I want to now move on to Rosen's last book, published after his death:Essays On Life Itself. Here is a review I wrote:Review of: "Essays on Life Itself". The first chapter is worth spending at least this one diary looking at to punctuate what we have done so far in this series of diaries. It is entitled "On Biology and Physics" and comes from a talk Presented at a workshop on "Limits to Scientific Knowability" held at the Santa Fe Institute in 1994.
To me, the basic question in biology, to which all others are subsidiary or collateral, is the one put most succinctly by the physicist Erwin Schroedinger: What is life?...I claim that the Goedelian noncomputability results are a symptom arising within mathematics itself indicating that we are trying to solve problems in too limited a universe of discourse. The limits in question are imposed in mathematics by an excess of "rigor", and in science by cognate limitations of "objectivity" and "context independence."...the result in both cases, is a mind set[my emphasis] of reductionism, of only looking downward toward subsystems, and never upward and outward.
We have now tasted enough in the previous diaries (here is a link to the last which links the others
Reading Ramblings: Science and religion-At odds or in collusion? )to see what he is getting at. But that was said some time ago and some of us have been working on. In my case it has become clear that the "mindset" Rosen is referring to is more widespread than the context of science. For that reason we can gain insight into politics as well by looking at its meaning. George Lakoff has already given us plenty to chew on and his latest warning is not to be dismissed without consequences that we could possibly avoid or minimize.
Why the GOP Campaign for the Presidency Is About Guaranteeing a Radical Conservative Future for America I will be coming back to this point, but now read on below for some insights about the confusion that exists about the relationship of biology to physics.
Living organisms are material things subject to the laws of physics. Yet as Rashevsky pointed out more than half a century ago, life is consistent with physics, yet physics does not predict life. This is no trivial statement. It is about relationships between systems of thought. The popular notion has always been that physics is general and that biology is special. The contradiction should jump out at this point but it rarely does. That is what mindsets are all about. Lakoff could talk about the framing that has gone on. In fact that framing began centuries ago as we have seen in this series. Let us see this through Rosen's eyes once again:
Despite the profound differences between those material systems that are alive and those that are not, these differences have never been expressible in the form of a list-an explicit set of conditions that formally demarcate those material systems that are organisms from those that are not. Without such a list, Schroedinger's question, and biology itself, become unanswerable at best, meaningless at worst. So we must probe more deeply into what the quest for such a list actually connotes.
He speaks about the formal way of expressing the possible existence of such a list in terms of the finding of algorithms that helps us classify organisms among a larger universe of material systems.
It of course has never been demonstrated that there is no such list. But no one has never found one.
Not for any lack of effort that is sure. Now we get to a point that has been a problem for people every time Rosen drives home the meaning of all this for it is indeed a revolutionary idea. The crux of it will be the subject of a fortcoming diary but for now let me just drop the bomb (again): Complex systems always have aspects that are
not computable. This is a hard pill to swallow in the age of computers. It says that if we can simulate some aspect of a system on a computer, we have stripped that system of its complex nature and reduced it to a machine! Computation relies on algorithms and the inability to find these algorithms is a symptom of this noncomputability.
This possibility (the absence of algorithms) is already a kind of noncomputability assertion, that asserts that the world of lists and algorithms is too small to deal with the problem, too nnongeneric.
And there is the idea about what is generic and what is not. It certainly is
not physics that is generic! Rosen then reviews the Goedel result in a way fitting this discussion. To sum it up in his words:
Hilbert sought this kind of formalizationof all mathematics, the reduction of mathematics to algorithms or lists.
It was this program that Goedel's results killed. Briefly, these results mean that a constructive universe, finitely generated, consisting of pure syntax, is too poor to do mathematics in. They mean that semantics and impredicativies and meanings are essential to mathematics; they cannot be replaced by more syntactic rules and more lists or algorithms. They mean that mathematical systems are generally unformalizable; hence it is the formalizable ones that are the rare special cases, and not the other way around...I argue that biology teaches us that the same is true about the material world. Roughly, that contemporary physics is to biology as Number Theory is to a formalization of it. Rather than an organism being just a standard material system plus a list of special conditions, an organism is a repository of meanings and impredicativities; it is more generic than an inorganic system rather than less....If this is so then organisms possess noncomputable, unformalizable models. Such systems are what I call complex...The main lesson from all this is that computability, in any sense, is not itself a law of either nature or of mathematics.
If you want to update yourself on the deep meanings here A. Louie's book
More than Life Itself is the place to go:
A. H. Louie’s More Than Life Itself is an exploratory journey in relational biology, a study of life in terms of the organization of entailment relations in living systems. This book represents a synergy of the mathematical theories of categories, lattices, and modelling, and the result is a synthetic biology that provides a characterization of life. Biology extends physics. Life is not a specialization of mechanism, but an expansive generalization of it. Organisms and machines share some common features, but organisms are not machines. Life is defined by a relational closure that places it beyond the reach of physicochemical and mechanistic dogma, outside the reductionistic universe, and into the realm of impredicativity. Function dictates structure. Complexity brings forth living beings.
I am not exposing you to these ideas for their obvious meaning alone. I am going to be asking you to extend your horizons to see that these relationships between contemporary ideas are not limited to science and the material world. As Rosen pointed out they have much to say about human institutions as well. The fields of politics and economics and education are among the many places where fresh approaches are called for. Thus we have only begun to see beyond the self-imposed limits we have accepted up until now. Lets us go forward and explore these new ways of seeing what is out there. The world will change and we will be helping change it!
Our next diary will be a technical digression to maximize the solidity of these very revolutionary ideas. It will be devoted to some things A. Louie put forth in his book to set these matters to rest; hopefully for all time.