[FRIAM] On old question

[uǝlƃ ☣]

I think you have the "materialist but not mechanist" gist right.  But it's worth a warning that Rosen's definition of mechanism isn't what most people mean by that word.  And it's his hijacking of the word into jargon that caused so many, for so long, to accuse him of vitalism.  Most people include all 4 causes in and around their use of "mechanism".  Dictionaries even list the arrangements and how the parts fit together as part of the mechanism. (Side plug: My colleagues have published a paper calling for a classification of "mechanistic models", if anyone's interested: https://arxiv.org/abs/1801.04909)

What Rosen's done is jargonalize "mechanism" to mean only the most ... deductive, for a lack of a better word ... causal flow, chopping out the rest of what normal people include.  To his credit, the important part of what he ablated comes down to impredicative definitions -- where the construction/counting of one component is defined in terms of another component.  Constructively, such loopy definitions *can* result in deadlock.  But classically, they're not really a problem at all.  Higher order and non-classical logics are well-studied and not as pathological as Rosen seems to think.  So he seems to have attributed more power to this criticism of formal systems than is warranted.  And given that it's a fundamental part of his framework, it calls the entire thing into question.

Whatever, though.  Reframing these questions in the way he did is useful because it targets an audience that doesn't  spend much time on them.  But be skeptical of his hype.  Formal systems aren't as limited as he claims.  And we had these tools, for the most part, while Rosen was writing.  My *hack* opinion is that the problem, as always, was one part a) the lack of cross-domain pollination and the other part b) Rosen's belief that he was the only one having these thoughts.  It's kindasorta ironic that he latched onto category theory, which was/is an attempt to unify disparate bodies of math.

And FWIW, your "scaffolding" sounds a lot like "bootstrapping" <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootstrapping_(compilers)> to me.

On 10/25/18 2:55 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:
> Serendipity!  Your letter struck me like a thunderbolt, because I had dedicated the morning to carefully rereading Rosen's first chapter.  And for the first time, I think I got it! Rosen doesn't put it that way, but I think I want to say that his chapter is all about the distinction between “materialism” -- the belief that all that is consists of matter ==> and its relations <== and “mechanism”, the belief that the nature of parts tells you everything you need to know about the wholes those parts compose.  We need a science of biology that is materialistic but NOT mechanistic.  
> 
> [...]
> 
> To answer the question What is Life? we have so many more tools than we did when Rosen wrote.  The evo-devo literature is full of examples of what I guess I would call organizational serendipity.  The most inspiring example, to me, is the current explanation for the origin of life.  The way the question has always been posed to me before is how did life arise spontaneously from parts. But if life is an organization of things from another organization, the question becomes, “What kind of an organization could scaffold the organization we call life.  Enter the white smokers with their rich source of energetic chemicals and their intricate cellular structure.  So, life is the inadvertent consequence of one kind of organization coming into contact with another kind of parts in such a way that the native possibilities for the parts to work together are scaffolded by the organization.  

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☣ uǝlƃ