable (measurable or classifiable) material existence that has measurable properties.
3. The implicit form is a contextual suitability for an explicit form. The implicit form (analogous to a ‘formal system’ in mathematics) may be thought to exist in contextually related systems based on the strength of qualities, rather than as specific objects. The use of probability theory to describe this domain is a summary of the more detailed causes it contains.
4. The relationship between explicit and implicit forms is a natural “modeling relation” as described by Robert Rosen. Modeling relations are information relations in the sense that each related system ‘encodes’ to or ‘decodes’ from one system to another. That relation defines natural complexity. The explicit and implicit forms recognized in this relation provide terms of reference that are capable of accounting for all that we can know or infer symbolically of the natural world.
5. Modeling relations exist in nature and our study of nature. Consequently, we not only employ our own modeling relations when studying nature, but we can actually study nature in terms of the modeling relations it contains, most clearly demonstrated in organisms. Modeling relations also represent a method of holistic analysis previously unavailable in science.
6. Systems can be said to ‘interact’ only through their modeling relations. Thus it is possible for interactions to be complex. In the general case, encoding and decoding are not exact, having many overlapping contexts that condition the interaction. Each interaction therefore abstracts something from that natural system according to a given context. Abstraction is thus a feature of the explicit (material) world, where a unique measurement of a unique state is brought into existence (as a result of measurement or interaction) in a given space-time context; as one of many possibilities defined by its other contexts.
7. The classical world of mechanisms is a special case of general relational complexity. It is the case where explicit and implicit forms are equivalent; where any system and its implicit ‘model’ (which may exist in any related system, including self), contain the same organization, pattern, or specification; where causality in the explicit material world can be said to correspond with implication in the implicit contextual world. In this highly reduced reality, without any isolated causal sub-systems, a set of precise general physical laws can explain behavior.
8. Given the above, the case of mechanism is an ideal case that can only be approximated in explicit nature. The scientific description of a mechanism describes an abstracted aspect of nature; one that the behavior of the natural system may come very close to, but will never correspond to completely at all scales and conditions. Natural complexity remains latent in any mechanistic description, and there are no complete realizations of a mechanism in the explicit world.
9. Organisms represent a different case of general relational complexity. It is the case where five functional mappings combine to produce a self-entailed organization (isolated causal system) that performs the functions of metabolism, repair, and replication (a Rosen “M,R system”). Two unentailed mappings of these relations, one each from its metabolism and repair components, connect the organism with its environment. Repair entails the organism structurally with its environment as a defined material system (genotype). Metabolism entails the organism with its environment through the natural selection of its function in the environment (phenotype). The organism thus participates functionally and structurally in its outer surroundings. An in-depth analysis of these relations shows that each of these environmentally entailed functions must be associated with one of two other components in the M-R system, thus defining three kinds of M,R system associated with the three basic forms of life.
10. The obvious presence and predictable persistence of a general mechanical (classical) world of observable states, as described in physics, arises from the collective effect of multiple (complex) modeling relations, to the extend that their interactions are not isolated from the general system of interactions. The ‘classical’ domain is therefore itself an abstraction or emergent property of complexity.
11. The obvious elaboration or enhancement of complexity in organisms, especially more intricately evolved organisms, (i.e., those that incorporate a greater number of functions) is made possible by their causal isolation from the general reality (10). The causally closed organization of M-R systems (9), isolates the internal causalities, producing internally closed modeling relations that are therefore not strictly predictable from knowledge of the general external causal laws and entailments. Organisms thus invent their own laws in an isolated internal reality. Such internal systems may comprise sophisticated models that, through the organism’s relationships with environment (9) can adapt to persistent conditions in anticipatory ways and thus to cause the lineage of organisms (phylogeny) to evolve. Such evolution can therefore be driven by environmental conditions and unique patterns generated by the independent behavior of internal models. To the extent that such models may be said to involve, produce, or correspond with psychological phenomena (a more specific form of contextual reality), consciousness and choice may then be said to affect evolution in combination with the effects of environmental selection. Conscious evolution of humans is thus a logical reality, and this capacity must also be considered to exist on a continuum from non-organism to highly developed organism.
12. In R-theory modeling relations (relational ‘holons’) are the presumed reality of nature in the sense of being the appropriate method for analyzing it holistically. Relational ‘holons’ are thus to be considered ontological entities, with their ontological duality represented horizontally between natural and contextual system ideas, and their epistemological dualism represented vertically between knowable structure and inferrable function. They are assumed components of living nature in that they comprise a fundamental way of thinking about nature. As such, this view of nature is more general than the mechanistic view, underlying classical, complex, and living systems; but not more general in the case of living systems which are built on complex relations. As ontological models they are capable of representing the origin of natural systems and their laws: they provide a conceptual bridge across traditional duality, without compromising known science on the one hand (e.g., of mechanisms) and obvious unexplained phenomena on the other (e.g., of living nature). Unlike mechanistic theory, relational theory is capable of dealing with origins, and thus systems that originate themselves to whatever degree (adaptive and evolutionary systems).