Retrospective 2024-36

This is a retrospective of week 36, 2024 (2024-09-02–2024-09-08).

I’ve read Overcoming the Newtonian paradigm: The unfinished project of theoretical biology from a Schellingian perspective by Arran Gare this week.

Arran Gare writes:

“The concept of an atom did not emerge from any analysis offered by Newton; rather, he simply presupposed particles without structure and devoted himself entirely to synthesis, asking what behaviour can be manifested by such particles, individually or collectively. The formalism based on this procedure assumes that that almost everything of importance is unentailed. … Further strictures follow from the assumption that the universe is composed of structureless particles, that every system has a largest model from which every other model can be effectively abstracted by purely formal means…”

“…it is necessary to examine and appreciate the efforts to overcome Newtonian physics and their achievements from the end of the Eighteenth Century, particularly those of F. W. J. Schelling and those he influenced. …there is a relatively coherent tradition characterized by intense efforts to empirically investigate the reality of life in all its dimensions generating equally intense efforts to develop new mathematical approaches adequate to the reality of life.”

“Schelling argued that mechanical cause-effect relations are abstractions from the reciprocal causation of self-organizing processes… While ‘matter’ emerges through a static balance of opposing forces, living organisms were characterized by Schelling as responding to changes in their environments to maintain their internal equilibrium by forming and reforming themselves…”

“Given the history of modern physics it should not be surprising that the main proponent of mathematical biophysics, Nicolas Rashevsky, should have been so concerned to avoid reductionism and develop a mathematical approach to life that did it full justice, and that his foremost student, Robert Rosen, and those influenced by Rosen, including Rosen’s foremost student, A. H. Louie, should have continued this quest.”

“…in his later work, Rosen became more interested in mathematically modeling the distinctive features of life itself – most importantly, anticipation, independently of its material substrate – and more radically questioning received ideas about modeling systems. In following this path Rosen was advancing von Bertalannfy’s general system theory and the relational biology of Rashevsky while utilizing Category Theory as developed by Saunders Mac Lane.”

“Although he studied at Göttingen, the stronghold of Hilbert’s formalism, Mac Lane rejected formalism. In accordance with Schelling’s understanding of concepts, he argued that mathematical concepts originate in practices and only then are refined and elaborated as mathematical concepts… Mathematics cannot be understood as simply the manipulation of rigorously defined terms according to specified rules.”

“Rosen utilized Category Theory to examine the assumptions of Aristotelian and Newtonian science and the relationship between Newton’s assumptions and the mathematics deployed by him and his successors, revealing thereby how science had locked itself into a path that denied the objective reality of function, and more fundamentally, of final causes, and thereby excluded the fundamental question ‘What is Life?’ He showed how reductionists avoid this question by constructing a small surrogate universe of various fractionated components of organisms that can be explained by methods that have sometimes worked in other areas of science, and then taking these isolated fractions as the surrogate for the whole living system. They then identify science with the methods used to investigate these fractions. The possibility of revealing this to be deficient is then blocked by redefining science – not through its content and the kinds of questions it must answer – but by specifying the method of investigation, which is then identified with what is ‘objective’. … Unraveling this confusion, Rosen showed the real issue and the real problem to be how to develop a mathematical structure in which the logical entailments within the mathematics models adequately reflect the causal entailments in what is investigated. In biology, what is being investigated are living beings. Rather than invoke an inadequate surrogate universe, it is necessary to appreciate the full reality of life itself characterized by final causes and functionality of components… Functional components cannot be fractionated and treated independently of the organism since they are aspects of and definable only through the whole organism.”

“Rosen claims that organisms, having models of themselves, are full of impredicativities. The effort to exclude these was part of the effort to achieve certainty in mathematics by reducing the semantics of mathematical language to syntax; that is, the rules of how we are permitted to manipulate terms from one proposition to another, while ruling out any reference to what terms denote… If this were possible, then mathematics could be identified with what is computable on a digital computer. … However, …this program of reducing semantics to syntax was shown by Kurt Gödel to be impossible. Gödel showed further that what is modeled by a formal system in which all entailment is syntactical entailment is richer and more complex than its model. …as Rosen pointed out, systems governed by syntax alone are small, inferentially weak and are not generic of mathematical systems as a whole, which are full of impredicativities. …Such models involve necessary ambiguities and cannot be simulated on a computer, and this is what makes them indispensible for understanding biological and cognitive functions…”

I’ve also started reading the following books this week:

• More Than Life Itself: A Synthetic Continuation in Relational Biology by Aloisius H. Louie. This book is intended to be a continuation of Robert Rosen’s work in Life Itself. The point is that life itself is not computable. Computable models are, by definition, incomplete. “Life is not definable by an algorithm.”¹
• Understanding Our Unseen Reality: Solving Quantum Riddles by Ruth Kastner.
• Adventures In Quantumland: Exploring Our Unseen Reality by Ruth Kastner.
• The Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics: A Relativistic Treatment by Ruth Kastner.

The following videos and interviews provide an introduction to Ruth Kastner and her research in the foundations of physics, particularly in interpretations of quantum theory:

• Ruth Kastner: Five Minute Fellow (5 min)
• Ruth Kastner: Visionary Scientist (1 h 17 min)
• Ruth Kastner: Buddha at the Gas Pump Interview (1 h 57 min)

I will return to my reading of Ruth Kastner next week.

Notes:
1. Aloisius H. Louie, More Than Life Itself: A Synthetic Continuation in Relational Biology, p. xviii