Are Living Systems Machines?

[nwrickert (Neil Rickert)]

I was never attracted to materialist metaphysics. Partly, that’s because I don’t know what matter is, and QM seems to make it murkier.

The behavior of biological organism just doesn’t fit what I expect from a machine.

[jongarvey]

@nwrickert

The behavior of biological organism just doesn’t fit what I expect from a machine.

Now there we agree. However they certainly exhibit mechanical properties. So the interesting challenge is to find a way of explaining their totality beyond artifacts.

[glipsnort (Steve Schaffner)]

@jongarvey

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.

I would tell this story in somewhat different terms. Classical physics developed a materialistic mental model of the world that permitted accurate description of and intuition about physical processes. (An intuition that is often quite different from common sense intuition, by the way.) Quantum phenomena were paradoxical in that framework. Physicists therefore developed a new framework for describing these phenomena. That framework differs from the old one, but it’s still materialistic. It’s not couched in terms of Aristotelian potentia, however, but in terms of a wave function, of states as vectors in Hilbert space, and of observables as operators in the same space. It too permits the development of intuition about the phenomena in question.

@jongarvey

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.

Well, yes. Quantum mechanics very rapidly took over mainstream physics because the phenomena involved clearly violated classical expectations, and because it represented an objectively better framework for describing them. The depth of the trenchworks inhabited by classical physicists was irrelevant. I would suggest that the same applies to biology and design.

@jongarvey

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.

I don’t follow all of these debates, so I’m not sure whom you’re referring to here. I don’t see any reason that a working definition of ‘design’ relevant to this context can’t be put together. Something along the lines of “a process of creating, choosing, and instantiating models of the physical arrangement of matter”. Someone who’s thought about it could no doubt do better.

@jongarvey

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.

That strikes me as a really bad way to proceed. Our everyday intuition is typically a terrible guide to understanding natural phenomena