Re: Rosen, Kauffman and compatibility

[Tim Gwinn <***>]

Howard,

 

HH: To me "closed to efficient causation" is still a very abstract image that I find hard to associate with observable properties of organisms. Maybe Tim can help me out here.

TG: The first thought that comes to my mind is: what did Robert Rosen answer? I would be surprised if this never came up in conversations between you two because "closed to efficient causation" is such a central point. It would be unfortunate indeed if circumstances didn't allow for that discussion. 

 

For my own part, I see it as two questions. First, there is the question of the observables. We know that functions like metabolism, repair, replication exist as biological qualities, but we do not generally regard them as observables. I think that one of the lessons of Life Itself is that our notion of what it is to be an observable has to be enlarged to include entire functions - that they are as empirical as atoms. Second, if we have a model that is in a commuting modelling relation with the system's organization of functions, then they have congruent entailment structures and we can examine the entailment structure of the model and perform an Aristotelian analysis of its entailment structures, in order to verify that it (and therefore also, the system under study) is either closed to efficient cause with respect to this model or not.

 

Regards,

Tim

 

-----Original Message-----
From: ROSEN Forum [mailto:***On Behalf Of Howard Pattee
Sent: Thursday, January 27, 2005 11:41 AM
To: ***
Subject: Re: Rosen, Kauffman and compatibility

Judith,

I think of "closed to efficient causation" as a necessary condition to answer What is life? It is certainly a principle that empirically testable scientific models of life must satisfy, but I'm not convinced it is itself empirically verifiable. I think of it like the epistemic principles in physics, like the requirement that all empirically verifiable models (laws) obey invariance principles.

To me "closed to efficient causation" is still a very abstract image that I find hard to associate with observable properties of organisms. Maybe Tim can help me out here.

Howard