Howard:
Thanks for your excellent post!
Pete
Howard Pattee wrote:
Judith, Tim, Steve, John, and all,
What I am trying to get across to this group is that most physicists as
real individuals (not as abstract "Physics" or what masquerades as
physics taught in high school and freshman courses) do not disagree
basically with Rosen, or us, that physical models of natural laws are
inadequate to explain life. It is counterproductive make your fellow
searchers after truth into opponents when they are not. For example:
Judith: Today's physics is still based on laws ("Physical Laws") that
are not entirely "congruent" with Natural Law/s. So while I believe
that all systems, including living systems, behave in ways consistent
with natural laws of the universe, I do not think Physics has
accurately figured out what most of those laws are.
HP: No physicist could have said it better. There is total agreement
here. You go on:
Judith: I also think my father was right about the fact that Physics
has misinterpreted a substantial number of basic attributes of the
universe. So, words like "violate" or "evade" are inapplicable when it
comes to "laws" that aren't really laws.
HP: Again, no physicist would dispute that we do not have the "correct"
laws. It follows that we must be "misinterpreting" some basic
attributes of the universe. However, it certainly does not follow that
physicists intentionally or thoughtlessly overlooked life or "beguiled
themselves" or "shirked their task" with "disastrous" consequences as
Rosen charges.
In fact, history shows quite the contrary. Before Rosen began thinking
about it, a number of prominent physicist, starting with Bohr ("Light
and life" Nature, 131, 421, 1933) and Schroedinger (What Is Life, 1945)
, began to seriously question whether life was really covered by
physics. They were not vitalists, but they were skeptical that physics
was adequate. There was a common feeling that something fundamental was
being overlooked, and this feeling led physicists, like Bernal,
Astbury, Bragg, Delbruck, and others to actually switch from studying
particles to studying biology. (This group was the start of what is
called molecular biology today.)
Gunther Stent (in Phage and the Origin of Molecular Biology) points out
that the motivation for many of these physicists was the expectation
that studying life might lead to the discovery of new "laws of
physics." He says it was the hope of some that the study of life "would
prove incomprehensible within the framework of physical knowledge."
(See review by John Kendrew, Scientific American 216, Mar. 1967, p.
141, and Stent, "That was the molecular biology that was." Science,
160, 390-395, 1968)
The literature on physics's relation to biology is too large to even
outline. I will give you only one more quote from Rosenfeld (a close
colleague of Bohr) with whom Rosen would have agreed.
Rosenfeld asks: Will a physico-chemical analysis of the molecular
processes underlying biological phenomena provide a complete and
exhaustive description of these phenomena? And he answers: The concept
that immediately comes to mind is that of "function," the usefulness of
which in biological investigation nobody will deny. And the idea of
function, with its implication of finality, seems to be incompatible
with the type of causality exhibited by a purely physical description."
(Theoretical Physics and Biology, Marois, ed. Interscience, 1969)
Today there is still no consensus on how important and/or adequate
quantum mechanics is for models of life. There is, however, a general
feeling that the deepest problem is with the act of encoding or
measurement that is at the heart of the modeling relation. All
physicists agree that the process of measurement is not usefully
describable by physical laws, whatever they are, because it is an
epistemological problem. Pauli and Von Neumann have clearly stated this
problem. Rosen's words are that encoding is unentailed by nature or the
model of nature, but this is in complete agreement with their position.
Rosen's ideas also produce no basic disagreement with physicists over
the necessity for multiple complementary models (irreducible to and not
derivable from each other). This was well established in physics early
in the last century.
The only problem left with Rosen's ideas that I can see is whether we
can find a useful biological model that does not have what he calls
"states." What is or is not a state is not yet a clearly defined
concept.
I agree with John K: "We need to begin with [say, Judith's or Rosen's]
basic principles/assumptions in the Rosennean view, then work out,
rather than endlessly battling over the results of one view vs
another." It is just my opinion that the development of a Rosen-based
biological model can be done better without introducing the physicist
as a villain.
Howard
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