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Of course! Shannon's mathematical model of communications does not need to entail anywhere near as much as Rosen's in answering the question "What is Life?"

Totally agreed. Shannon's model is about effective or "successful" communication that reduces uncertainty in the receiver. Where I suspect this may fit into the Rosen picture is on the question of how does an efficient cause realize its effect on a material cause — under the "auspices" (so to speak) of a formal cause globally moving the system towards a final cause (not in this context a reference to teleology)?

I do recall that somewhere in Rosen's relational diagrams there's some "chasing" going on. The fact is, however, I don't now recall the details of Rosen's argument.

Please give me a page cite, dearest sister in Christ? I'd like to revisit that very much. I think that's key to understanding of how Shannon Communication Theory "dovetails" with the Rosen theory.

Intuitively, I think it does. [Hypothesis: To actually be effective, the efficient cause ("sender") depends on "successful communication that reduces uncertainty in the receiver" (i.e., the material cause.)]

Thank you ever so much for your thought-provoking essay/post, dearest sister in Christ!

I do recall that somewhere in Rosen's relational diagrams there's some "chasing" going on. The fact is, however, I don't now recall the details of Rosen's argument.

Please give me a page cite, dearest sister in Christ? I'd like to revisit that very much. I think that's key to understanding of how Shannon Communication Theory "dovetails" with the Rosen theory.

Sure, I'd be glad to. The concept is introduced here (underline emphasis mine) and is discussed a few pages later:

It cannot be stressed too strongly that, in these considerations, the hardware f and the flows it induces on software are fundamentally different things; they encode entirely different aspects of the natural system they model. I have tried to make this clear by exhibiting the encoding itself in various ways; I will try one last time by rewriting [9B.6] in terms of the modeling relation itself; see section 3H above. In terms of that discussion we should think of the right-hand box (i.e., the model) as being the form shown in figure 9B.4. That is, all of the states (i.e., hardware plus software) go inside the box, as does the flow from input to output. The generation of that flow by the hardware (i.e., the black arrow) is what sits outside the box as the inferential structure, as indicated. I discuss some of the causal correlates of this picture in subsequent sections.

In any case, we have passed with some difficulty from a natural system that is a machine to a formal representation of it, of the form [9B.6], or, in abbreviated form, [9B.5]. This is what I shall call a relational model of the machine. As we see, there does not seem to be much left of the machine itself in this version of it. For instance, we see no explicit encoding of time, have no dynamics in the diagram. The diagram does, however, embody the basic polarity of the machine, the progression in time from afferent to efferent, from input to output. This will turn out to be the essential temporal feature for us, not time divided into minutes and seconds, but time encoded as a chase through a diagram.

Robert Rosen, “Life Itself”, pgs 222-223

For Lurkers: Shannon's Mathematical Theory of Communications is the foundation theory of the the field of Mathematics called "Information Theory."

Thank you so much for sharing your insights, dearest sister in Christ!