[Alamo-Girl]

But the thing is we CAN put the mechanical parts back together and have life that is completely indistinguishable from life that wasn’t taken apart and put back together.

Just in time for the arrival of the baby boomers, the funeral homes can now shutdown because allmendream purports knowledge of how to bring dead bodies back to life.

Life as a physical phenomenon has no mystical component.

The argument is not vitalism but relational biology which is rigorous mathematics (Modeling, Category Theory):

Life Itself (Rosen)

According to Rosen, "a material system is an organism if, and only if, it is closed to efficient causation."

Or as Athel Cornish-Bowden put it in Perspectives in Biology and Medicine (2006)

Having presented the problem without reference to Aristotle’s four causes, we can now return to it to see how machines and organisms differ in terms of them. As Joslyn explains in his his review of Life Itself, we choose different categories of causation according to the answers we give to "why?" questions. If we ask why a car engine produces water and carbon dioxide, an answer in terms of fuel and oxygen provides the material cause of the water and carbon dioxide. However, that is not the only possible correct answer: they are also caused by mixing and sparking the starting materials in the carburetor, and this is now an efficient cause. If we ask why the engine mixes fuel and oxygen and then ignites them, then answering that it is to provide power to drive the car forward appeals to a final cause, which for a machine, and indeed for everything else in classical Aristotelean philosophy, is always something outside the machine itself. The final cause remains essential for discussing engineering, but it has largely been banished from the modern scientist’s view of the natural world, which has no room for an external designer with definite intentions. The fourth category is the formal cause, which concerns the essential nature of the process; it plays little role in Rosen’s analysis.

If we ask similar questions about metabolism, for example why glucose 6-phosphate is produced by most organisms in glycolysis (catalyzed by the enzyme hexokinase mentioned earlier), then initially the argument runs in parallel to that for machines. If the answer is that glucose 6-phosphate is produced because glucose and ATP are available then that is the material cause; if we answer that it is produced as a result of the action of the enzyme hexokinase, then that is the efficient cause. So far so good, but when we ask where the hexokinase comes from there is no final cause: it certainly does not come from outside the organism, so it must be produced from within. We can trace back material and efficient causes for that, but we never reach a final cause. This is what it means to say that organisms are closed to efficient causation. In admitting it to be true, however, we are stepping outside everything that we know about machines, and everything we can derive from classical philosophy.

We are still far from full and satisfying answers to the questions that Rosen asks about what makes a living organism alive. In general terms his view of the essential difference between a machine and an organism was foreshadowed by John Locke more than three centuries ago, but his detailed analysis is mathematically very demanding. It has been followed up by few other authors, and asserting that the organization is circular is not the same as the same as explaining exactly how the circularity is achieved. The essential point is to recognize that there is a real problem: as he said, the questions are real, and will not go away by virtue of not being addressed—so it is not sufficient to say that we do not like Rosen’s answer. If we regard it as unsatisfactory or just wrong we need to propose an alternative; we cannot pretend that there is no question to be answered. In summary, the classical reductionist approach to science can be understood as a way of understanding the functioning of a whole system in terms of the properties of its parts, but now we must learn to understand the parts in terms of the whole (Cornish-Bowden et al., 2004). To make Rosen’s ideas more easily intelligible to biologists they will need to be put in the context of current knowledge of biology, and the limits within which his interpretation of the circular organization of living organisms can apply need to be specied (Letelier et al., 2006).

To God be the glory!

[betty boop]

amd: But the thing is we CAN put the mechanical parts back together and have life that is completely indistinguishable from life that wasn’t taken apart and put back together.

A-G: Just in time for the arrival of the baby boomers, the funeral homes can now shutdown because allmendream purports knowledge of how to bring dead bodies back to life.

Good grief, allmendream, but that is precisely what we CAN'T do! On Alamo-Girl's "rocks and rabbits" analogy, once you "reduce" the rabbit — that crittur's done for. You have absolutely no way to "put it back together" as the living system it was before you "reduced" it to its components.

That is why the entire reductionist, mechanistic approach of contemporary science cannot tell us much about living systems. For reductionism loses all the system entailments — but it is system entailment that expresses everything we need to know about the organizational configuration of the living system— i.e., how all the parts or components work together for the benefit of the whole living system — which is astronomically more complex (i.e., has an astronomically greater number of causal entailments of various kinds) than mechanisms or machines. Plus all entailments which are efficient causes are "inner" to the organism; unlike in the case of mechanisms or machines, they are not injected by the environment.

As Rosen put it, "a material system is an organism if, and only if, it is closed to efficient causation." This statement to me is not as transparent as it needs to be. For there's plenty of efficient causation going on within the living system, as Rosen clearly recognizes. His point is that there is no efficient cause from outside the system. But a hasty reading of his statement might lead one to surmise that Rosen is saying there is no efficient causation in living systems period (e.g., they are "closed" to it). Yet seemingly they are only "closed" in this sense to efficient causes rising from outside of themselves — that is, in the environment.

Dearest sister in Christ, thank you so much for the "chuckle," above! It's so nice to know that allmendream knows how to keep me out of a funeral home. :^)