Does this help?
(hey, those look pretty good -- now I am hungry!)
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?
The “mathematical model” argument seem to be operating under the premise that the model is a perfect representation of whatever is being modeled. I find that a dubious proposition.
Not only are you erudite, but you have a heck of a memory.
When you and your sister (in Christ) get rolling, I feel like a boogie boarder on Hawaii’s North Shore. Huge beautiful waves of words, but not what I expected when I parked the car.
I understand why it is you link science and philosophy, but that is not and never has been my argument.
My argument is and always has been a practical one: How can you apply amorphous musings (no offense) to the modern scientific model? Answer: You can’t. It can certainly be part of the individual and even the collective pursuit, but the process has nor (nor should it have) any “bucket” to hold it.
Philosophy is a different realm that hard science. All scientists engage in philosophical debate and many are very good at it. But that is still different.
The idea, for example, that evolution is “looking for something” (I am broadly paraphrasing for example’s sake) can establish a direction for science to pursue (a proper role) but once the pursuit begins, it becomes “what physical, non-supernatural phenomena constitute ‘looking?’” (FWIIW, it is stochastic processes).
So as much as I really admire the depth and breadth of your knowledge and ability to apply to the issue at hand, I still feel it takes the discussion in paths that wander away from the core issue.
IMHO and YMMV
Does this help?
(hey, those look pretty good -- now I am hungry!)
You wrote:
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....The "presupposition" that the universe "ought" to be understood as a machine obviously limits the scientific search to machine-like characteristics from the get-go.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 Newtonian paradigm has been so successful that by now, most people believe that physics (including mechanics of course) is THE universal descriptor of the laws of the universe, and biology — as you noted — is just a fairly "rare" and thus uninteresting case. Biology is simply assumed to reduce to the physical laws.
On that very assumption, though, biology hits the wall.
Notice that Darwin's Theory of Evolution is not a theory of biology, per se. It is only a theory of speciation. It takes the biology "for granted," and then purports to explain how it speciates.
A much more interesting proposal has been surfacing in recent times, however — the idea that biology is the basic, "more general law" of the universe, and physics is a special case of it.
It seems to me that a science that purports to be a "life science" ought to get a bit more serious about the question, What is life itself? That is, what constitutes "biology?" This is not to ask how do biological organisms change — this is to ask, What is it that makes them biological organisms — living systems — in the first place?
To me, this is the greatest question for 21st-century science. And it is clear that the Newtonian Paradigm cannot answer it. Since Darwin's theory rests on that, it has no answers either.
Here's an excerpt from Robert Rosen's working notes that sheds light on the issues of self-imposed "scientific limitations" WRT to inquiry into biological nature — in a delightfully humorous way:
WHY DO PEOPLE HATE SCIENCE SO MUCH?Thank you ever so much for writing, dearest sister in Christ!a. IT'S REMOTE. (hence, limited away from what is concrete and near).
b. IT PERTAINS, AT BEST, TO ONLY ONE WAY OF KNOWING. (hence, limited away from what is inaccessible to that way of knowing).
c. IT'S RESPONSIBLE FOR OUR PRESENT PROBLEMS; PROBLEMS WHICH CAN ONLY GET WORSE AS SCIENCE PROGRESSES. (hence, limited away from the roots of those problems, limited away from solving those problems; indeed, a cause of those very problems; making the world increasingly worse as it advances).
Re (b): Hutchins felt that scientists were in fact insufferable; arrogant and impudent; confusing reality with objectivity, facts with understanding or principle. Remember his remarks about the Great Conversation. He held that the real question was "what should I do now?" "What should we do now, why should we do these things?" The Great Conversation was, he felt, about politics and religion.
What I am trying to argue is that science is characterized by what it is about, not by any method or way of knowing. Something becomes scientific not by means of a particular way of knowing, or of doing, but by what it is about. It is about truth. It is about finding the consequents of hypotheses: IF a, then what? IF b, why b?
Is A true? (observation).
If A is true, what else is true? (prediction).
Why is A true? (causality).Pretty benign. In this context, a "limitation" of science, would be something like: (a) an inherent inability to tell whether A is true or not; (b) an inherent inability to find out what A implies; (c) an inability to find out what implies A....