Re: Why is this machine not an MR Organism?

[Judith Rosen <***>]

Hi Steve,

Your question is one that comes up from time to time: If something "looks
like" life and "acts like" life, why is it not life?  The Turing Machine was
one example of studying this question, and currently cellular automata are
another. I'm currently pulling together a longer answer to this question
from Robert Rosen's (my father) books, but here's a somewhat shorter answer:

One of the tests of complexity/non-complexity is computability. If you can
compute any given system (meaning to fully model it in a finite number of
models) then it is not complex. The reasoning for that is long and if you
have "Life, Itself", the answers will be in there. Here is an excerpt from
the companion volume to that book, "Essays on Life, Itself" (page 335):

Robert Rosen wrote: "Simulability mandates an extreme degree of causal
impoverishment. Almost everything about such a system is unentailed from
within the system and must accordingly be externally posited; all that
remains is the entailment of "next state" from "present state". It is
precisely this paucity of entailment in simple systems or mechanisms that
allows them to be expressible as software."

"Complex systems may be thought of, on the other hand, as manifesting more
entailment (more causality) than can be accommodated by a mechanism.
Organisms, for example, sit at the other end of the entailment spectrum from
mechanisms; almost everything about them is, in some sense, entailed from
something else about them."

"In a complex system, there is no meaningful intrinsic distinction between
hardware and software, no single overarching function that stays fixed while
only its arguments can vary. In material terms, a system of this type is
literally infinitely open, whereas a mechanism or simple system can be, at
best, finitely open. The upshot of this is that if we try to replace a
complex system by a simple one, we necessarily miss most of the interactions
of which it is capable. Herein lies the primary basis for the
counterintuitive characteristics or nonmechanistic behavior so often
manifested by organisms; the causal entailments on which they depend are
simply not encoded into the simulable models we are using."

"No superposition of simple models will yield a complex system; we cannot
leave the realm of computability in this fashion, any more than we can build
an infinite set by means of finite operations on finite sets. Thus, in
general, it is not a good tactic to try to study open systems by opening
closed ones; it usually turns out that closure, in the material sense, is so
degenerate (i.e., so nongeneric) that the behavior of a perturbed closed
system will depend much more on how it was perturbed than on its behavior
when closed."

"It must be emphasized that we can still make dynamical models of complex
systems, just as we can formalize fragments of Number Theory. We can
approximate, but only locally and temporarily, to inexact differential forms
with exact ones under certain conditions. But we will have to keep shifting
from model to model, as the causal structure in the complex system outstrips
what is coded into any particular dynamics."

"I will conclude by remarking that concepts such as activation/inhibition
and agonism/antagonism, which are informational (semantic) terms, may be
used to introduce a language of function into the study of (complex)
systems. Here, I use the word "function" in the biological rather than the
mathematical sense... ... We thus inch toward a legitimation of the
Aristotelian category of final causation, bound up with what something
entails rather than with what entails it. In complex systems, it is not only
completely legitimate to use such a language, it is absolutely necessary.
Indeed, this is another fundamental way in which complexity differs from
mechanism. Using this kind of language leads us in the direction of
relational models, which have proved most appropriate for biological
purposes (and, by implication, for any kind of human or social system)."

I realize that all of the preceeding material sort of "answers the question
without answering the question" of efficient causation. That's what the
longer answer is going to do! A discussion of Aristotle's four categories of
causality is a long one, but it's 3/4 finished. I'll post it shortly.

Judith
----- Original Message -----
From: "Steve Johnson" <***>
To: <***>
Sent: Friday, August 13, 2004 12:49 PM
Subject: [ROSEN] Why is this machine not an MR Organism?


> I'm fairly new to Rosen and like many on this list I'm struggling to
> understand the concept of closure under efficient causation as described
in
> Life Itelf. It would help me greatly if the more enlightened ones than me
> could comment on why the machine in the following example would not
qualify
> as an organism by Rosen's definition. Intuitively, it seems to me that
it's
> not an MR systems but I can't find a specific flaw in the argument.
>
> Example:
>
> It's faily easy to imagine a machine (built with currently available
> technologies) that can repair itself. It consists of CPUs, motors, levers
> etc. Everything is redunant so for instance when one CPU fails another one
> is available to execute the repair program. When one of the components
> fails the diagnostic software automatically detects it (e.g. a motor
failed
> or a cpu failed) and initiates a program for replacement of the component.
> Say, the program says that the machine has to walk over to a certain box
> take the a new cpu and replace the broken one.
>
> Of course, this is a very crude example and it can immediately be noticed
> that it's not closed under efficient cause since the question "why CPU?"
is
> not anwserable within the organism. The answer is "because such an such
> company made it" leads out of the proposed organism and thus it's not
> closed under efficient cause.
>
> So, far so good. But the same criticism on a different level can be
applied
> to the human body. The answer to "Why such and such amino acid or why such
> and such protein?" leads out of the organism. The answer to "why such
> protein?" can be "because this beefsteak the human just consumed" so this
> particular substance was manufactured outsite the organism. In Rosen's
> terminology the proteins from the beefsteak will be the material cause,
> the "A" from "f:A-->B".
>
> Here is my question: why can we not consider the CPU in the above example
> as the material cause the same way we consider the beefsteak the material
> cause? Granted the CPU is very complex but then again protein molecule
from
> the beefsteak is probably a lot more complex than the CPU.
>
> Why can we not regard CPUs, mortors etc of the machine as the material
> causes and thus consider the machine described above an organism?
>
> Why the is the program that tells the machine to walk over to the box and
> replace the broken component not equivalent to the "program" that tells
the
> fox to go and get replacements for its broken components by eating a
rabbit?
>
>
> Thank you for your help!
>
> - steve
>