Re: When does an (M,R) system cease to be alive?

["Tim Gwinn" <***>]

Hi Judith,

In my followup to my post below I pretty recanted my arguments as being
erroneous. I agree that I was straying off-target. The cryogenics experiment
really makes the point.

Other comments interposed.

Regards,
Tim.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: ROSEN Forum [mailto:*** Behalf Of Judith
> Rosen
> Sent: Wednesday, October 08, 2003 9:04 AM
> To: ***
> Subject: Re: When does an (M,R) system cease to be alive?
>
>
> When an organism is in suspended animation, as in cryogenic
> suspension, then
> it's metabolism has ceased, but it's still alive. Why? Because it is still
> intact as an organism. If you just put an organism that cannot
> tolerate cold
> in the freezer, that kills it. Why? Because the "ordinary"
> freezing process
> destroys the organization.  It's the organization that is the critical
> aspect in Rosennean Complexity, which is why it is also the
> critical aspect
> of life. Anything you do to an organism after it exists, is about
> something
> else-- not about why the organism is alive in the first place.
>
> He told me that the human body metabolizes its way through its matter
> roughly every six to eight weeks. In other words, the stuff we intake and
> digest to do that metabolism and repair... displaces the old completely
> within that time frame. What we are made of is changed out
> completely every
> interval. Yet we are still "us"; with the same organization and the same
> memories, the same appearance (roughly!) etc, etc.... Yet, if reductionist
> science says the matter is what's important and goes off "chasing the
> particles" as my father used to put it, they will chase them right out of
> the organism. That's why he said "keep the organization and throw away the
> matter".
>
> The thing to remember when reading my father's work is that he kept his
> focus on his main interest all the way through all the other stuff that he
> created. He recognized that it was the bedrock. If he could
> understand "Why
> Life?" then he would be well on his way to answering just about
> every other
> question that interested him. He managed to avoid being sucked in by the
> distractions of all the intriguing stuff that was just "falling
> out of" his
> work. He had to get to the truth about what made a living organism alive.
> And he believed he did.


Well, ok, it is about the organization. But what is it _specifically_ about
the complex organization of organisms that differs from complex
non-organisms? This is the question left unanswered, as far as I know. And
perhaps there will be no answer, if it turns out that there are no
sufficient conditions.


The question I wanted to get him to put a
> few brain
> cells on, since he had gotten the answers he had been searching for about
> life, was.... "Why TIME?" And he was just beginning to do that, when he
> died. Just one more loss to add to the pile. We'll never know
> what he could
> have come up with.The peculiar behavior we see in "time" with regard to
> organisms was one of the things that "fell out" (as he put it) of
> his work.
> My sense is that it only looks "peculiar" if you are expecting time to
> behave differently. The problem is expectations based on false
> assumptions,

I think that time is basically about labels and their relation to other
percepts or observables, using relationals such as "simultaneous" and
"predecessor-successor".  The idea that there should be one set of
ubiquitous labels for the entire universe goes back to at least the days of
a belief in a clockwork universe.

Einstein showed that in certain kinds of differing frames of reference,
these labeling schemes are not universally identical.However, there is
always a way to _translate_ the time labels in frame of reference to those
in another frame of reference. It gives the appearance that time is still
one universal linear construct, but it just happens to get "stretched" or
"contracted" in these relativistic frames of reference.

I do not think this is general enough. To me, the presumption of adequacy of
a single, linear timeframe is very much like the presumption of adequacy of
a single linear algorithmic sequence. Within the confines of both of these
schemes, only a very limited kind of description can occur.

Biological systems, particularly as anticipatory systems, seem to intimately
use different labelings for different aspects of the organism. And, it seems
(given that it is a complex system) that there are no ways to translate
these labeling systems between these aspects into one coherent time label
reference. So that attempting to describe them using a single linear set of
time labels loses the unique labeling for each different aspect. It loses
that aspect of the complexity.

This would change time from being merely "relative" to being
context-dependent. Perhaps organisms are just particularly good at
exploiting that context-dependence in order to carry on morphogenesis and
other activities within a multitude of internal, context-dependent
timeframes, and that is part of what makes the orchestration of such
processes hard to comprehend.


