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Re: Rosen and William Paley

For the Seminar I'm doing I actually re-read one of my assigned
readings, RR's piece on Schroedinger in Essays. I think I got a deeper
understanding of what he was saying here, and it relates to this
question of immanent causation and causal closure. Of course restating
it in my fewer words compared to his many will certainly lose much
rigor, but I think what we do here is try to translate these rigorous
statements into common language, accepting its less precise and
multiplicative possibilities to serve the purpose of making things more
intuitive.

Anyway, what I got, roughly, was that it was a prelude to the discussion
of the modeling relation itself and provided the historical background
for that "new" view as an ontological issue - the case I've been making
for some years now as opposed to thinking of that modeling relation as
purely epistemological. The argument traces how the early physical
scientists developed the idea of causation itself - necessarily
splitting the thing that is caused from the thing that causes it. Then
the parallel is drawn with biology, as below:
Cause                            Caused
gravitational                    inertial
genetic / genotype           phenotype

The Platonic view has apparently been characterized (by others) as one
where causes can come from nowhere. Whereas Aristotle's view was seen as
an idea that only things can be causes and only things can be caused,
hence the misinterpretation that it must be entirely syntactic. In
reality, the issue still arises of when a caused thing - a phenotype or
inertial mass -  can become a cause, i.e., exert a "force" (general
sense of). In physics gravitational mass and inertial mass were found to
be identical - i.e., cause and caused commute. In biology the same ideas
can be found, but (a) these two aspects don't really commute, and (b)
biologists didn't much care to think about phenotypes as becoming causes
of anything (see Odling-Smee for the quintessential modern exception).

From there it gets really interesting, because he argues that
gravitational effects, i.e., our example or metaphore for causes and
analogous to genetic effects, come naturaly from the outside of a system
unless it is ordered in some novel way. A particle is pushed by
something else ourside it. thus one can at will imagine increasingly
larger systems of things causing things until you get to the whole
universe (and the big bang I suppose).  The idealization of a closed
system, where only the effects of things in that system are considered,
was thus invented to avoid this infinite regress, but in fact there are
no fully closed systems. Even considering a gas in a jar must take
account of the effects of the jar, which then has causes, etc. but
because these systems then seem separable, the habit of fractioning them
arose to some advantage.

The general case, however, remains the open system for which all the
physics of closed systems does not apply and which have consequently not
been studied very well. It seems, however, that organisms have taken the
general case of an open system and added certain kinds of closure that
are quite different from the logical closure of the kind of fractioning
of mechanical physics referred to above. Enzymes bring the forcing of
rate control (alteration of other forces) inside the system. That
immediately defeats the idea of fractioning the system between inside
and outside. Genes bring the forcing of enzyme production inside the
system, further closing it and further defeating the physical approach.
And there are more kinds of closure than that. Both enzymes and genes,
and other such closures, represent effects from a "larger system" that
are nevertheless carried into a system by agents. In this way, as is
otherwise natural and physical, larger systems force smaller ones FROM
THE INSIDE, and so a meaningful  organismic boundary can still be
created around it. It is axiomatic, however, that the theoretical
involvement of larger systems is always infinite, hence there is always
uncertainty in the system. This view explains two things (at least): (1)
why it was natural for physical science to think of this kind of system
as just another physical system that could be fractioned away from its
outside and investigated entirely within a boundary, and (2) why this
idea didn't work - namely that the assumption that error induced by this
approach would be small, as it is in constrained and idealized physical
dynamics, was quite opposite the case. The "outside" is vitally
important to the organism and cannot be fractioned away, and yet it is
largely represented by internal agents. This leads naturally to the idea
of encoding the outside by these agents; i.e., importing information
into the system in a causally effective way.

This is closure to efficient causation, and it is understood to be
partial; i.e., enough of such larger system involvements to create
problems for the traditional physical analysis, such as an identity and
substantially preserved structure-function relationships. The result is
an organism that is substantially "self" causing, but that is a deceipt
because it is not caused from the inside, it is caused by
representations of the outside, inside.

Now think of the case of God as traditionally viewed. It is genetic or
gravitational cause from the outside - a force from the outside. It
arrives in the 10 commandments, miracle interventions, acts of reward
and punishment, etc. These are the orthodoxies, the fundamental beliefs.
But if like life itself God (allow us to talk of this for the moment)
can be represented by agents on the inside, then it is clear that (a)
the deeper metaphysical views of spiritual nature, which is always
represented as an inner sanctum, are more the case, and (b) being
represented inside the organism it is at least possible to study the
agents to some degree, while retaining reverence for the (possibly) more
complete outside reality. In other words the concepts are fully
applicable to deep spiritual or introspective inquiry without
sacrificing anything scientific or giving up anything religious.

John K.

Judith Rosen wrote:

I don't know if I mentioned this before, but I had a discussion recently
with a gentleman who was interested in my father's work but had some
concerns that the scientific ideas might interfere with his own personal
religious beliefs (he told me he was very religious and had no interest in
any science that tried to prove there is no God). I told him that, while my
father was not a religious man and recoiled from orthadoxies of any kind,
his work actually leaves plenty of room for the "existence of God".
Specifically, it's the fact that "epistemology tells us nothing about
ontology in complex systems"; one of the key differences my father
pinpointed between simple systems and complex systems. In other words,
knowing how the universe works does not tell us about creation of the
universe. Knowing how living organisms do what they do does not answer the
origin of life question. That doesn't mean there IS a God... but it doesn't
mean there isn't. It simply doesn't address that aspect.

Tim's mention of what my father called "immanent causation", which was
discussed only briefly in Essays on Life, Itself, and a few other places,
begins to address the ontology question. But that was one of the areas my
father began to feel it might be prudent not to write about in any detail.

Judith
 ----- Original Message -----
 From: Tim Gwinn
 To: ***
 Sent: Tuesday, August 24, 2004 8:11 AM
 Subject: Re: [ROSEN] Rosen and William Paley


Steve,

 I agree. I think Rosennean complexity also completely deflates alot of
similar arguments from "intelligent design". Many of those arguments rely on
the limited explanatory powers of the artefactual Newtonian restrictions in
order to suggest or 'prove' the existence of God.

 Regards,
 Tim

   -----Original Message-----
   From: ROSEN Forum [mailto:*** Behalf Of Steve
Johnson
   Sent: Monday, August 23, 2004 1:03 PM
   To: ***
   Subject: Rosen and William Paley


   I was reading Life Itself the other day and thought that Rosen's
arguments about closure to efficient cause answer nicely the William Paley
famous Watchmaking conundrum.

   The expectation that the efficent causes lie outside the system are so
deeply ingrained in our common sense thinking that Paley's century-old
natural theology is still debated despite the fact that it is a simple
misunderstanding of the nature of efficient causation in organisms.

- steve


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