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Re: Could you give me your analysis of this?

Hi everyone,

I'm commenting on my own post here, to make a notation that I appear to
be at odds with the common interpretation of "iff" or "if and only if,"
which as others on the list have said is commonly take to mean necessary
AND sufficient. The language itself doesn't say that to my ear, but it
does seem to be the convention in science and I am sure Howard must be
correct that Rosen would have used it in a technical sense.

Anyway, with that correction, what I am saying is that absolute closure
is impossible, so "iff" cannot apply precisely no matter how it is
interpreted. Also, if we use the technical definition and insist that
efficient closure is a sufficient condition for organisms, it means that
formal cause, including some kind of DNA-like code, is not an internal
requirement (which is at odds with Schroedinger and Von Bertalanfy) and
that final causes, including life strategy or purpose, also need not be
internally produced. I can't think of any reason for the limitation that
only metabolic and repair processes, as such, need be internal in order
to have a living organism. It  makes sense to me that Rosen would have
modified later in Essays after considering the internal nature of formal
and final causes, argued so eloquently elsewhere. In fact, I would argue
that organisms are most closed to self-defined functions; that their
very existence results from such functions and serves to organize them.
That would be final anticipatory cause, and then some means other than
pure teleos is needed by which that can work. Formal cause, internalized
(i.e., closure) provides such a means because without the creation of
formal templates of some kind, material processes have to provide the
explanation alone and they can't without being teleological. Hence
organisms are characterized by a recognizable and operational degree of
closure to efficient, formal, and final cause; and these seem to be
requirements, although as Rosen says in Essays, we don't know enough to
say they are all the requirements.

If we say "why a rabbit" the answer surely has primarily to do with all
the functions a rabbit represents and defines, to which its ongoing
progeny is closed enough that we can define the word "rabbit" and it can
exist and approximate itself through time. If we ask how this closure
comes about, we have to look at how form and function co-inform each
other during development, behavior, and evolution, i.e., how they
provide templates for each other and hence sufficient (formal) closure
to get functional definitions. The efficient cause has to do with the
material construction processes, i.e., actual phase transitions and
their agents, the metabolic and repair processes.

So, the question is if we had a system with only well defined and stable
metabolism and repair processes (relative closure to efficient cause),
openness to material and energy flows (material cause),  and openness to
both structural and functional templates (formal cause), which we must
assume extends to the case of no closure at all in this domain (in which
case neither phylogeny nor life strategy would be stable enough to allow
definitions), would we then be able to say we have an organism? I would
say clearly not, except in some very mechanical sense, unless it is true
that "efficient closure" alone somehow requires that the formal and
final causes must also be somewhat closed. If that is the case then
perhaps one could get away with only the one stated criteria, but I'm
missing the logic that efficient closure implies the others, as it could
just as easily work the other way.

John

John Kineman wrote:

On the sufficient or necessary question regarding efficient causation, I
personally think too much has been made of it. Politicians are more
interested in whether someone has altered a view than scientists
should be.
Indeed it would be suspect as science if there were no evolution of
ideas.
Also, "closed" should be interpreted scientifically too. As such it
must be
interpreted as meaning "relatively closed." If a biologist says organisms
can be distinguished from their environments, the statement does not
necessarily mean they are absolutely distinct. Measurable differences are
just that, measurable differences, not absolutes. So, organisms have
efficient closure as one of their defining characteristics, and that is a
requirement for being an organism (the meaning of if and only if). I
disagree that "only if" means sufficiency, i.e., nothing else required. I
believe the phrase "if and only if" only establishes necessity. It says
that the condition implies organism and not the condition implies not the
organism. That is necessity, not sufficiency. Nevertheless, the fact that
this was not clarified until later indicates an evolution of the
ideas, to
me. Beyond that, however, "closure" itself cannot be taken as an
absolute.
There are no absolutely closed systems in nature or else Rosen's entire
thesis would be falsified.

JK

At 02:16 PM 9/13/2004 -0400, you wrote:

Tim,

I re-read the references you gave to evolution in Rosen's work.
Adaptation
is certainly a consequence of evolution, but I think Rosen is trying to
fit the process of evolution into his concept of anticipatory system,
which it is not. He says that, "a behavior or phenotype which is
adaptive
necessarily is of an anticipatory character." Darwinian evolution is a
model-free process, hence no anticipatory action can exist. Also,
Rosen's
description of evolution sounds like it works on individual dynamics.
Darwinian theory is about statistical biases only on population
distributions.

Tim: as been several comments by listmembers that Don Mikulecky and
others
had presented examples of such systems which are closed to efficient
causation but which are not alive, although I cannot find such
examples at
the moment (anyone have any links or examples from those days?).

HP: I have always understood Rosen's phrase "closed to efficient
causation" as a formal condition, a closed topological loop in a diagram
of relations including abstract genetic and metabolic components of an
(M,R) system. A less abstract, more material view of this same
condition I
have called "semantic closure," or more recently "semiotic closure," to
reflect the essential non-dynamic symbolic descriptive nature of the
gene
as contrasted with the material dynamics of metabolism. (Rosen abstracts
away this distinction in his (M,R) systems.) I must note, meo periculo,
that this is essentially an elaboration of von Neumann's requirement for
evolution, i.e., the distinction between description and
construction, or
(his analogy) of software and hardware. This is clearly only a necessary
condition and not a sufficient condition for evolution since viable
descriptions are rare in the space of all descriptions. Whether a
daughter
cell with an immediately lethal gene is alive is just a matter of
definition, like how long must it last, or how many faulty proteins must
it synthesize to be called alive. For a discussion of semantic
closure see:

http://www.ws.binghamton.edu/pattee/sem_clos.html

Tim: 2) I have always been puzzled by - what I consider to be - a deep
conflict between Rosen's proposing of sufficient condition in Q1 and the
"Godelian suggestions" (as Aloisius puts it) evident in Q2 that
"Sufficient conditions are harder; indeed, perhaps there are none".

HP: In my view, this is not a real conflict but a result of Rosen's
non-evolutionary, or what I call "synchronic," view of life. It is in
the
nature of relational models that time is abstracted away. Rosen views
life
as a kind of timeless order. As he says in LI, he can easily picture
life
without evolution. It is also clear that a Darwin-like evolutionary
process is not computable in any Turing sense, first, because it depends
on mutations or errors in the description, and no formal system can
tolerate even one bit of error. Second, evolution never halts. Of
course,
many aspects of evolution can be simulated but not in all details.

Also I find that Rosen's concept of error is not the same as the concept
of evolutionary mutation. Rosen's concept of error is limited to a
discrepancy between a system and its model and is therefore entirely an
epistemic problem (See AS Chap. 5.6, p. 307). A mutation changes the
real
system itself by constructing a new system. Mutations are not errors in
Rosen's sense but changes in ontological reality. Rosen sees
organisms as
only "inequivalent observers" (AL p. 319) instead of "inequivalent
constructors." Again the description/construction distinction and their
coded relation is the crucial condition for evolvable life.

Howard




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