> really. That's true about a lot of things in human experience, including
> relationships! But that's another discussion...
>
> To stay (sort of) on topic here; what you are discussing with a shopping
> list of criteria that define an organism is really a list of typical
> symptoms of living systems (ie: metabolism, repair). Another way to say it
> is that these are observable side effects or expressions of the life in a
> living system, aka an organism. They are not WHAT LIFE IS... and,
> to make it
> more difficult: The symptoms aren't always reliable. There are always
> atypical situations, all kinds of anomalies.... But that wasn't what was
> important about the ideas he was getting at. The shopping list and the
> diagram... that was merely my father's way of nailing down a formalism for
> those that require such things to help illuminate the ideas. ("Hard"
> science.) But don't get too caught up substituting the formalism for the
> ideas. The real crux, for what defines the threshhold whether/if
> a system is
> alive rather than just complex, was the level of complex organization.
>
> The reason Rosennean Complexity as a whole (the entire body of work) is so
> useful and applicable to myriad other areas of human thought is
> because the
> approach, the process of analyzation, and the concluding
> definition of what
> Complexity means... are all non-specific. That's precisely what frustrates
> experimentalists! There are no Einsteinian Tests to perform, like
> measuring
> light bending in a gravitational field, to "prove" anything. The
> final test
> may be that it's the only thing that makes any sense. It's the
> only approach
> and conclusion that can't be DISproved, which would ultimately
> show that the
> reason why that is so... is because he had it right. The thing he
> wanted to
> understand is not something that yields to tangible
> quantification, so don't
> be surprised if any shopping list about it is going to be right
> some of the
> time and seemingly wrong as well. "Life" is slippery.
>
> Judith
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Tim Gwinn" <***>
> To: <***>
> Sent: Tuesday, October 07, 2003 8:21 PM
> Subject: Re: [ROSEN] When does an (M,R) system cease to be alive?
>
>
> > Hi Jeff et al,
> >
> > So, then, is metabolism all that is necessary in order to say that an
> > organism is alive? In an ameoba (for example) that has no heart, is the
> > cessation of metabolism when life deemed to have ceased? It seems right.
> >
> > What, then, is this apparent distinction between "being alive"
> and "life"?
> >
> > Well, I just went back to section 1B ("Why the Problem is
> Hard") in "Life
> > Itself". There he states that the question "what is life?" is really a
> "why"
> > question in disguise, and "that we are really asking, in physical terms,
> why
> > a specific material system is an organism, and not something else."
> >
> > Using this statement suggests rewording as follows:
> > "Why life?":
> > - We are really asking, in physical terms, why a specific
> material system
> is
> > an organism, and not something else.
> > "Why alive?":
> > - We are really asking, in physical terms, why a specific
> material system
> is
> > alive, and not dead.
> >
> > So, then, the questions are notably distinct, and as a result, it now
> seems
> > to make sense that the answers will be different. It also seems obvious
> that
> > the first question ("why life?") must include, as part of its answer, an
> > answer to the second question ("why alive?") as well.
> >
> > But doesn't that also imply that the question "why life?" is about more
> than
> > just being alive? What does that "more" consist of? It must be something
> > other than just being closed to efficient causation, since Rosen
> apparently
> > backed off of  "closed to efficient causation" as a sufficient
> condition.
>
> > So, what else must it include?
> >
> > This intrigues me since we now have a different kind question
> than usual.
> > Rather than "why an organism instead of not an organism?", we now are
> asking
> > "Why is being an organism different than, and more than, being alive?"
> >
> > To me, what initially jumps to mind is 'persistence': the idea that an
> > organism includes the notion of an innate ability to persist.This goes
> > beyond an ability to be alive for a few more seconds or hours.
> But what is
> > it that persists? Persistence implies stability: in order to identify a
> > system as being the 'same' system over time means that some thing(s)
> > identifiable about that system remain stable. Is it the functional
> > organization that is what is stable and persists? Or, is persistence not
> > even a crucial aspect?
> >
> > Regards,
> > Tim
> >
> >
> > > -----Original Message-----
> > > From: ROSEN Forum [mailto:*** Behalf Of Jeff
> > > Pridaux
> > > Sent: Tuesday, October 07, 2003 5:39 PM
> > > To: ***
> > > Subject: Re: When does an (M,R) system cease to be alive?
> > >
> > >
> > > These is a very interesting thread...
> > >
> > >
> > > One may make the "provocative" simplifying assertions that
> "metabolism"
> is
> > > what proteins do...
> > >
> > > Repair is the manufacture of more proteins by RNA
> > >
> > > Replication is the manufacture of more RNA... (by special proteins)
> > >
> > > If one were to suddenly get a disease that prevented
> replication in the
> > > above sense, then the person would no longer be "closed to
> > > efficient cause"
> > > but would by most people's definition still be alive until the persons
> > > metabolism stopped.  Assume metabolism is sufficiently
> stopped when the
> > > heart stops...
> > >
> > > I agree that "life" and "being alive" are two different notions.