Re: What would be a Rosennean exobiology test?

Tim Gwinn wrote: I think the hypothetical question I posed also has some broader implications:. Two that come to mind are:

What would it mean to be able to detect things like 'metabolism' and 'repair'? What would constitute the observables our test equipment would have to look for? (This seems closely related to the recent topic of 'process'.)
Test equipment that is a mechanism (in the Rosennean sense) could certainly be built to detect various aspects of life, but can a mechanism detect a complex system, or can the complexity in a system (e.g., the closed loops of functional organization in an organism) only be detected by another complex system?

While the testing equipment, itself, would be mechanistic, it is actually the chimerical system of human/machine which would be doing the evaluating. The inconsistencies we see in computer systems, with regards to "simple" vs "complex" and the tantalizing glimpses of what look like true intelligence, are actually glimpses of our own intelligence which we have grafted, in chunks, into these machines. Such technology is, by itself, simple (in the Rosennean sense that my father developed), but computers would not be able to be fully analyzed unless their context is taken into account, and their context is US, and of course we are complex. Because this is true, all the attempts at designation and definition become blurred. Incidentally, these issues were discussed at the ISSS conference-- generated by attempts to define consciousness and intelligence, such that we would be able to know when we create it artificially in computers. My father's notion of chimera is one I think is essential in that discussion.