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28 of 29 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Revolution in Science, July 16, 1999
This review is from: Life Itself (Hardcover)
Robert Rosen asks the question: what is life?, and answers the question precisely after 10 chapters. His method of answering the question is ground breaking. In trying to answer the question of, What is Life? he first must explore what life is not. In that process of trying to answer the question about life, he had discovered something *very* important about science and mathematics: there are some unnecessary limitations placed them, currently. Robert Rosen *precisely* shows the reader the logical limitations of current scientific thinking in the form of modern physics and the machine metaphor. This is not your typical rant on reductionism. Everybody has hear the reframe against reductionism, "the whole is more than the sum of the parts," but Rosen shows in precise terms, much more: there is a limitation of modes of entailment (inference). The book is not easy reading, not because it is poorly written, for Rosen is a great writer, but because it examines the foundations of science, mathematics, and computer science (essentially anything having to to logical investigation). By trying to answer the question: what is life?, Robert Rosen shows us that the Newtonian paradigm (including all of modern physics, such as string theory, quantum loop gravity, and relativity) cannot and will not be sufficient to answer the important questions that not being ask in physics. Their modes of entailment are limited unnecessarily using the machine metaphor (e.g. differential equations and recursion, such as the Schrödinger's wave equation or Einstein's field equations). One of his results is to show precisely why physics (including molecular biology) has little to say about life (and non-life). He proves that Alonzo Church's thesis cannot be true, and demonstrates a revolutionary methodology (akin to precise analogy -- category theory) can help answer questions not asked by reductionistic science. Rosen examines physics, mathematics, biology, computer science with great insight and points the way to the future of science, in the use of precise mathematical metaphor; that is, by reasoning about function (as opposed to structure) by doing a primitive form of comparative complexity. Life Itself is the best introduction into Robert Rosen's revolutionary work: any scientist not completely blinded by the machine metaphor or lacking in enough background, should be able to "get it" with some work and concentration. Don't be fooled and bogged down by the first three chapters; this is, the ground breaking book: on par with Newton's Principia and Darwin's Origin of Species. However, don't expect to get everything on the first (or tenth) reading. A guide to the book: getting through Preface, Note to Reader, Praeludium, Chaps 1-3, Chapter 4 is crucial, this is where he sets up the problem and deconstructs Newton's technique (dynamics) and shows its weakness. Chapter 5 shows that there is another way. (Life Itself is not the standard (and vague) rant against reductionism - he shows an alternative.) In Chapters 6-9 he deconstructs simulation and the machine metaphor and shows it is equivalent to the Newton paradigm. Chapter 10 and 11 give you a good understanding why he went to so much trouble. What he doesn't say explicitly in this book, for his interest is in biology, is that his methodology is applicable to ALL of Science and mathematics, not just biology. His Anticipatory Systems book (his previous book) is just as good, but the book Life Itself is crucial to read to understand the importance of his ideas, and is the best introduction. Unfortunately, Anticipatory Systems is out of print. Its going to take awhile for science, mathematics, and computer science to catch up. His last book, published after his death, Essays on Life Itself, is icing on the cake.
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31 of 33 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
An original perspective on the nature of biological systems, January 5, 1999
By A Customer
This review is from: Life Itself (Hardcover)
In his short story, "The Wall Of Darkness", Arthur C. Clarke (cf. Tales From Planet Earth), described Trilorne, a world in which all exploration was forced to end by a wall that appeared to extend to the very heavens. In this brilliant and thought provoking book, a summing up of over 30 years of careful analysis, the late Dr. Rosen argues forcefully for the presence of just such a wall between what he called "simple systems" (roughly, systems that are algorithmic), and "complex systems" (everything else). His main thesis is that biological systems were complex and as such, beyond the ken of algorithmic approaches. The book also outlines rudiments of an alternative approach, the "closed causal loop" model of complex systems. The book explores the concept of a model and the act of modeling, state-based models (a particularly brilliant discussion), analytic and synthetic categories, the Turing machine and it's relation to simple systems, and the relevance of Aristotelian causality for biology. Causality is unfashionable at the moment (in particular Aristotle's view of it); Rosen's gift for finding gold in strange mines is nowhere more evident than his use of causality to build his alternative approach. Dr. Rosen was one of those unfortunate scientists who worked on problems, that to the rest of his community were non-existent. This decade has been a little kinder to his work. The increasingly evident general intractability of problems in disparate areas such as artificial intelligence (consciousness,intelligence) linguistics (symbolic reference), artificial life (speciation), computer vision (pattern recognition), and algorithmics (e.g. protein folding problem) led credance to Rosen's claims. The book itself is very carefully constructed; there are other obvious hints that he intended this book to reflect parts of his theory. Rosen's style, as always, is magisterial, and sometimes even poetic. Perhaps the readers most likely to benefit from this work are those who have confronted the wall at some point in their own careers. In Clarke's short story, Trilorne's universe turned out to be a Mobius strip. The wall had no other side, and all journeys ended at the beginning. It may well be that the limitations seen in these areas are fundamental, and that *no* approach will work. Yet, the joyous abundance of life itself and this work suggests otherwise.
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25 of 26 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
THE BEST BOOK I HAVE READ IN YEARS, July 3, 2006
Although many influential scientists (Steven Weinberg, Francis Crick, and Richard Dawkins, for example) claim - and most members of general public believe - that all of reality can "in principle" can be expressed as the dynamics of its constitutive elements (atoms, genes, neurons), some have intuitively felt that this reductive tenet is wrong, that life and the human mind are more complex phenomena. Critics of reductionism have pointed to Kurt Goedel's 1931 "incompleteness theorem" (which shows that in any axiomatic formulation of, say, number theory there will be true theorems that cannot be established) as a contrary example, but this paradigm-shattering result has been largely ignored the scientific community, which has blithely persisted in its reductive beliefs.
How is one to understand this curious situation? In Kuhnian terms, it seems that reductionism persists because this old paradigm has not yet fallen out of favor. Leaders in physics have not yet taken the public stance required by Goedel's theorem and assertions in their textbooks have not changed. Why not? Perhaps because Goedel's theorem relates to mathematics rather than reality, or perhaps because recognizing its import diminishes the status of physics as the primary science.
With the publication of Robert Rosen's LIFE ITSELF, the other shoe has dropped. In a carefully constructed exposition developed over eleven reader-friendly chapters, Rosen shows how something akin to Goedel's theorem applies to the natural world, and in particular to biology. Thus Rosen shows that all dynamical systems can be divided into two broad classes: "simple systems" for which the reductive paradigm holds and "complex systems" for which it does not hold. Note, however, that by the term "complex system" Rosen means something more specific than the way that the same term is used in chaos theory. Low-dimensional dynamical systems that exhibit chaos are "simple" to Rosen, whereas the term "complex" is reserved for those systems that cannot be simulated. Thus a Turing machine is "simple" as is the weather system proposed by Edward Lorenz as a model weather system that exhibits "irregular" (i.e., chaotic) solutions and the well-known "butterfly effect." "Complex systems" - Rosen proves in the sense that mathematicians use the term "prove" - comprise natural systems that cannot be simulated.
As a physicalist whose intuition has long suggested that reductive perspectives are too narrow to encompass living organisms and human consciousness (see my STAIRWAY TO THE MIND), the discovery of this book has been an illuminating experience for me. Having just read it word for word over three increasingly exciting days, I strongly recommend LIFE ITSELF to all who would understand the limits of science as it is currently practiced and preview the ways that linguistics, biology, cognitive science, and the social sciences (psychology and cultural anthropology) can be expected to develop in the present century.
Alwyn Scott
[...]
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