Posted on 04/05/2009 8:10:35 PM PDT by betty boop
[[I would rather discuss “could be’s” as opposed to what some consider “facts”..]]
i can chime in here- and point to a few facts of science-
—it’s a fact species have biological limits that if exceeded result in species degredation to hte point hwere hte species is no logner fit- this isn’t just an opinion, this is a study/tested fact
—Mutations cause stresses o n a system and result in loss of information
—Macroevolution needs icnreases in non species specific information- Nature does not provide that htrough mutaitons
—it’s a fact that the bible said there was no death of spirit or bloodshed before the fall- in order for macroevolution to have happened, were it even a biological possibility, the bible would have to have stated a lie about sin and death
—it’s a fact that it is mathematically impossible for mutaitons to create new non species specific infromation
—it’s a fact that it’s biologically impossibile for chemicals to produce metainformation and hte heirarchal system of information needed before Macroevolution even has a slight chance of being a possibility
—it’s a fact that metainformation NEEDS to be inpalce first before any new non species specific informaiton can be itnroduced- otherwise the species receives nothign but noise that the species system can not cope with- introducing non species specific info also results in again, loss of species specific info, and degrades the species specific info resulting in less fitness for hte species.
—it’s a fact, that when species experience change due to mutaiton, that hwen left to their own, they tend to begin shedding htose changes, and return to their original fitness levels- the do not keep moving away fro mtheir originally created kind as woudl be needed IF mutaitons could possibily result in macroevolution- which it can’t at any rate. this is a studied and tested fact.
— it is a fact that the second law is detrimental to living systems- whether it be in an open system or a closed on, and in order for macroevolution to be possible, the second law woudl have had to have been violated in billions of species trillions of times all through hte process
—it’s a fact that we have no examples of living systems being able to violate the principle of hte second law except in one single species of bacteria, and even there, the species is STILL beholden to hte law, but has hte ability to renew it’s DNA AFTER it’s old DNA gets too degraded to continue on- this is a unique ability however, and is only seen in one bacteria species, and infact is not an actual violation of hte second law, but a delaying due to the unique ability to renew it’s own DNA thus delaying hte inevitable.
—it’s a fact that an objetive look at hte fossil record shows discontinuity, and hte only way to claim continuity, is by assuming naturalism without any evidence to back the assumptions up
—it’s a fact that there was an ‘explosion’ of fully formed species during what is called hte cambrian age- most species which were the same hten as they are now- with perhaps minor trait changes, which as we know is microevolution, not macroevolution
—it’s a fact that micro and macro evolution are two entirely different biological processes- one causes change to info already present, the other is a result of the creation or introduction of new non species specific information
—it’s a fact that macroevolutionists try to equate hte two processes as beign hte same, but they are not.
There’s lots of facts- not just opinions based on beyond reasonable doubt conclusions based on the evidences present.
And that you are not "spinning minutia" in abbreviated form to make a point?..
If so, your opinion is your opinion.. and thats a fact.. in my opinion..
The fossil record shows, not only discontinuity, but stasis: the preservation of species morphological form over extended periods of time, unto the hundreds of thousands of years or more. In light of these facts, one wonders where the macroevolutionist got the idea that the evolution of species (as "simulated" by the fossil record) is in any way "continuous" is beyond me. Stasis and continuity are mutually exclusive terms. There seems to be nothing "empirical" about such a claim.
I question whether science as presently constituted could even reach to (2)....
That, however, is a minor quibble. IMHO, it does not in the least detract from your magnificent, luminous essay/post! Thank you ever so much, dearest sister in Christ!
In other words, in Rosen's model it is counterproductive to think of time as reducible to a series of discrete, "quantized" steps moving irreversibly from past to present to future. Instead, we are invited to think of time in terms of flow or as Rosen puts it on pages 222223, i.e., with respect to a class of material objects called "machines" of time as a transducer of causal events that relate back to a formal cause, the system's "program." Which respecting the class or set of machines is essentially algorithmic in character.
At this point in the text, we have a description of "machine" a material system in nature classified generically as a mechanism with "special" properties. As such, Rosen regards the machine description as too "impoverished" (a correlative of "special") in the causal entailment department to have much to say about material systems in nature of the class living organisms. (Pardon my redundancy there.)
The figure or diagram in Life Itself that so entrances me is the one that appears on page 251 as [10C.6].
Though conditioned on an "if," it has a certain beauty to it....
Thanks so much for getting back to me with the page cite! I was looking for the "chasing" reference in later chapters, forgetting that in context it referred to Rosen's discussion of machines.
In any case, the Shannon model would seems to apply to whatever case we're looking at. That is, whether from the standpoint is of the machine (e.g., "chasing", as defined by a program or algorithm) or of biological systems (relentlessly non-algorithmic "life"), "efficient cause looking to impress material cause because that's what formal cause specifies and final cause requires" is the rule applying to both. And to inorganic nature also.
