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 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 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?
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 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 . [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!!!
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I aver that there is an obvious cause which precedes all these. In this example, that "original" cause would be the Architect who formulated the "blueprint".
In our broader discussions, I believe that we commonly refer to that "original" 'cause" as, "I AM"...
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To be even more rigorous, I would interject a "supplier" cause: the source of the materials necessary for your "material" cause to exist.
(See "I AM", above...)
But, then, what do I know? I'm a mere scientist -- not a "Philosopher" -- or a "Swahili" linguist... LOL!!