Re: Dr Mae-Wan Ho and i-sis.org " Definition in the SpaceTime of an Organism and in relation to Quantum theory?

[Judith Rosen <***>]

I've been in touch with Dr. Mae-Wan Ho, whose site "i-sis.org" is, and asked her if she had ever seen any of Robert Rosen's stuff. She said she had heard of him but hadn't read any of his work and told me it sounded like something she would like to take a look at. However, I doubt she will like what she sees if she does, given what she has subsequently written about quantum theory and living organisms. I will include a snippet from "Life, Itself", beginning on page 103.

 

Robert Rosen wrote:

"As I have indicated, several basic presuppositions of Newtonian mechanics break down when extrapolated from experience with bulk matter to the realm of the small. That is, when we come to actually think about atoms, the Newtonian encodings fail completely. This has had several revolutionary consequences in physics. One of them is the development of a  new kind of mechanics, quantum mechanics, which I have already [discussed]. Concomitant with this has been a proverbial agonizing reappraisal of causality itself, which is worth mentioning here. As we shall see, as far as causal entailment is concerned, the quantum-theoretic revolutions were mainly technical; the heart of Newtonian causality (recursion) has passed intact from classical to quantum mechanics...

 

Yet when quantum mechanics seemed to contradict or preclude classical ideas of causality, an enormous disquiet was generated, which has still not been completely resolved. The problem is that the Uncertainly Principle, or more generally, the commutation relations on which Heisenberg based his quantum theory, are not compatible with the notion of phase. As we have seen, phase is the basic idea in the Newtonian description of particulate systems; it is precisely what the recursion rules operate on to generate the trajectories that encode causality in that formalism. The Heisenberg commutation relations said that classical phase could no longer even be defined at the quantum level, let alone be recursive.

 

But as was quickly realized, giving up the notion of phase did not mean giving up the notion of state. It merely required an encoding of that notion whose relation to actual observational chronicles was now (to say the least) indirect. Formally, in quantum mechanics, the wave functions that encode state remain completely recursive, governed now be Schrödinger's equation (or its equivalents) rather than by Newton's Second Law. The guts of classical causality therefore passed intact to the new mechanics. It so happened that the new encoding, into a formalism of wave functions and Schrödinger's equation, could be related only in a statistical way to the old, classical encoding, so that the two inferential structures in the formalisms could not be brought into a complete homology. But as we have seen, this is an entirely different matter; causality encodes differently into the two kinds of formalisms, but that only says something about the encodings, and not about causal entailment itself...

 

Nevertheless, the reappraisal of causality occasioned by the advent of quantum theory has left physicists without consensus on what causality is or on how it should be encoded into contemporary physical formalisms. More generally, no one is today sure what the formalism of quantum theory encodes, or even if it encodes anything at all; in this latter view, advocated by Bohr under the rubric of complementarity, the only thing that matters is the decoding. I believe it fair to say that the "foundations" of quantum theory remain a quagmire, to a far greater extent than has ever been true in physics before.

 

It would therefore be idle, as well as perhaps presumptuous, to enter into a more detailed discussion of quantum theory here. My main point is, however, unarguagble: that the concept of state plays the central role in its formalism, just as it did in its classical predecessor, and the essential property of state is its recursiveness. It thus perpetuates the duality between states and dynamical laws that began with Newton. The inferential or entailment structures in the two formalisms are different enough so that they cannot be directly compared (and indeed, attempts to directly compare the two formalisms have created much of the confusion to which I alluded above), but they remain different species of the same genus."

 

My diagnosis of what Dr Ho has been trying to achieve is a scientific description of what causes life in living systems from within the accepted paradigm. She does not appear to question the soundness of the foundational issues involved, only the design of the structures built on these foundations. She recognizes the mechanistic approach as being inapplicable, but she is still trying to build structures on the same flawed foundations. If she reads my father's work and sees what he saw, she will have to pull a "Rashevsky" and go in a completely different direction (basically disavowing all earlier work). That's a really painful thing to make one's self do and is one reason why my father had so much respect for Rashevsky's courage as well as his intelligence. It's also why he felt such protectiveness towards Rashevsky when people like Lewontin tried to make a noose out of the older work and hang Rashevsky's credibility with it.

 

I'd be interested in hearing thoughts to the contrary if the group has some?

 

Judith

 

 

----- Original Message -----

From: "Ionel" <***>

To: <***>

Sent: Saturday, July 24, 2004 1:38 AM

Subject: Re: [ROSEN] "Process" Definition in the SpaceTime of an Organism and in relation to Quantum theory?

> Hi, Tim:
> 
> Related 
to the comments exchanged here, there seems to be also an
> interesting 
new reference that you might like to add a link to, which is on
> 
non-reductionist views of organisms at:
> 
> http://www.i-sis.org.uk/hoarchi.php
> 
> The author does not seem to be aware of Robert Rosen's work, but I 
might
> simply have not seen all that she wrote in several of her recent 
books
> published in the UK.
> 
> Regards,
> 
Ionel
> On Mon, 19 Jul 2004 08:31:32 -0400, Tim Gwinn <***> 
wrote:
> 
> >Hi Pete,
> >
> >My only comment in 
reply is to your (rhetorical) question:
> >
> >  For 
example, is it meaningful to talk about the "qualitatively or
> 
>quantitatively  measured behavior" of, say, an ingot of lead (Pb) 
inside an
> >evacuated Bell jar ("the system"), wherein the lead ingot 
and the jar are
> in
> >thermal equilibrium with the jar's 
environment? No matter how you pick your
> >delta t across the initial 
& final states, any measurements you might make
> >of the system's 
"behavior" during the delta t are going to show zero
> >variance 
(within the precision of the measuring instruments). Is it
> 
>meaningful to say that the system states across the delta t define a
> 
>"process"?
> >
> >From my particular (peculiar?) 
perspective, I would say "yes" in answer to
> >that question. I take 
the view that 'process' is closely allied with its
> >etymological 
roots: deriving from L. processus - "advance, progress, lapse
> >of 
time", which in turn is from L. procedere - "go forward". To me, the
> 
>commonality here is the spanning of time, what we are calling the 
delta-t,
> >and the specifics of the behavior is not central to the 
definition. Thus,
> >for me, the behavior of any system across some 
delta-t is a process; the
> >specific nature of the behaviors 
encountered does not generically qualify
> or
> 
>disqualify.
> >
> >But again, as you note, depending upon 
one's purpose, changes (or lack of
> >them) in behavior may indeed be 
an appropriate qualifier (or disqualifier)
> >from the application of 
the term 'process' in a given context.
> >
> >Regards,
> 
>Tim