I fear these issues are tiresome for most readers, dearest sister in Christ. But I have to say no thinker has excited me more than Robert Rosen since my "discovery" of Eric Voegelen in 1985. :^)
And thus he joins my "pantheon of truly great ones"....
Just to say I think it's time for me to "put a sock in in." :^)
Thank you as ever, dearest sister in Christ, for all your help and able guidance!
I'm very pleased to hear that Rosen is at the top of your list of great ones! He certainly got my attention as well.
For the moment, most all of the Rosen-speak is between you and me. But I expect as the concepts have a chance to sprout and grow, we'll pick up a few more correspondents.
After all, the subject "what is life v non-life/death in nature" seems to come up a lot around here.
Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned:That actually raises more interesting questions - if Adam was not earth-bound but rather a non-physical spirit being (formed out of the dust of the earth..?) busy about his tasks of tending a spiritual garden, then did he actually eat the forbidden fruit, or, well, anyway, I'd love to hear your comment on this!
(Romans 5:12, v14 mentions Adam)
[[For the moment, most all of the Rosen-speak is between you and me.]]
Well it wouldn’t be if you two would speak something other than Swahili :) Having trouble following your lines of htought- I think that Rosen was stating that living systems aren’t to be compared to mechanical or software due to ‘chasing’ which occures when the programs search for the best answers (and protect the ‘species’ or program by isolating it from errors that would otherwise affect living systems??) is this correct? If so, that’s about hte bottom line of things as GA’s certainly can’t mimic living systems, and end up artificially protecting the ‘evolving’ systems, and artificially introducing elements not seen in nature such as far greater rapid development minus the negative effects seen in nature.
[[That actually raises more interesting questions - if Adam was not earth-bound but rather a non-physical spirit being (formed out of the dust of the earth..?) busy about his tasks of tending a spiritual garden, then did he actually eat the forbidden fruit, or, well, anyway, I’d love to hear your comment on this! ]]
This brings up a good point too inthat, Angels had the ability to sin against hteir God before Adam and Eve were created, and if so, if Adam was a spiritual being, he would not have needed the tree of knowledge of good and evil because spiritual beings already knew good AND evil, and could make hte choice between the two- thus no tree was needed needed to make that descision.
And just a further note- some peopel question why God woudl have created the ‘tree of knowledge of good and evil’ and htus ‘tempt’ man to sin- thinking that God had stacked the deck against man right fro mthe start- However, in order for true love to exist, there MUST be the ability to excercise free will, and htere can’t be an ability to do so without the possibility of being unfaithful- , True love can only flourish deeply when htere is the possibility that another ‘love interest’ could capture the heart- the person dedicated to hte spouse shows true love by stickign to their mate or their one true devotion (Soemthign Sanford seems to have forgotten)
Man could have remained moral had hte tree not been available- had hte ability to sin not been made available, but complete morality without the chance of falling ends in a stale relationship- man HAD to go from morality to mortality in order to experience the ability to show true love toward His Creator
First off, no I am not a member of the "Catholic Church" though about half of my family is. Im just a Christian plain and simple. See number 2 on my twelve point answer to the epistemological question for more.
Secondly, the Epistle of Barnabas is not part of the Deuterocanonical books that the Catholic Church includes in its canon. And it is not to be confused with the late sixteenth century Islamic fraud, The Gospel of Barnabas.
The Epistle of Barnabas dates back to the first few centuries after Christs resurrection. It is quoted by Clement of Alexandria and also mentioned by Origen. It was part of the Codex Sinaiticus but is not part of the Catholic canon today.
I quote it because it unambiguously informs us how at a major part of the early church viewed Creation week in Genesis vis-à-vis prophecy. Both it and the Pseudepigraphal book, 2 Enoch which is dated to the first century and only preserved in Slavic refer to the new heaven and earth as the eighth day a time of no more counting when God makes everything anew, and that our present age corresponds to Creation Week 7 days to 7,000 years with the last 1,000 being the Sabbath, Christ's reign on earth (fulfilling the Jewish Messianic prophecies.)
In sum, my Spiritual understanding is that the first three chapters of Genesis are from the Creators perspective. He was the only observer of Creation week.
At the top of Genesis 4, the perspective changes to Adamic man the clock starts clicking, death has entered the world because he was banished to mortality (end of chapter 3.) The death here is not just physical, it is muwth muwth. (Genesis 2:17)
Adam was made to be a living soul in paradise, always communicating with God.
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. Genesis 1:1
Note that the tree of life is in the center of the garden of Eden and also in the center of Paradise. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil is also in the midst of the garden.
