The physical/phenomenal duality of reality is for us elemental, and the ecological Janus Hypothesis gives the network mechanism behind it .The two-faced Roman god Janus is our metaphor for this. Marrying Janus to Gaia, we cleave our ecological reality into concrete and virtual parts, and hold that music too fits this scheme in the rather elemental sense of having a physical basis (sound, involving energy and matter transfer) but effects on organisms that are quite phenomenal (virtual) in expression. Simplistically, just as concrete energy and matter in physical reality might be thought of as providing a 'melodic' foundation for phenomenally based 'harmonies' to evolve between organisms, melody in music provides a primary 'physical' scaffolding upon which 'phenomenal' embellishments of harmony can be laid.And, the responses that propagate forward from music's reception are typically mixes of influences both ontic and epistemic. As each of the 8.7 million organism types has a unique way of processing physical reality to create its own phenomenal model, the diversity of virtual causality is huge in the biosphere, and this makes life entangled in its dualistic planetary webs interesting and challenging, also hard to study. In our ecology, the dichotomy of physical and phenomenal realities is integral in our Janus Hypothesis, diagrammed below. This hypothesis is an ecological theory about how the world works to create order and organization in ecosystems and the biosphere. It works mechanistically in the physical domain because this is empirical and overt, and lends itself to manipulation. It works holistically in the phenomenal domain, which is immanent and covert, and yields only to logical analysis. The combination physical + phenomenal works to create universal order and organization in ecosystems and the biosphere.

In a physical reality that, by the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics tends to spontaneous disordering, work must be done, entailing energy degradation, to move substance away from thermodynamic equilibrium. Left to itself, substance so moved tends to return to equilibrium, so work must continually be done, and energy degraded, to keep this from happening. In living systems, the prime agency for this is life itself, whose processes are 'anti-entropic'. That is, life resists the 2nd-Law 'heat-death' degradation imperative and does work of aggradation to move and maintain itself and its critical non-living support systems far-from-equilibrium. Energy used, and the environments from which it comes, are both degraded in the process. Aggradation, movement away from equilibrium, expresses gaining more order and organization (negative entropy, or 'negentropy'). Degradation, return toward equilibrium, expresses the loss of order and organization. At ecological levels, order-generating processes are represented by a set of categorical ABC's that form an aggradation nexus of 2nd-Law-resisting, order-creating activities (left-center). Autonomous, self-interested organisms (A) and an associated long list of processes are initiating. Replicating these to generate (maximize, actually) biodiversity (B), and another long list of processes, follows. And finally, all the biodiversity dots are connected together (C), also to be maximized, to form constituted ecosystems and their extensions to the biosphere, involving another long list of connectivity-generated and generating processes. By all of this, the aggradation nexus self-organizes to maximize antientropic kinetic energy and matter interchange, termed total system throughflow, TST (center). This results in the accumulation and maximization of natural capital as potential energy and biomass, known as total system storage, TSS (center). Storage (by definition far from equilibrium) thus represents the potential to do work, and throughflow the kinetics of work being done. A Janus Theorem to formalize the hypothesis states that maximization of TST and TSS is sufficient to generate maximum 'benefits' to ecosystems, meaning distance away from thermodynamic equilibrium. This happens automatically (for mathematical reasons) in Margulis' "networking", and in Janus theory it is called network synergism, with two expressions, one kinetic (TST-based), the other potential (TSS-based). We do not yet have a mathematical proof of sufficiency, but we have proved the theorem's converse (and inverse). The biphasic generation of network synergism is depicted in the figure as two lines of left-to-right development — upper (physical/agonistic) and lower (phenomenal/holistic). The upper, ontic line concludes with maximization of Darwinian fitness of organisms, Fitness-I, taken as a minimum entropy condition for biota in relation to geophysical surroundings. The lower, phenomenal line ends with Fitness-II, entailing maximum aggradation of both organisms and their geophysical environments that sustain them. Altogether, the Janus invisible-hand produces sequentially in ecological systems, physical 'wealth' (both kinetic, TST, and potential, TSS); phenomenal 'health' (network synergism); and enduring physical + phenomenal, biotic and environmental 'wellbeing' (Fitness-I and -II). In music too can be seen echoes of these self-same network processes, as the simple example developed in the next section below will serve to demonstrate.

Defined by these equations is the network shown in the second figure. The nodes (notes) carry in them probabilities for the different durations each note is held. The arrows represent probabilities for transition from one note to another. These probabilities define the system dynamics which, as solutions to a set of simultaneous differential equations, plays out implicitly (and inaudibly) beneath the overt and audible music as this is performed. There are several other points of interest in the diagram. Every note has an output to the environment; this appears as a downward-pointing arrow from each node to 'nowhere' (a red dot). Its Defined by these equations is the network shown in the second figure. The nodes (notes) carry in them probabilities for the different durations each note is held. The arrows represent probabilities for transition from one note to another. These probabilities define the system dynamics which, as solutions to a set of simultaneous differential equations, plays out implicitly (and inaudibly) beneath the overt and audible music as this is performed. There are several other points of interest in the diagram. Every note has an output to the environment; this appears as a downward-pointing arrow from each node to 'nowhere' (a red dot). It also would appear as a term in the differential equations for this system. These outputs ensure that the music generated can leave the system and eventually reach your ears. Only two notes have inputs, shown as vertical arrows incoming from the same red-dotted 'nowhere.' These are the first two notes struck at the beginning of the piece. They are depicted as struck from 'outside' the system, implying that the energy introduced by these two inputs does work to produce sound and dissipates at the output ports as the piece progresses.

storage, TSS = 118.5 'energy units', potentially attainable by this particular musical composition. This goes unrealized in the simulated dynamics, however, as follows. The Silent Night composition is 24 measures long. At 6 beats/measure it is 144 beats long. Consulting the figure, none of the compartments has reached full potential at time t = 144 on the time line. As our research proceeds, ascent to full potential may become a significant diagnostic feature in music quality. It would be interesting, for example, if German composer Richard Wagner (1813-1883) ranks so universally high as one of the greats in Western music composition in part because his most acclaimed works are very long, giving time for fullest expression of their built-in potentialities to materialize.In our research, we will be attentive to values of TSS and also other measures, both achievable and achieved in music compositions, and how long it takes in a score for full realization to materialize. Total system storage (TSS) is not the only measure available to us in our network analysis research. The above table lists a few more of these (of about 40) we will investigate, and gives their values for the present Silent Night example. Three measures (identified in boldface) have particular interest in the Janus Hypothesis context. You can locate them in the Janus diagram in PROGRAMS.4 RESEARCH: The Janus Hypothesis. All these measures have significance in the analysis of complex ecological systems, making it hard to imagine they will not be informative also about the organizational properties of music when these are cast in the same analytical mold. That's what we intend to do, also later with poetry, economics, neural networks, genomics, and a whole host of other complex systems that (we think) obey the same rules of General Systems organization that became established over evolutionary time and are now universal within and across the scales of nature — including in human-made music. We fascinate ourselves with this (crazy?) consilient vision that cuts across all reality. We need your interest, and your help, to bring it to fruition.