Robert Rosen: the well-posed question and its answer - why are organisms different from machines?

Abstract

The question ‘What is life?’ has been asked by many over the years. Robert Rosen realized that this was a poorly posed question and that when rephrased the question had an earthshaking answer. This is the subject of this review. We will examine the entire epistemological basis for modern science and its grounding in reductionism and the machine metaphor. The role of the machine metaphor in science goes back to Descartes. Newton and those who followed built it into what has become modern science. The success of this worldview was so great that it became as strong as any of the other belief structures we might identify as religions. Physics is said to deal with the fundamental laws of nature. Chemistry and biology were to use these laws to deal with specific applications of the general laws of physics. This world of the machine is a ‘simple’ world inhabited by simple machines or mechanisms. What if the objects in chemistry and biology are not that simple? Then we must reduce them to subunits that are. Robert Rosen discovered that when the reduction is performed something real and necessary is lost in a way that made it unrecoverable. It isn't the atoms and molecules that are at the hard core of reality, it is the relations between them and the relations between them and things called processes which are at the core of the real world. From this perspective the answer is a very easy one to obtain. When the causal relations are examined, the organism stands apart from the machine by being closed to efficient cause. It is its own ‘builder’. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.