Re: Empirics and Life

[Howard Pattee <***>]

Judith,

I don't think you understood what I was aiming at. I was trying to 
illustrate how physicists narrowly define objectivity, and why it is not 
really inconsistent with your more general view that everything is 
ultimately subjective. As I said, that is not the issue we should be 
discussing. All physicists really worry about is satisfying the Hertzian 
condition for all possible observers. That much I think Rosen would agree 
is necessary for a good model. That is why he spent so much time clarifying 
what the modeling relation is in more detail. The controversial issue is 
what types of formal model and what types of encodings (observables) 
actually can satisfy the Hertzian condition for living organisms. He shows 
that the Newtonian state-determined dynamics and simple physical 
observables cannot. I agree. In my opinion, the relevant problem is that we 
as yet have no specific Rosennian models of organisms.

I suggested that we need to work on clarifying the type of model Rosen had 
in mind beyond his abstract graphs. In my opinion, they are general 
epistemic models from which we need to derive more detailed models specific 
enough to test by experiments.

Howard