There was a thread up re: Rosen a few months back, but I don't think this particular issue of "causal closure" by means of a final cause came up there. It's based on recollection of arguments in his wonderful book, Life Itself: A Comprehensive Inquiry into the Nature, Origin, and Fabrication of Life. Rosen's approach to theoretical biology is intensively mathematical. His method is mathematical modeling of complex systems, in particular biological ones.
He doesn't get into information/communication issues explicitly, nor is he building a hierarchical model of a biological organism of the type Williams created. Rather, he is dealing with the causal characteristics (organizational structure) of complex systems in general, and how they differ from the "simple system" structures we call mechanisms and machines.
It is, IMHO, a revolutionary book. It seems to be gaining wider attention among theoretical biologists, especially those who favor a mathematical approach. Which to me is a promising way to advance; for as Eugene Wigner put it, mathematics is "unreasonably effective" in probing/describing the universe. (Or words to that effect.)
Of course the Evos would detest final causes; they cannot have a system that is NOT completely open to the environment. All the prompts to speciation are said to come from the environment. The environment "pushes," and "natural selection" does all the rest, in a purely blind, purposeless process....
Of course, it's my view that people who say such things must also believe in fairy stories....
IMHO, your analysis of the Evo "predicament" is spot-on, dear CottShop! Thank you ever so much for writing!
CottShop, you did ask about some of this on a previous thread. For tacticalogic and freedum2003, I'm copying below your remark then and my reply:
I’ll try to “sum it up” this way…
There are four different kinds of “causation.” To use an example, the formal cause would be the blueprint for your house. The material cause would be the lumber, nails, etc. The efficient cause would be the construction workers who build it. And the final cause would be the house itself, the reason for the previous three causes.
Since the days of Newton, science has ignored formal and final cause with the assumption that everything in the universe is a machine that can be understood by material and efficient causes.
Among other things, this allowed them to insist philosophers and theologians stay away to let them do their work.
And their presupposition has been wildly successful for centuries because, with the notable exception of living things, the rest of the universe can be understood as a machine.
Evidently, the scientists always considered biology to be a “special case” – minor in comparison to the rest of the universe – and not really worth their time. The machine presupposition works well in physics and chemistry, so it’s just a matter of time before they can explain life as a machine, too.
The biologists meanwhile didn’t care either. The machine way of looking at things works well enough in the laboratory until people ask inconvenient questions – and besides they can always claim that life is evolution, the historical record itself. Which is to say, it is because here we are (see Anthropic principle.)
Well, enter the mathematical biologists (Rosen and his predecessors) and mathematicians/physicists who dared to ask (vonNeumann, Pattee, Yockey, Chaitin, Wolfram et al) and it becomes glaringly apparent that life is not simply a machine after all.
From Rosen’s outstanding arguments we see there is no (efficient) cause outside of the organism doing the maintenance, repair, metabolizing and building. It’s doing it on its own. And so he has developed a relational biology, a mathematical model looking at the organization itself. And thus Rosen declares that "a material system is an organism if, and only if, it is closed to efficient causation."
That is how he answers the question “What is life?” 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.
The same is true of Shannon’s mathematical model of communications. It is all about the chasing. Information is defined by Shannon as the reduction of uncertainty in the receiver (an element to Rosen’s model) – the chasing, the flow – not the message itself.
My only complaint so far about Rosen’s book is that he did not give enough credit to Shannon even though his theory relies on Shannon’s work.
To compare the two, think of Shannon as a discrete single chase through Rosen’s organization, e.g. it starts with a sender, a message which is encoded and sent through a channel subject to noise whereupon it is decoded and thereby reduces the uncertainty of the receiver. Shannon's has a beginning and an end. It is discrete.
Rosen's is not a discrete instance, his goes endlessly one to another, turning it into a circular model. One flow (input>process>output> to another (input>process>output) seamlessly.
And so, if anyone asks me “What is life?” I will answer them with both.
Under Shannon, that which successfully communicates in nature is alive. If it cannot, it is either dead or non-life. Shannon’s model doesn’t care whether the elements of the model are biological, radios, tvs, computers, non-physical, etc. Thus the Shannon definition applies to biological organisms (nature), alien life forms (cosmos), artificial intelligence (man-made), spiritual beings, etc.
Under Rosen, expanding his above definition beyond the material (nature) - a thing is alive if it is closed to efficient causation. Which is to say, the thing doesn’t need an outsider to do maintenance, repair, etc.
Because of this, Rosen’s definition rejects artificial intelligence and thus has been criticized by some in that camp. It also arguably would only recognize God as having Spiritual life in Himself (as the Scriptures say.)
The two models are not mutually exclusive. Which one I emphasize in a debate will probably depend on the subject matter.
The Shannon model has a track record in pharmaceutical and cancer research. The Rosen model is just now getting some attention and its application is also reaching to physical cosmology (Fineman et al.)
Did that help?