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I think this is a good place to start:
>Judith: As he [Rosen] said in Life, Itself, "The machine metaphor isn't
>just a little bit wrong, it is entirely wrong and must be
discarded."
HP: It is difficult to see this statement as more than an
_expression_ of
irritation. I have never heard anything like this from Rosen,
and it
contradicts his long-standing concept of complexity as systems that
require
multiple models. He always accepted physical models as one useful
type of
model. What might save the statement would be to replace "The
machine
metaphor . . ." with a phrase like, "To claim that models should be
only
machine metaphors . . ."
Well, you are correctly reading his irritation, but it is far more
than just irritation. He's stating it like it is, with none of the careful
diplomacy that he had used up to that point, which seemed to be obscuring the
message too much for it to get across clearly. What is the machine metaphor? His
description of it was that Rene Descartes saw some new-fangled automata and was
blown away by them. He found them reminiscent of natural systems. After giving
it some thought, Descartes came out with "All natural systems are like
machines." Newton came along and created Newtonian Mechanics, which seemed to
explain "the machinery of the universe"...
What do you do when various hypotheses seem to be partly proved by
natural events, and partly disproved at the same time? Some folks choose to
fiddle around at the half-disproven end, trying to tinker with various details
until it can be proven ("If we apply this set of transformations to
Newtonian equations, we can get it to add up over here!")(Oops, then it's not
adding up on this side anymore... Wait a minute....) Other folks choose to just
work with the proven stuff, cuz it works most of the time, and you can live a
whole life and win Nobel Prizes that way. My father's strategy, when he was
stymied trying to use Physics to answer Biological questions, was to look
at why Physics should be half proven and half disproven... what was the relation
between the proven half and the disproven half? Why did people make the
assumptions they did in each half? What were they looking at when they made
those assumptions? What was the "state of the art" at that point in history?
What were the exigencies they were dealing with? His analysis revealed that the
so-called proven half was not really proving what they thought. That pissed
people off-- "Hey, don't mess with that! That's working!!! Fix the other half,
but leave that part alone!" His response was, in effect, "It's not working like
you think it is." The reaction was a big "F___ OFF! I won a Nobel Prize with
that, I'll have you know!"
But the truth doesn't go away just because we may want it to. No
natural system is "like a machine"-- indeed, even machines aren't like science
thinks they are. They are not free-standing systems that spontaneously
self-organized; these are contraptions that humans created for a reason. This is
part of their epistemology and they cannot be understood without factoring in
that human element, much less be used as THE model for all natural systems in
scientific analysis. Machines are really chimerical extensions of human beings
just as a discarded mollusk shell is turned into a technology employed by a
hermit crab to serve a purpose of its own devising.
To try and pretend a machine is not something we created for our
own reasons is silly, and yet it's exactly what is at the basis of the machine
metaphor and the machine metaphor is at the basis of Physics, which is at the
basis of all science. People may be saying they aren't holding onto that
philosophy, but if they're using the tools generated by that philosophy, the
tools are flawed. I also question whether the physicists of which you speak are
really aware of their own assumptions where physics is concerned. People rarely
question the foundations unless they have a good reason. My father would not
have done so if he hadn't been stymied by the inapplicability of the tools to
Biological questions.
Secondly, I would dispute that his statement "The machine
metaphor is not just a little bit wrong, it is entirely wrong and must be
discarded." contradicts in any way his assertion that complex systems
require multiple modes of modeling. How do you arrive at that conclusion? These
things are not related.
Judith
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Wednesday, December 15, 2004 12:43
AM
Subject: Re: [ROSEN] Fundamental problems
in Physics
At 10:10 AM 12/14/04 -0500, Judith wrote:
>I am perfectly
willing to believe that you personally know physicists who
>don't
subscribe to the machine metaphor as a philosophy of how the
>universe
is, in fact I know a few myself. But if they aren't changing the
>basis
on which physics is predicated, then nothing changes.
HP: My only point
was that most physicists are no longer reductionists.
I also doubt that you
understand the basis of modern physics, and why
should you? It is not easy
to state precisely even if you have studied it.
An important point is that
its models are not restricted to any type of
preconceived metaphor. As an
ideal physicists are looking only for that
type of order in the universe
that is inexorable and universal. This means
nothing can violate these
laws, no matter where or when or in what context
or situation they are
observed, or in what type of organization or system
they are observed in.
Any violation means its not a law. Of course the
models describing these
laws must also pass the Hertzian test.
Universality is often
misinterpreted to claim that the laws can describe
all observables and all
systems. That is not the claim! The laws describe
the relations among only
a very small and weird set of observables.
"Quantum mechanics does not
describe a tea party" (Bohr). Life obeys
physical laws but is not
describable just by these laws. An analogy (with
obvious flaws) are
traffic rules. In all civilized countries their
existence is universal and
(ideally) inexorably obeyed. However, they tell
you almost nothing about
where traffic is going, why there are rush hours,
or who is
driving.
>Judith: As he [Rosen] said in Life, Itself, "The machine
metaphor isn't
>just a little bit wrong, it is entirely wrong and must
be discarded."
HP: It is difficult to see this statement as more than
an _expression_ of
irritation. I have never heard anything like this from
Rosen, and it
contradicts his long-standing concept of complexity as
systems that require
multiple models. He always accepted physical models
as one useful type of
model. What might save the statement would be to
replace "The machine
metaphor . . ." with a phrase like, "To claim that
models should be only
machine metaphors . . ."
In any case, this
has nothing to do with the basis of modern physics models
as I explained
above.
>HP: On the other hand, I don't know any physicist that does
not believe
>that there exists completely general physical laws that
every living
>system must follow in detail at all levels of
complexity.
>
>Judith: I think the physicists are wrong about
sentence number one [above].
HP: As I explained to John K, what I mean
by physical laws is what Rosen
calls natural causes. Physicists and Rosen
believe that everything follows
natural causes.
Judith:
Physics, as a science, is less than helpful in analyzing any
system which
has an organization where the organization supplies more
"causality" than
the parts alone do. Frankly, I see this as being true even
in "simple"
systems, like chemical reactions, but you can pretend it isn't
and get
away with it.
HP: I agree, and so do physicists. They regard chemistry
as requiring
different models. Nevertheless, no fundamental physical laws
are violated
by chemistry. In the traffic-rules analog, you might think of
physical laws
as the stop signs and chemical reactions as the
traffic.
New topic:
>HP: "The concept of Biosemiotics
requires making a distinction between two
>categories, the material or
physical world and the symbolic or semantic
>world. The problem is that
there is no obvious way to connect the two
>categories. . .
In fact, how material structures serve as signals,
>instructions, and
controls is inseparable from the problem of the origin
>and evolution
of life. Biosemiotics was established as a necessary
>complement to the
physical-chemical reductionist approach to life that
>cannot make this
crucial categorical distinction necessary for describing
>semantic
information. Matter as described by physics and chemistry has no
>intrinsic function or semantics. By contrast, biosemiotics recognizes
that
>life begins with function and semantics." (Pattee, J.
Biosemiotics 1, in press)
>
>Judith: Again, what the above doesn't
acknowledge is the foundational
>issue of how these two "worlds"
(material/physical and symbolic/semantic)
>interact to make each other
possible.
HP: The above paragraph is only the first paragraph of the
paper, the
subject of which acknowledges: "the foundational issue of how
these two
"worlds" (material/physical and symbolic/semantic) interact to
make each
other possible."
I will send the whole paper if you wish,
but I do not claim to have the
whole answer!
Howard
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