Are Living Systems Machines?

Incidentally Josh, what do you think of Jeremy England’s theory of explaining life in terms of pure thermodynamics? Such as this and more recently this. It seems like yet another case of a physicist trying to explain away biological problems in terms of physics. I tried reading his paper some time ago and couldn’t really understand it. I wonder what an actual biologist would think about it.

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Sounds more like the magical thinking that sometimes emanates from cosmologists. :smile:

Physicists have made very important contributions to biology, even winning Nobel Prizes. They have also taken forward some strange pet theories. That is what this sounds like to me. It is about as believable as the thermodynamic arguments against abiogenesis we more commonly see. To disconnected from the realities of chemistry and biology to be salient, or even true.

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Science can only obliquely engage these question. It cannot engage them head on.

Of course scientists will say stupid things in public. When that happens, hope that Peaceful Science has risen to high enough prominence that we can set the record straight.

I agree with you on this… unfortunately scientists don’t. I don’t see how origin of life sciences can avoid the definition of life… and the distinction between the living and non living.
I don’t see science limiting itself according to its limitations… and in such cases there is no hesitation to bend the rules such as testability (for example string theory). The only unbendable rule seems to be materialism.Either the scientific method should be consistently used, or the special cases should be identified where all bets are off… an inconsistency application of rules just looks like a philosophical bias as opposed to a methodological one.

Well I appreciate your efforts… However the more I listen to people here, the more this seems like a political/ideological slugfest.
I will pray for you.

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There is more than just this. There is quite a bit happening behind the scenes. We are trying to cultivate a new type of engagement. For each person that joins, there is a journey to understand what that might mean for them. @Ashwin_s, you are really contributing greatly to our community here, much more than when you first came. Thank you for staying.

Thank you for praying for me. I really do think we have another way forward here.

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No, living systems are not machines.

Honestly, I don’t think this argument can be easily settled. I have often run into people who insist that living organisms are machines. That’s a common view in the AI (artificial intelligence) community, though it seems obviously wrong to me.

As it happens, I was thinking about this last week. And it seemed to me that the contrast we should make is between mechanical and adaptive. Parts of a biological organism are mechanical, while other parts are adaptive. But, overall, a biological organism is adaptive, while a robot is mechanical. Thinking is adaptive, while computation is mechanical.

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Can the parts that are adaptive be reduced to mechanical systems?
Ultimately, how can such reductionism be avoided if we consider only “natural” mechanisms? If it is natural, it has to be reducible to mechanical/physical and chemical interactions… isn’t that nature’s suite of cards…?

Seems relevant to the topic at hand:
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.405.9079&rep=rep1&type=pdf

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No, I don’t think they can.

I’m not a reductionist. And the meaning of “natural mechanisms” is far from clear.

Right now, there are mechanical/physical and chemical reactions taking place in my body, that involve molecules which were not even part of my body as recently as yesterday.

A comment from my current reading in Heisenberg’s Physics and Philosophy, which gets added to my “must read” list of clearsighted scientists along with Eddington’s The Nature of the Physical World and Polanyi’s Personal Knowledge.

Heisenberg, more or less in as many words, says that quantum theory cannot be adequately described under materialistic categories (and he is scathing about the Cartesian system’s failures in this regard).

As I’ve mentioned on another thread (or two!) he frequenetly describes quantum uncertainty in terms of Aristotelian potentia, which have no place in the efficient causation and inert matter of classical science, but which (if you have a minimal grasp of Aquinas) reduces the paradoxical element considerably, despite the quantum world’s strangeness.

Now, he goes on to suggest (albeit from 1950s perspective) that there are likely to be things in living systems just as intractable to materialist reductions, and describes the division of biology into camps of those pursing to reduce life to chemistry, and those with whom he evidently feels more sympathy, who are looking for the equivalent of the “odd quantum world” in biology. Notably, the former in our century are heavily entrenched as the mainstream, and the others are the outsiders - even the pseudoscientists.

Now it’s one thing to say that there is not good evidence of design in living things: there could be methodological or evidential reasons for this, or it may be absent, even though nearly universally intuited.

But it’s quite another to say that there is no definition of design that scientists can use, because there is absolutely no doubt that it exists and can be observed, because it is what scientists do for a living. Design in human affairs is an empirical fact.

If an empirical fact cannot be described adequately or tractably, the problem is likely to be that science is using an inadequate language for it, ust as the language of inert matter subject to deterministic laws turns quantum physics into a bizarre paradox.

