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It seems to me that any discussion about my father's work must
include certain key concepts that pervade the whole. One of those is the concept
of entailment.
In the Praeludium of "Life, Itself", on page 10:
Robert Rosen wrote: "It seems to me that the duality between
"hard" or quantitative science and "soft" or qualitative science rests on an
entirely false presumption. It is not a question of doing physics or not doing
science at all. It is rather a relative question, of simplicity versus
complexity.
I would in particular draw attention to the way [these] ideas
rest on entailment alone, on systems of entailment in the material world (causal
entailment) and in the world of formalisms or mathematics (inferential
entailment), and on comparisons or congruences between such entailment systems.
I have come to believe that the concept of entailment provides a reliable
anchorage for the scientific enterprise itself, and I accordingly recommend it
to your attention."
On page 13:
Robert Rosen wrote (about tying to ascertain the answer to the
question "Why are living things alive?"...): The muteness of physics
arises from its fundamental inapplicability to biology and betokens the most
profound changes in physics itself...
In any event, the task that physics has shirked devolves next
onto biologists, perhaps properly so, since it is central to their every
enterprise. What light then, do biologists shed on the taproot of their own
endeavors? In fact, precious little. Indeed, a rather strange and dreary
consensus has emerged in biology over the past three or four decades. On the one
hand, biologists have convinced themselves that the processes of life do not
violate any known physical principles; thus they call themselves "mechanists"
rather than "vitalists". Further, biologists believe that life is somehow the
inevitable necessary consequence of underlying physical (inanimate) processes;
this is one of the wellsprings of reductionism. But on the other
hand, modern biologists are also, most fervently, evolutionists; they
believe wholeheartedly that everything about organisms is shaped by essentially
historical, accidental factors, which are inherently unpredictable and to which
no universal principles can apply. That is, they believe that everything about
life is not necessary but contingent. The unperceived ironies and contradictions
in these beliefs are encapsulated in the recent boast by a molecular biologist:
"molecular biologists do not believe in equations." What is relinquished so
glibly here is nothing less than any shred of logical necessity in biology, and
with it, any capacity to actually understand. In place of understanding, we are
allowed only standing-- and watching. Thus, if the physicist stands mute, the
biologist actually negates, while pretending not to.
Thus, to ask the question "What is life?" is to find oneself
standing essentially alone. But perhaps not entirely; there is yet another
oracle to be consulted. That oracle is System Theory, which as yet speaks only
in whispers. Insofar as it can be characterized, System Theory is the study of
organization per se, divorced from material embodiment, as the form of a statue
can be divorced from the marble or as cardinality can be divorced from the
things being enumerated. This oracle will at least entertain the question but
only when it has been transmuted to a new form: not what is special about life
in terms of matter but what is special about it in terms of organization. This
is good, because obviously organisms are, in purely material terms, of the
greatest diversity. But it is not, by itself, good enough. Moreover, this oracle
speaks not of laws or principles, as physics does; as yet it can speak only in
parables.
Thus the question remains, and it is the THE question: What is
life? It commands us to grapple with it and even allows us the luxury of
choosing our own weapons for the struggle. But our armory is inadequate;
wherever we look, some essential element is missing. Life is material, but the
laws framed to describe the properties of matter give no purchase on life.
Something is missing here, perhaps something essential for the understanding of
matter in general, however much the physicists insist not. Biology has so far
spent itself in cataloguing the endlessly interesting epiphenomena of life, but
at the heart of it there is still only a gaping void. And the parables of the
system theorist cannot as yet be incarnated in material reality. As I said,
something is missing, something big, but it is hard to see even the biggest
things when they are not there. We can only sense the void of its absence and
try to fabricate what is necessary to fill it.
That is what the present book is about. It is about the
creation and the application of an armory for a renewed assault on the question
of questions: What is life? In the process, we shall find ourselves partly in
the world of physics, constructing a language appropriate for a physics of
"organized matter", a physics of complex systems. We shall also find ourselves
partly in the world of the system theorist, developing a language appropriate to
"material organization" and thereby clothing that world in a substance and
coherence it has largely lacked. We will be in the world of the mathematician,
in the world of formalisms and formalizations. And finally, of course, we will
find ourselves in the world of biology, to see how far our armamentarium will
take us in our struggle with the question: What is life?
As a first step in our assault on the problem What is life? it
will be well to get some idea of what we are up against. Specifically, we will
try to understand what it is about the problem that has rendered it so
refractory to the combined resources of our contemporary scientific wisdom. This
will provide one way of sensing the shape of the void we need to fill and at the
same time will help set the stage for our further, more technical developments,
though we will not be able to reach a true answer to this question until we come
to the end.
Let us begin by noting the very form of this question; we are
asking WHY. We shall find ourselves asking "why" very often as we proceed. The
answer to such a question (and indeed there are in general many ways to answer
such a question) is to assert a "because". As we shall see abundantly later, to
ask why is to enter the realm of causality, and to propose an answer is to posit
something, to make a hypothesis. Although every physicist must believe in
causality, this attitude towards positing a "because" was set long ago by
Newton, whose proudest assertion was "hypothesis non fingo". Indeed, as we shall
see, causality in contemporary physics has evolved into a very different kind of
thing than that originally envisaged by Aristotle, a thing geared
essentially to deal with the question "what?: and to provide answers of the form
"this".
One of the main reasons the fundamental question "what is
life?" is so hard will turn out to be closely associated with such ideas. It
will turn out that this question is really a "why" question in disguise, that we
are really asking, in physical terms, why a specific material system is an
organism, and not something else. Such questions are not congenial to
contemporary science. "
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