He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith unto the churches; To him that overcometh will I give to eat of the tree of life, which is in the midst of the paradise of God. Revelation 2:7
And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell. Matthew 10:28
And all the days that Adam lived were nine hundred and thirty years: and he died. Genesis 5:5
Adam did indeed die (muwth muwth) in the day he ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil because a day from Gods perspective in this revelation to us is a thousand years from Adamic mans perspective.
But, beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. - 2 Pet 3:8
But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, [even] to them that believe on his name: Which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God. John 1:12-13
To me, all of God's revelations are consistent. He is the Creator, the author of Scripture, the only observer of Creation, that He created both spiritual as well as physical and that the observer-perspective of Scripture changes from the Creators to Adamic mans at the end of Genesis 3. Thats when the clock starts clicking.
To God be the glory!
Ill 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 the 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 its just a matter of time before they can explain life as a machine, too.
The biologists meanwhile didnt 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 Rosens outstanding arguments we see there is no (efficient) cause outside of the organism doing the maintenance, repair, metabolizing and building. Its 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 doesnt 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 Shannons 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 Rosens model) the chasing, the flow not the message itself.
My only complaint so far about Rosens book is that he did not give enough credit to Shannon even though his theory relies on Shannons work.
To compare the two, think of Shannon as a discrete single chase through Rosens 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. Shannons model doesnt 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 doesnt need an outsider to do maintenance, repair, etc.
Because of this, Rosens 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?
I think what Rosen is saying is that living organisms can't meaningfully be compared to mechanisms or machines (though all are material systems in nature) because the latter are "simple" systems (i.e., essentially reducible to their algorithms) while the former are "complex" systems (i.e., not ever so reducible the causal structure of such systems simply isn't "algorithmic" or "computable").
Rosen's idea of causality comprehends a system of entailments, which relate the events and phenomena occurring within.
The "chasing" behavior A-G pointed out in the context of the machine model is perhaps just Rosen's way of describing the moving inputoutput character of machine processing. Rosen expresses such notions with relational diagrams that show the system of causal entailment that models a given particular system. The mechanistic models and the machine models he shows all demonstrate situations of "paucity" of causal entailment. That is, there is insufficient causal basis in such systems to account for such real phenomena as life and mind. That's putting it in a (very abstract) nutshell! :^)
Another way to put it is to say all material systems in nature are studied by science (as presently constituted) on the assumption that they can exhaustively be explained in terms of three of the Aristotelian causes: formal, material, and efficient. It is postulated: There can be no final cause!!!
Yet the relational diagrams of living systems are rich with "final causes." The very idea of biological function is related to the idea of final cause. So Rosen argues, science must put the final cause back into its method if it wants to deal with issues of life and consciousness (mind).
In particular, he believes this would be essential to any understanding of the dualistic genotypephenotype relation, which essentially involves a "causeeffect" relation between two incommensurable phenomena.
The restoration of final cause to science is a suggestion most strenuously resisted nowadays, by physicists and biologists alike.
The reasons given for abolishing formal causes from science: (1) they are not "objective"; (2) they are not computable (i.e., reducible to an algorithm); (3) worst of all, they clearly point to a type of cause which is "anticipatory" in some sense, and this is forbidden by the Newtonian Paradigm, which demands that causation must always flow from past to future.
The book Life Itself largely deals with the inadequacy of contemporary physics to deal with the questions, "What is life?" and "What is mind?" Indeed, you pointed to one of the main strategies mimesis WRT your comment regarding "GAs." (I agree with your conclusions there.) The other main strategy (and the more common) is reductionism. Here's a funny story Rosen tells (in "Mind as Phenotype," Essays on Life Itself) about the reductionist strategy:
Many years ago, I heard a routine of Woody Allen that bears on exactly this point. As he told it, he acquired a Rolls-Royce while in England and wanted to return with it to the States. On the other hand, he didn't want to pay the duty on it. So he hit upon the idea of disassembling it, packing the parts into many suitcases, and describing them to the customs inspectors as modern sculpture, not dutiable as art. He was successful, got his many suitcases home, and proceeded to try to reassemble his car. In his first attempt, the parts yielded 200 bicycles. On the second attempt, he got many lawn mowers. And so it went; he never could retrieve the car.I won't further belabor reductionism here, except to say that what is "lost" in any such reduction is precisely information about how to reconstruct the system to restore it to its original form. No study of the "parts" can give one any notion of this. Analogically speaking, you have the elements of the genotype (i.e., its parts, the genes); but you have no clue how to reconstitute the phenotype (the original phenomenal system and its behavior).
Anyhoot, we see reductionism most clearly today in the way biochemistry and microbiology are usually conducted.
Regarding mimesis [the basic strategy of artificial intelligence and artificial life studies]: What is involved here is to replace the system of interest by some behavioral or phenotypic mimic, then to study the mimic to see what you can learn about the original system.
