Re: Quantum Physics, Measurements and Robert's Functional Dynamics Concept

[Judith Rosen <***>]

Ionel wrote an interesting recap of some of the discussion thread. I would
like to thank him for doing so, because it made certain things more clear to
me. I have a few comments inserted below:

> Ionel Baianu wrote: So, let's briefly
> re-cap the facts as they are. I am not attempting to 'skew' anybody's
> views, but facts have to be told, so that people can form informed
> opinions. This group's, or forum's, discussions started focusing on
> Quantum 'Mechanics' to which I feel I can contribute. My point about
> quantum theory, improperly  called'mechanics' was and is that it provides
> very useful tools in substantial agreement with a huge number of
> experiments.

My father would agree with your point. He said the same about the "useful
tools" that physics provides.

The fact is that my father's point of contention was not over the useful
tools of these areas of science, but rather over the insistence (by science
in general) that ONLY these tools can be employed to "do science". This
became a huge issue for him because, in trying to analyze why living things
are alive, he found that the tools labeled "scientific" were often (not
always) inapplicable,  incomplete, or even incorrect. When he began to point
this out, he was accused of "Trying to answer questions that nobody wants to
ask."

> Moreover, Schrodinger raised the issue 60 years ago: what
> new 'tricks' does Life use to get around the irreversibility associated
> with gene duplication?
> As Robert pointed out in "Essays..." and elsewhere,  Schrodinger even came
> to the correct conclusion that this requires "new physics".
> Robert followed this line of thought in his early papers on Quantum
> Genetics published in BMB in the early 50's but he went further by posing
> mathematically the problem that Schrodinger was grappling with.
> As I explained before,
> Robert utilized the mathematical- quantum mechanical- apparatus developed
> by von Neumann and arrived at the conclusion in his published papers that
> the "central dogma of molecular biology is wrong" and that genetic self-
> reproduction cannot occur as stated by the dogma then proposed
> by molecular biology. He was never challenged in BMB by anybody about his
> conclusions on Quantum Genetics.

I find that astonishing: "Never challenged"? Especially at that early date?
This young whippersnapper coming up saying something so bold as "The central
dogma of molecular biology is wrong"!?

>  Judith told us also the very interesting
> fact that he also arrived , perhaps later, at the conclusion that "QT and
> all other existing theories are unable /unuseable for understanding
> biology".

This requires a little correction/elaboration: "Understanding biology" is a
huge area with multiple definitions. (What does "understanding" mean? What
does "biology" mean?)What I said was that he found these tools inapplicable
to understanding (i.e. learning) why living things are alive. Understanding
what life is and why it happens is a fundamental issue. One can happily
spend a long and productive career in biology without ever grappling with
any fundamental issues, and there is nothing wrong with that, per se.
However, it was not what my father was interested in.

 > As I see it, Robert has then developed the (M,R)-systems, and
> especially the replication, beta-component, to address the very problems
> which he found that "could not be resolved through von Neumann's approach
to
> quantum mechanics". However, at this stage, around 1966/1967, when
> I 'arrived on the scene' of relational biology Robert has not yet come to
> the 'complete picture of self-reproduction' that he developed later in
> (M,R)-systems.

This is an interesting side issue: Replication, according to my father, was
not an essential property in a living system. There are plenty of examples
of living things that can't reproduce (a mule was his first example to me).

> because  of my substantial correspondence with him on the subject when
> they were  being developed, so that I could follow the trail of his
> developments quite well.

Do you have these letters? I'd love to see them-- especially as they were
written by a man who wasn't my father yet.

> Thus, when he published a paper on (M,R)-systems in 1967 saying in the
> title that they are "Abstract Sequential Machines."--another name for
> automata--there was a very prompt response from Michael Arbib who then
> classified promptly the category of biological systems modelled as (M,R)-
> systems as a subcategory of the Category of Automata, in a paper published
> in BMB in 1968 (that I listed with my first posting). He was saying in
> effect that biological systems--if correctly represented as
(M,R)-systems--
> are none else but "automata", and therefore let's study them as we would
> study automata in Automata Theory with the tools developed there. As you
> might expect, a prompt response article followed from Robert in which he
> pointed out the conceptual differences between the (M,R)-systems and
> automata. It is reasonable therefore to think that this
> controversy 'catalized' his further development of (M,R)-systems as we are
> discussing it today. It is at this point in time that I and my cowrokers
> began contributing to the development of Relational Biology and (M,R)-
> systems, specifically. The new point that we introduced was the
> significant, hierarchical/organizational 'structure' that (M,R)-systems
> must have in order to be able to function as described, and also showed in
> detail how they can be constructed using certain canonical functors
> (Yoneda) and natural transformations. That is, we brought up and published
> the fact that unlike automata or sequential machines, (M,R)-systems
> have to be represented
> by structures of a 'higher algebraic dimension'--or a
> supercategory-- (in current algebraic terminology), and not as simple
> 1-categories, in order to be able to both self-repair and self-reproduce.

The phrase "have to be represented" refers to modeling. In other words, you
are saying that you believe that your "supercategories" are a better tool
for modeling organisms than the tools used for modeling "automata", is that
correct? In that case, there is no argument here. The fact that the
discussion is about modeling has not always been apparent (at least, to me).
However, in modeling, there is always a mental view of what is being
modeled, and part of that mental view gets built in to the models. It's
inevitable. The tricky thing, for my father, was to begin at the beginning,
without the preconceived assumptions that science has accumulated, and look
at the systems to be modeled with (hopefully!) clearer vision. When he did
so, he came up with Complexity, in which there are no "states", which meant
that any tool based on states and on state transitions was going to be of
limited value. Such tools can only be applied usefully to aspects of living
systems where the state/non-state issue has nominal impact. Mind you, there
are a whole lot of those! They just weren't the aspects of living systems
that were of the fundamental, life-entailed/entailing aspects that he was
trying to get his brainwaves around.

Judith