Re: machine, organism, life

[Dan Fiscus <***>]

Judith Rosen wrote:

Judith re: this:

> *"Closed to efficient cause", as my father used that phrase, refers to
> an /organization/ where everything about the system is entailed by
> something else within the system. Ecosystems do not have this
> organization, although they do have the fact that they are made up of
> systems which run the gamut from simple to complex/living. Not all
> complex systems are alive, in the sense that an organism is alive, and
> this is where Dan and my father saw things radically differently. What
> Dan refers to as the "life" in an ecosystem is, according to Rosennean
> Complexity Theory, the life of the living components. It is very much
> like the complexity of human beings spilling over to human-created
> machines such as computers. Such situations muddy the waters. However,
> if we follow the logic in Dan's theory all the way to the foundations of
> what causes life in that scenario, it will become clear that the logic
> doesn't hold.*

I have to disagree. I see machines and organisms more alike than
either is to life itself. Both are mostly localized and fully or nearly
or easily fractionable and separable in terms of internal component
parts as well as separating system from environment. In these
characteristics, they are both more simple than complex. Life on the
other hand and in an ecological/community/ecosystem or network
model of it, is by comparison more complex in the Rosen sense -
harder or impossible to fractionate without destroying the life in it
or the essential organization, also harder to separate from
environment. I think the rigid identification of life with cell and
organism for both an original (origin of life) and fundamental (what
is life?) nature is a misconception that has held up life science
progress and also helps fuel our self-destruction as a species. Only
after we get rid of this old mono-model (life = organism only) and
at the very least balance it with an equally weighted complementary
view (life = ecosystem/community/autotroph+heterotroph) will
we ever be able to figure out "the meaning of life" (original and
fundamental nature of life) and "how to save the world" (successful
paradigm and program for sustainability as in open-ended evolution
for humans-integrated-with-life-and-environment.

One solid development that supports this view comes from work to
trace back genetic changes toward some last universal common
ancestor or LUCA. This news/commentary article in Nature tells
some of the story about how many respective workers are now
suggesting the idea of a LUCA as a cell may be completely wrong
and fruitless:

Nature 427, 674 - 676 (19 February 2004); doi:10.1038/427674a
Origins of life: Born in a watery commune by JOHN WHITFIELD

one snippet:

"But there are now hints that some of these questions may be
answerable. While some groups are zeroing in on LUCA's preferred
temperature, others are targeting its genetic blueprint. From all this
work, one of the more surprising theories to emerge may also help
to explain why LUCA has been so hard to find. Perhaps it wasn't a
single organism at all. Instead, most researchers now believe we
should think of LUCA as a pool of genes shared among a host of
primitive organisms.

"The naive picture that a group of organisms got all their genes
from a simple last common ancestor is breaking down," says
microbiologist Gary Olsen of the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign. In its place, the image of a sophisticated, global
community is emerging, he says. "In the past two years, it feels like
it's fallen together into a coherent picture." Rather than a last
common ancestor, LUCA may have been a last common community."

From this fuzzing of the boundaries to a global community of
organisms we will likley have to go another step toward blurring the
boundaries to a global network of pre-organismic molecular
processes. After this step we ought to be able to see/understand
how life emerged from environment while also  continuing to know
how to remain fully integrated and mutually causal with its
environment everywhere and always.

Some comments toward what I see as a more truly complex
approach to the origin and nature of life...one I think compatible
with Rosen's work even though he used the term "organism" a lot...

Dan