One learns something new and fundamental about the universe when it refuses to be exhausted by a posited method. The main lesson one learns from life itself is the troubles that arise when one tries to legislate a process, …and with a claim of objectivity besides, when the said process is, in the first place, neither a law of nature nor a law of mathematics.
—Aloisius H. Louie, More Than Life Itself: A Synthetic Continuation in Relational Biology
#life #relationalbiology #biology #mathematics

The limits of mechanistic dogma are very examples of the restrictiveness of self-imposed methodologies that fabricate non-existent artificial ‘limitations’ on science and knowledge. The limitations are due to the nongenericity of the methods and their associated bounded microcosms.
—Aloisius H. Louie, More Than Life Itself: A Synthetic Continuation in Relational Biology
#relationalbiology #biology #reductionism #science #knowledge

Any question becomes unanswerable if one does not permit oneself a large enough universe to deal with the question. The failure of reductionism is that of the inability of a small surrogate universe to exhaust the real one. Equivocations create artefacts.
—Aloisius H. Louie, More Than Life Itself: A Synthetic Continuation in Relational Biology
#relationalbiology #biology #reductionism

Biology poses problems. Experimental and theoretical techniques, from molecular biology to quantum mechanics, provide methods that may be applied to attempts in solving these problems.
—Aloisius H. Louie, More Than Life Itself: A Synthetic Continuation in Relational Biology
#relationalbiology #biology

The reductionistic claim bears the false witness that if one has enough such [mechanistic physiochemical] surrogates, and knows enough about them, then the biological organization will follow as a corollary. It is not just a technical matter of the impossibility in human terms of acquiring a sufficiently large collection of surrogates. The inherent impredicativity of complexity cannot be analytically resolved. A typical example is that one cannot solve a classical N -body problem by solving N one-body problems.
—Aloisius H. Louie, More Than Life Itself: A Synthetic Continuation in Relational Biology
#reductionism #relationalbiology #artificiallife #life

If one constructs the maps of metabolism, repair, and replication meticulously, one can indeed fabricate an (M,R)-system that has all the features of being alive. … In relational biology, artificial life is about the artful fabrication of an (M,R)-system. It is most certainly not about making algorithmic simulations that can deceive us into believing that it is alive.
—Aloisius H. Louie, More Than Life Itself: A Synthetic Continuation in Relational Biology
#relationalbiology #artificiallife #algorithms

[Robert] Rosen’s answer to the epistemological form of the question “What is life?” (i.e., “What are the defining characteristics of a natural system for us to perceive it as being alive?”) is … “A material system is an organism if, and only if, it is closed to efficient causation.” This ‘self-sufficiency’ in efficient causation is what we implicitly recognize as the one feature that distinguishes a living system from a nonliving one.
—Aloisius H. Louie, More Than Life Itself: A Synthetic Continuation in Relational Biology
#relationalbiology #livingsystem #life

…modelling is more an art than a science. … For natural systems, all one has are perceptions and interpretations… I have chosen, in my formulation of relational biology…, to state as axiom the more self-evident “life is anticipatory”. The less self-evident “life is complex” then follows as a theorem. While…the statement “life is anticipatory”, cannot be mathematically proven, …there is plainly abundant evidence for it. That is the best one can do with scientific ‘proofs’ and biological ‘laws’. It has been said that the only law in biology is that there are exceptions to every possible ‘law’ in biology.
—Aloisius H. Louie, More Than Life Itself: A Synthetic Continuation in Relational Biology
#relationalbiology #biology

…the raison d’être of biology, hence of our relational approach to the subject, is life itself.
—Aloisius H. Louie, More Than Life Itself: A Synthetic Continuation in Relational Biology
#relationalbiology #biology

The progressive generalization from analysis to synthesis in a biological context is essentially what the work of the Rashevsky-Rosen school of relational biology is about.
—Aloisius H. Louie, More Than Life Itself: A Synthetic Continuation in Relational Biology
#rashevsky #rosen #louie #relationalbiology

“Aristotle’s teleological view of nature may be summarized as “Nature does nothing in vain.” Using this regulative principle, Aristotle realized that the understanding of function and purpose is crucial to the understanding of nature. … One can see in these…principles the germ of relational biology: a natural system is alive not because of its matter, but because of the constitutive organization of its phenomenological entailment. The esse of an organism is this special entailment…”
—Aloisius H. Louie, More Than Life Itself: A Synthetic Continuation in Relational Biology
#aristotle #relationalbiology #entailment

The same readers who took delight in Life Itself [by Robert Rosen] should also enjoy this More Than Life Itself [book]. Be our companions on our journey and join us in our songs.
—Aloisius H. Louie, More Than Life Itself: A Synthetic Continuation in Relational Biology
#louie #rosen #relationalbiology #book #books

“…in relational biology, mathematical tools are used synthetically: we do not involve so much in the making of particular models of particular biological phenomena, but rather invoke the entailment patterns (or lack thereof) from certain mathematical theories and interpret them biologically.”
—Aloisius H. Louie, More Than Life Itself: A Synthetic Continuation in Relational Biology
#relationalbiology #biology #mathematics

“The Schrödinger question “What is life?” is an abbreviation. A more explicitly posed expansion is “What distinguishes a living system from a non-living one?”; alternatively, “What are the defining characteristics of a natural system for us to perceive it as being alive?” This is the epistemological question [Robert] Rosen discusses and answers in Life Itself. His answer, in a nutshell, is that an organism — the term is used in the sense of an ‘autonomous life form’, i.e., any living system — admits a certain kind of relational description, that it is ‘closed to efficient causation’. (I shall explain in detail these and many other somewhat cryptic, very Rosen terms in this monograph.) The epistemology of biology concerns what one learns about life by looking at the living. From the epistemology of life, an understanding of the relational model of the inner workings of what is alive, one may move on to the ontogeny of life. The ontology of biology involves the existence of life, and the creation of life out of something else. The ontogenetic expansion of Schrödinger’s question is “What makes a natural system alive?”; or, “What does it take to fabricate an organism?” This is a hard question. This monograph More Than Life Itself is my first step, a synthesis in every sense of the word.”
—Aloisius H. Louie, More Than Life Itself: A Synthetic Continuation in Relational Biology
#book #relationalbiology #louie #rosen