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. :^)
It occurs to me I ought to share a few more excerpts from Athel Cornish-Bowden's article to underscore the difference. Rosen's book makes the point exquisitely by mathematics, it cannot be escaped. But Athel's brief description here may be kinder to the reader:
Yet that is what a living organism does. Not only does it make itself (something no existing machine can do), but it also monitors the working state of all of its parts, and replaces those that need replacing, all of this being done from within. As we know, in good conditions a human being typically lives for about 70 years (even without the intervention of modern medicine, which is, of course, external), while containing necessary components with lifetimes in the range of minutes. This is a discrepancy of well over six orders of magnitude in the lifetime of the organism compared with that of its parts. Proteins vary considerably in their lability, and in many cases they are degraded as a result of specific catalyzed processes and not just by being worn out, but, even if this is ignored, none survive completely unchanged for decades. Some proteins, such as the crystallins of the vertebrate eye, are never replaced, and remain in use for 90 years or more, but this does not mean that they remain in perfect condition and suffer no damage. On the contrary, cataract is just the most obvious indication that crystallins do not survive unchanged for decades. The difference for crystallins is that the organism can survive without repairing the damage, whereas the overwhelmingly more usual case is that damage needs to be repaired at a rate essentially the same as the rate at which it occurs.
Understanding how this maintenance is achieved is a huge problem, and even if we restrict attention to the purely chemical part of what it means to be alive, that is to say to metabolism, it is still a huge problem. The chemical reactions that constitute metabolism require enzymes to catalyze them, and these enzymes survive for periods that are several orders of magnitude shorter than the period in which the metabolism continues to function normally. They therefore need to be replaced. (Rosen referred to "repair" rather than replacement, but that was an unfortunate choice of term, especially now that we know of many examples of genuine repair of nucleic acids, and a few examples of repair of proteins.) The enzymes themselves must therefore be regarded as metabolites, i.e. products of metabolism, and other enzymes are needed to catalyze the replacement process. However, these other enzymes also have finite lifetimes, and also need to be replaced, in processes catalyzed by yet other enzymes, which also need to be replaced, and so on for ever unless there is a way to close the circle. We therefore need a way of conceiving that the organization of metabolism is circular, so that at no point do we need to rely on any external help.
For almost all modern organisms a small amount of external help does exist, in the sense that apart from strict chemotrophs we are all parasites, as we need some of the products left by other organisms in order to survive. However, this dependence on other organisms solves only a tiny part of the problem, even for the most thoroughly parasitic of organisms, and it cannot even have solved a tiny part for the first organisms, which needed to survive in a world with no others to parasitize. Even the first organisms, of course, required some inorganic nutrients, just as all modern organisms do, so of course no organism is closed to material causation (and Rosen did not suggest that they were). This statement of the problem is probably clearer and easier to understand than the proposal of circular organization as a solution to it.
Or to put it another way, under the mechanistic, reductionist, contemporary view everything physical is a machine and can be analyzed and synthesized. That is the Newtonian paradigm. But it cannot admit that which has not yet occurred, i.e. final cause, the reason for which a thing is.
The one exception to this in the mechanistic paradigm is when the future is expressed in the present, such as in the Fibonacci series. But Rosen closes the causation by his circular model which entails much more and features encoding and decoding in the "chasing" (read Shannon here.)
In sum, biology is seen as a "special case" within the mechanistic worldview. And is generally ignored under the presumption that it must also be mechanistic because the paradigm works so well for physics, chemistry, etc.
But in reality, biological systems actually anticipate and thus Rosen steps away from the mechanism and instead models the organization without appeal to any outside causation. And thus the time issue disappears.