Mapping Theories of Life into Cell Biochemistry, Part III: Beyond Mechanistic Biology

In this three-part interview with Jannie Hofmeyr, we talk about Robert Rosen's pioneering work on the dialectical dynamics underlying living systems, the difficulties of relating his abstract models to cellular biochemistry (and how to overcome them), as well as the wide-ranging implications and continuing importance of Rosen's work for the study of living systems today.

In this third and last part of the interview, we go wild and cover a vast number of topics that derive from Jannie's work on Rosen's view of life: dynamics, informational openness, evolution, impredicativity, Turing computability, the limits of formalization, and the potential and perils of a post-mechanistic biology. At the end of this tour de force, we promise, you will see life, the universe, and everything with different eyes.

Chapters:
0:00 Introduction and recap
2:26 The dynamic aspects of functional organization
5:32 Dynamic pre-supposition & the historicity of autonomy
7:13 Interpreting other models: Ganti's chemoton & Barbieri's ribotype
10:12 Informational openness & a Red Queen for life
11:53 Nothing in the cell makes sense, except in the light of functional organization
13:12 Kantian wholes & the closure of constraints
16:59 Dialectical systems, recursivity, impredicativity & computability
21:58 Pernicious impredicativity & no largest model of an organism
28:36 The use/mention dichotomy & the problem of realization
32:19 The limits of formalization: Rosen as the Gödel of biology?
37:56 Church-Turing: are organisms algorithmic?
41:34 Beyond control: the metaphysics of a post-mechanistic biology
47:18 Rosennean complexity: from organisms to Gaia (not an organism)
50:15 The perils of a post-mechanistic synthetic biology
58:33 Towards the end, a word about the origin of life
1:01:20 Questions too rarely asked: to see the world with different eyes

Works mentioned in this conversation (in order of appearance):
1. Rosen (1991). Life Itself, Columbia University Press.
2. Rosen (2000). Essays on Life Itself, Columbia University Press.
3. Hofmeyr (2017). In: Poli (ed), Handbook of Anticipation, Springer.
4. Hofmeyr (2018). BioSystems 164: 121-127.
5. Hofmeyr (2021). BioSystems 207: 104463.
6. Louie (2020). BioSystems 197: 104179.

[finshinggun]

At section 3, you cited Mark Bickhard, but didn’t cite him in the description! It took me a while to find him as I wasn’t familiar with his work!!

[johnjordan]

Enjoyed this discussion!

Re: the phrase, the "Newton of Biology" at 32:58 that Mr Hofmeyr mentions, I have a related quote from Rosen himself:
"Kant (who understood Newtonian mechanism very well) claimed that
the essential features of the organic world were so bound up with telos that
a mechanical explanation of them was impossible in principle. Indeed, the
entire thrust of Newtonian mechanics was to abolish telos entirely from
science: this is why Kant picturesquely stated that there could never be the
“Newton of the leaf, ” who could do for a blade of grass what Newton had
done for the solar system."

(From: Optimality in Biology and Medicine, Rosen, 1986)

[rysw]

I think Jannie gets something slightly wrong here. I don’t think Rosen would say that you couldn’t in principle have a computer simulation that would tell you what the behavior a new gene/protein would assume within a cell.

I think it’s more similar to Wolfram’s concept of computational reducibility, where you wouldn’t be able to predict what its behavior would be (in whatever sense the modeling relation holds) before actually enacting the model. And even in that case, you would only be able to examine the perspective of the complex system that the modeling relation holds for.