Re: Why four categories of causation?

[Howard Pattee <***>]

Judith quoted Rosen on a central issue about the meanings of
"state."  It is important because "entailment without
states" is what relational biology is all about. The quote can be
misleading because although "state" indeed "plays the
central role" in quantum mechanics it does not play the role
"just as it did"  in classical Newtonian "state"
and as Rosen uses it to define mechanism.

> Rosen: My main point is,
> however, unarguable: that the concept of state plays the central role in
> its formalism, just as it did in its classical
> predecessor..."

In the Newtonian paradigm the state description is assumed to be complete
in the sense that the next state is completely determined by the
recursion rule (representing Natural Laws). The observer plays no role
and has no influence on the next state. This kind of Natural Law is what
Rosen and everyone else says is equivalent to a deterministic mechanism.

A quantum state does not represent a completely determined condition of
Nature, but only incompletely defined potentialities that can be realized
in classically observable forms only by further interactions with other
systems, usually called measuring devices. The state and wave function
allow us to predict only the probabilities of these classically
observable forms. 

Consequently, two quantum systems with the same wave function need not
behave the same way depending on how they are observed. They have only
the same potentialities. Quantum systems have entirely different
entailment logic as classical systems and therefore quantum systems are
not mechanisms in Rosen's sense. 

Whether this essential difference is important for life has been argued
for many years beginning with Schroedinger. There is now a large
literature on the subject. I have suggested that the speed and
specificity of enzymes depend on the uncertainty in momenta induced by
the recognition (positional measurements) of their substrates. But that
is another issue.  

Howard