I thought I’d post an excerpt from a conversation that started with Stuart Kauffman and then moved to the Rosen list server at Panmere.com.
JJK to List:
I suggested to SK that Rosen was a genius and deserves as much credit for RT as Einstein does for SR and GR – hinting that it is in all of our interest to give that credit and build the field and the mystique. He’s thinking about that one.
Then I started thinking about his doubt. My understanding, from many discussions with Judith, is that RR did not want to produce the final synthesis of the theory, for several reasons. One was an ethical concern about how it would be used. Another might have been (my speculation) the peer pressure he obviously was under during that period of unenlightened general science.
In things RR wrote he said everything one needs to put it all together is there in his writings, but he’s not going to do it. He seemed content to lay the foundation in precise mathematical terms, answer the question of life to his own satisfaction, and meet the obligations to this crazy world by publishing essentially a puzzle. That was as much his genius as was the theory itself, in my opinion.
So, back to SK’s question. What RR published in LI Ch. 10 as the life entailment diagram (deserves its own special label, I think as LED, so ‘Rosen’s LED’), was nothing less than an Escher diagram — it is a physical structure that cannot exist in the theoretical world of mechanisms, which to everyone else was the material world itself. And yet it definitely describes life. Therefore, life cannot exist as a mechanism. QED.
He stopped there and did not draw the diagram that CAN exist. Mathematically the LED is a Category – technically in category theory. So SK is correct, no such pre-stated category, as such, can define life. But when you combine it with RR’s OTHER theory track, modeling relations, what you get is NOT A CATEGORY. It is a complex relation between inverse categories that cannot be reduced, and the inverse category had not even been stated yet in Category theory. LED+ might thus refer to this category relation that does fully entail life. The original LED is the projection of this complex LED+ into the erroneous science of mechanisms. It is what the causality of life would look like projected into that imaginary world, and thus stripped of its deeper formal and final causation. The diagram demonstrates that those ‘hidden’ causes cannot be removed. It is the most elegant proof I can imagine.
He left it as a puzzle for future generations to solve, like Fermat’s principle. To me, it says “genius-squared”.
Response from Judith Rosen:
Yes, it is true that initially my father intended to publish what he had discovered and/or developed about synthesis of a living system, from scratch (as opposed to what is being called “synthesis” currently, using the organization of a living cell to house GMO guts– I call that “cheating”). But he decided against that after witnessing what he called “the mischief” that genetic engineers were doing. He could see the writing on the wall and felt that he didn’t want it on his conscience if scientists without the knowledge or wisdom to know what they should be most careful of took his work and were able to use it as a set of “how to” instructions. He decided that whoever would be able to use his work for that would have to get inside it enough to understand it enough to be ABLE to put the pieces together themselves and then, he said, it would be on THEIR head, whatever the consequences would be. So, the way he put it to me was; “It’s all there, in my published work, for whoever is able to see it. But it won’t be easy.”
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