Quantum physics at least has the advantage that one can manipulate relatively simple equations and simply ignore the queerness, but what if the more important processes of life, which are indisputably many orders of magnitude more complex, cannot be reduced to any useful mathematics? Perhaps only some verbal expression of the issues is possible, but that the relevant language is as far from the usual materialist jargon as Aristotelian potencies are?

In that case, maybe scientists may just need to learn to work with the intuitive concept of design that they use when designing experiments, designing theories, designing lecture presentations, and so on and so forth. This would be because of the dictates of the subject matter, not because the subject itself is beyond investigation.

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How is that pertinent.
You say you are not a reductionist… so are you claiming that some biological systems cannot be explained naturally?

Do you know about the delphic boat?

He is pointing out that there are emergent properties that are independent of lower level details. He is right.

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More likely that we do not know enough about the lower level details to predict emergent properties…

It implies that a reductionist account of a single person would need to be a reductionist account of the entire cosmos.

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Life is physics and chemistry. That is to say, we are pretty certain that the reactions and interactions inside living organisms do not break any known law of physics. Personally, I don’t take issue with the notion that cells can be described mechanistically. There are, however, lots of very small details, many we can’t presently measure and cannot model that can make very big differences. So, one can invoke thermodynamics and entropy, because that certainly has a strong role, perhaps penetrating to the organismal level, and one can invoke chaos in modeling, again because their are parts of life and biochemical interactions where that’s appropriate. Self-organized, non-equilibrium, energy dissipative systems, is not an inappropriate way of looking at life, at some particular levels.

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Those two sentences do not mean the same thing. This post is not physics and chemistry, but does not break any known law, either.

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OK. I see that. “Life comports to the laws of physics and chemistry.”

In my work as a biological scientist, I tend to work with the assumption that life is a phenomenon of physics/chemistry. That may be wrong, but scientifically, that’s how it goes.

To be honest, I can’t know for sure that it’s not an epiphenomenon or emergent from the properties of universe. So, physics + initial conditions might be sufficient for your post. I think the question defies proof either way at this time.

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That would depend on the definition of “machine”. For example this definition: e (1) an assemblage of parts that transmit forces, motion, and energy one to another in a [predetermined] manner from Merriam-Webster says that living systems are machines

And this one: 2a. a living organism or one of its functional systems says it all

It looks like most dictionaries say that living organisms are machines. I haven’t looked through all of them.

The only argument I can find to the contrary is: The Official PLOS Blog - The Official PLOS Blog covers PLOS initiatives that address our core principles.

A machine is extrinsically purposive in the sense that it works/functions towards an end that is external to itself; that is, it does not serve its own interests but those of its maker or user. An organism, on the other hand, is intrinsically purposive in the sense that its activities are directed towards the maintenance of its own organization; that is, it acts on its own behalf.

It does seem like a semantic quibble, though. Should we rename the field of biomechanics and restructure kinesiology?

Speaking purely to the question of organisms as machines, and nothing else, surely this view stems directly from the teaching Descartes which set the trajectory of modern science, even as individual findings militate against it.

Arguing that only the human mind (resc ogitans), created by God, is immaterial, and the rest of creation is inert matter (res extensa), animals were necessarily simply automatons.

This explains the calaier attitudes to vivisection amongst many scientists well into the 19th century and beyond: they had the principles of science on their side. The reaction against vivisection is an interesting history, often with the professional physiologists defending it on Cartesian grounds, and less scientifically rigorous medics attacking its cruelty on compassionate grounds.

Anti-vivisection laws controlled animal suffering, and currently there is a tendency to play up the sentience of animals (sometimes to extremes), but meanwhile, the molecular biology movement inherits Cartesian assumptions about the nature of life as something reducible to chemistry and ultimately to physics.

Clearly, machine-like systems are involved in life - which has been known ever since amputees wore wooden legs or Egyptians had false teeth. But the Aristotelian science that Descartes deliberately denied insists that living orgianisms are, primarily, holistic entities (called substantial forms). The parts all function towards the ends of the whole, and are not merely interlocked systems of mechanical or chemical artifacts. This remains a minority view amongst some, including the structuralists - but the research money is in the molecules and the machines.

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With that definition, it seems a stretch to say that a living organism is a machine. I see an organism as a process or system of processes, rather than as an assemblage.

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