Math is Hard, But Life is Harder

Recall what the late Robert Rosen's daughter says about his works:

Do not be intimidated by the mathematical notation in this book! The mathematics represent additional illustration of ideas already described in prose. It was his form of "bullet proofing."

This gives me a whole new perspective, because I had assumed the parts I understood were trivial, while the more lofty stuff was totally Bob-proof. Now I can review the material with the assurance that I actually do understand it.

Can we stipulate that Life is a pretty, pretty important subject? Where would we be without it? And yet, when I was writing the book and immersing myself in the philosophy of biology, I found no fully satisfactory answers, any form of reductionism being entirely out of the question. It's fine for biologists, but not for a free range bio-psycho-pneumo-cosmologist.

On the one hand, I did find some helpful thinkers along the way, in particular, Whitehead, Hans Jonas, and Michael Polanyi. But Rosen provoked a major click -- which is that sound in your head when disparate pieces of the puzzle suddenly cohere and reveal a deeper dimension, like one of those "magic eye" pictures.   

In the preface to Life Itself: A Comprehensive Inquiry Into the Nature, Origin, and Fabrication of Life, Rosen asks

For whom is this book intended? I do not know.

Join the club!

This  book itself has no pragmatic purpose of which I am aware.

Welcome to our world!

It is thus for anyone who wants to claim it. 

Yoink!

Now, why do we wish to yoink it? In short, because the existence of Life (which I will captitalize when speaking of the phenomenon of Life Itself) is one of the Top Five Mysteries for which any worthwhile metaphysic must account. A cosmos capable of giving rise to Life is radically -- I would say infinitely -- different from one that is not so capable (let alone one that gives rise to a Mind capable of meditating on Life).

In fact, the attributes of such a cosmos are so statistically unlikely that one is forced to conclude that the the cosmos is "designed for life" or something. Or like a conspiracy to create biologists.  

But that's not my argument, nor is it Rosen's. Let's just stick to the facts before jumping to conclusions. Back off -- this is science, man, not the vain speculations of some silly blogger.

Back in the 1940s the eminent physicist Erwin Schrödinger turned away from his indeterminate cat long enough to write a book called What is Life?, and Rosen's book is something of an update, or at least asks the same question. One of the problems is that physics simply cannot cope with the problem of Life, more on which as we proceed. 

Indeed, I have Schrödinger's book, but I don't know that I even finished it, and not just because of the math. He even says on the first page that Life is "much too involved to be fully accessible to mathematics." 

More generally, it seems to me that there's something important about Life that we miss by virtue of living it, as in how the fish knows nothing of the water in which it swims. So it's a hard problem, nor will mathematics solve it. 

this text is the hardest thing I have ever tried to do, much harder than doing the research it embodies (Rosen).

Again, join the club:

The problem was to compress a host of interlocking ideas, drawn from many sources, which coexist happily in my head, into a form coherently expressible in a linear script (ibid.). 

Now, if the result isn't "art," it certainly partakes of a (right brain?) psychological mode that underlies art. Moreover, perhaps a work of art would be the best way to express these ideas. It's something I often grapple with: that I am not an artist, but need to be in order to convey what I'm trying to get across. 

Here is one of his bottom lines: "Physics as we know it today is, almost entirely, the science of mechanism," but mechanisms 

are very special as material systems. Biology is a class of systems more general than mechanisms. In fact, the relative positions of physics and biology become interchanged; rather than physics being the general and biology the special, it becomes the other way around.

That's a radical idea: that biology is prior to physics. Nevertheless, CLICK.

For example, if we begin in the usual way, with physics, we necessarily reduce qualities to quantities, such that "Qualitative is nothing but poor quantitative." 

But such unqualified nothingbuttery, is, of course, a quality. In other words, there is nothing quantitative about a metaphysic that pretends to reduce everything to quantities, just as materialism cannot be defended with recourse to inanimate matter. Just ask a rock if materialism is true.

Transcendent qualities cannot reduce to numerical quantities, which reminds us of the Aphorist, who says the same thing in a more poetic way:

The laws of biology in themselves do not have sufficiently delicate fingers to fashion the beauty of a face.   

More generally, 

The philosopher who adopts scientific notions has predetermined his conclusions.

We love science, but let's be reasonable. It doesn't explain everything, beginning with science. 

Another way to address the problem is to affirm that semantics doesn't reduce to syntax. If it did, then every pedantic grammarian would be a great writer, and every machine would be a work of art.

Besides, Gödel. A system of purely syntactical rules will be consistent but never complete. In short, we all deploy the rules of grammar to convey meaning that cannot be reduced to those rules. There are even grammatically correct sentences that convey only absurdity, AKA journalism. Not to mention grammatically insane sentences that convey dense holofractal meaning such as Finnegans Wake. 

What is the meaning of meaning? This sounds tautological unless we consider the word "meaning" from multiple levels -- levels that cannot be reduced to the lower one. 

Some people say life is meaningless. I say that's a meaningful sentence. Wrong, but nevertheless full of meaning.

The meanings are the reality; their material vehicles are the appearance.

You just need to appreciate this and take it seriously:

Scraping the painting, we do not find the meaning of the picture, only a blank and mute canvas. Equally, it is not by scratching about in nature that we will find its sense. 

This is the cosmos to which we must return -- not by denying science, but by situating it in a deeper context. This is the real cosmos, the one in which we actually live --  and can live, for no one can live in math, or DNA, or anything less than Life Itself.

To be continued, or perhaps not, depending on the level of interest.