Case in point: the typical assumption that a mimic capable of demonstrating a sufficient number of "thinking behaviors" is actually, in fact, "thinking." What we learn about its "thinking" is assumed to shed light on how human beings actually think. Or at the very least, the mimetic model is imputed to human thought as the best descriptor of it.
There seems to be a huge "leap of faith" involved in this strategy. The mimic is a (comparatively small) collection of behaviors manifested by the original system. What behaviors one puts into the mimic is largely arbitrary, and no attention is given to the causal underpinnings of such behaviors. Then, as Rosen points out, "something like an Occam's Razor is invoked to argue that explaining these behaviors in the mimic is adequate for explaining them in the original system."
As Rosen points out, both these strategies involve replacing the actual system of interest by some kind of surrogate, and then studying the surrogate.
What is clear to me is that both strategies drain all life and mind aspects from living organisms simply by employing the methods that characterize the strategies themselves. The irony is these strategies are attractive to scientists because they meet the scientific criterion of "objectivity." And yet each strategy, as a model, is relentlessly subjective, a "choice" of how one wants to look at material reality, and an assumption that one's model is up to the task.
Neither reduction nor mimesis looks to be a "wining strategy" if what we want is to answer the question, "What is life?"
Don't know if any of this helps, CottShop, to indicate what Rosen is up to in his work. His insights are rigorous, penetrating, profound, and among other things often go straight to the very foundations of mathematics.
Astute observation, dearest sister in Christ! Certainly the two theories dovetail nicely once we understand that Rosen is dealing with the WHAT, and Shannon with the HOW. (If I might put it that way.)
I loved your description of what Rosen meant by "chasing" indeed, it's far better than my own humble attempt to deal with this issue. You wrote:
His model is not static, the organism doesnt 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 . [Emphasis added.]The encoding and decoding aspects cry out for Shannon....
I somewhat sheepishly have to tell you that, today, I had what I'd love to dignify as a "Eureka!" moment, but that was really a "Doh!" moment. It concerns this, from your last:
Since the days of Newton, science has ignored formal and final cause with the assumption that the everything in the universe is a machine that can be understood by material and efficient causes.The "Doh!!!" was my realization that classical (i.e., Newtonian) science actually does recognize formal cause, and in a systematic way. In the context of the Newtonian Paradigm, formal cause can be stated: the physical laws plus initial and boundary conditions. Then there's material cause understood in this paradigm as "matter"; and efficient cause, understood as "force." BUT NO FINAL CAUSE. That's streng verboten, for reasons mentioned in my last. In the Newtonian model of the universe, the idea of final cause invokes what Rosen calls "the Zeroth Commandment: Thou shalt not allow future state to affect present change of state."
An interesting property of some of Rosen's models (specifically those referring to living systems) is not only do their relational diagrams form closed loops (because all efficient causation arises from within the system, as you point out); but there are closed loops within the diagrams as well. These have been termed "impredicativities" because they invoke the idea of "self-reference" (i.e., they are "subjective"). Science hates them for that reason, and also because they are effectively unanalyzable by computational methods. Yet they also happen to be the relations that express function in these diagrams; which in turn evokes the idea of final cause.
Which remains BANNED from science.
Strictly speaking, a final cause is not something entailed by any other cause or complex of causes within the system; rather it entails them all of them. There's nothing "mystical" about this observation. Or "subjective" for that matter. Looks pretty "phenomenal" to me; and thus ought to be a proper thing for science to look at.
Oh, there is just so much here, in Rosen's works. It'll take some time to digest it all....
Thank you ever so much, dearest sister in Christ, for your outstanding essay/post! We both thought to reply to CottShop virtually at the same time poor CottShop! LOLOL! There's some "overlap" between our two accounts. Yet you had certain striking insights I hadn't thought of before.... Thank you!!!
What is clear to me is that both strategies drain all life and mind aspects from living organisms simply by employing the methods that characterize the strategies themselves. The irony is these strategies are attractive to scientists because they meet the scientific criterion of "objectivity." And yet each strategy, as a model, is relentlessly subjective, a "choice" of how one wants to look at material reality, and an assumption that one's model is up to the task.
In life, the whole is truly greater than the sum of its part.
Thank you so very much for all of your wonderful insights, dearest sister in Christ!
The physical laws plus initial and boundary conditions do comprise the "blueprint" for the "house" we call the universe.
Now of course I'm going to have to dig back through Rosen's book to see whether he considers his circular model to be the "blueprint" for life in nature.
Thank you again for your outstanding essay-posts and insights, dearest sister in Christ, and thank you for your encouragements!
Oh, well.
HAPPY INDEPENDENCE DAY dearest sister in Christ, and to all our FReeper friends!
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