In the last installment Reading Ramblings: Why do things happen? The role of causality in the worldwe developed Rosen's breakthrough discovery that we can have a clean distinctions between organisms and machines using causal reasoning. I want to go back over that in this installment. I also want to introduce some hot new work that backs it up Then I want to look at its implications for the result of a few hundred years of an apparent struggle between science and religion. I will show you why the Cartesian machine metaphor made religion necessary! This finding, in itself, explains more about what we see going on in political discourse than anything I know. It has made science weak because the science being followed is indeed weak. If we go back and use Rosen's results that weakness disappears and the whole situation with regard to science and religion gets framed in a new way far more favorable for science. Read on below and I will make my case.
First I will review what it was that Rosen did. The link to the previous diary above will give you more. Rosen was fascinated by Schroedinger's little bookWhat Is Life? As I showed in the last diary, Schroedinger's question was (and still is) poorly posed. Rosen took care of this by reposing the question in a way that could be answered. Rosen saw that in the context of the Cartesian legacy, of which even Schroedinger was victim, the machine metaphor had effectively set a stopping point for scientific progress. Therefore it was necessary to deal instead with a well posed question:"Why are organisms different from machines?" His strategy for dealing with this is brilliant. He makes it possible to divide the Universe of Discourse cleanly into disjoint categories: (Organisms|Machines), creating a total reversal of the epistemological failure that was Descartes legacy! How did he accomplish this? By using a model. Not just any model, but a relational model built on causal reasoning and an extension of systems theory taken from the Cartesian dogma. Using the form of the technique developed there he created a set of abstract causal block diagrams that could become dealt with using a form of mathematical reasoning known as Category Theory that enabled constructing causal maps of systems models. Using these tools he created both a machine model and an organism model. They were different in one very important respect. Once the organism model was nearly finished, he saw that the categorical mappings had a very important property. Using one fact about the way living organisms relate their production of proteins to their DNA in their genes, he was able to close the diagram for the organism. It became closed to efficient cause! Why is this important? Because no such closure is available for a machine. In fact machines are causally impoverished. The model of a machine leads to an infinite regression unless causal agents are added from the outside! But Descatres and those who followed his legacy to this day insist that we can treat living organisms as machines. So they have introduced a logical necessity for an outside cause and that can only be supernatural, usually a diety! So there you have it. The entire misguided legacy of Descatres has made science weak in its efforts to deal with religion. Rosen's finding puts the whole thing in a different relationship. Religion is now a choice, not a necessity and certainly that choice can not be claimed to cover things science can not any longer.
Finally, the things Rosen claimed did not go unchallenged. Every challange has been met with good mathematical and good scientific backup. Rather than dwell on this I will steer you to a book written by A. Louie, one of Rosen's students.More Than Life Itself: A Synthetic Continuation in Relational Biology
A. H. Louie's "More Than Life Itself" is an exploratory journey in
relational biology, a study of life in terms of the organisation 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
characterisation of life. Biology extends physics. Life is not a
specialisation of mechanism, but an expansive generalisation 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
After this book came out, a number of us were asked to contribute papers to a special (but refereed) edition of the journal
Axiomathes to comment and add to the growing body of new science.
I have a paper in that volume which I have written about here in other diaries. Jim Coffman and I are writing a book as a follow up to this paper.
I have also reviewed other books that try to accomplish what Rosen has apparently without having read him. (One seems to be full of non-referenced ideas from one of the others so the situation is complicated). I am unable to fathom the lost time and effort that has gone into the false arguments over science and religion based on the weak reductionist version of science. As we develop complex systems theory we also have to constantly explain to people that these words mean different things to different people. Rosen has given a definition of complexity that can not be co-opted by the Cartesian reductionists who also have used the words. Rosen's work, as far as I know, is the only example of rigorous mathematics and systems theory being put to the task, So now we are ready to go on. But where shall we go? I think we are ready to try to look at the relationship between biology and physics from our new perspective. That will be the next installment.
Fri Mar 16, 2012 at 11:21 AM PT: Just a clarification. The comments about "religion" are for the context of today's political struggles in the USA. "Western Christianity" is therefore the religion in mind. Other religions are outside this context. Descartes made his deal with the Church. The soul (mind) was theirs and the machine like body was for science.