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This is a note from Don Mikulecky to New England Complex Systems Institute Forum , October 21, 1999. The note was reposted as a bead by the review committee, October 21, 1999. Permission from Don was requested, and received October 22, for the play of a bead. The original note was in response to a question about the sense in which scholar Robert Rosen's views about theoritical biology and complex systems might be thought of the views of a vitialist.

To New England Complex Systems Institute Forum

I'll start by quoting Rosen and then say a bit more to focus these quotes on the definition of the "new vitalism".

"The theme of the book [Life Itself] is that Mechanism and Vitalism pose a false dichotomy. Roughly, I argue that the external, public, material world is full of closed causal loops, just as the internal, mathematical world is full of closed inferential ones (impredicativities). The world of the mechanism, or machine (or as I call it the simple systems) does not allow such loops. Accordingly, as a class, these simple systems are extremely poor in entailment, and hence extremely non-generic.

In particular I pose it in a causal language and show that a closed loop of entailment permits a perfectly rigorous notion of final cause."

He also describes his finding that as he sought a material basis for the phenomenon of life he used the idea that "any material phenomenon consists of observables evaluated on states.

So I tried to find out what the observables had to be to manifest this "information". The shock was in discovering that the families of observables I characterized in that way could not contain anything which behaved like a Hamiltonian."

"Fortunately I had a positive alternative to such negative, pessimistic conclusions. In the spirit of Rashevsky's Relational Biology and manifest in my own (M,R)-systems. As I have characterized this spirit, it involves "throwing away the physics and keeping the organization" instead of the reverse.

What remains then is an abstract pattern of functional organization, which has properties of its own, independent of any particular way it might be materially realized. To me, such patterns, and the elements and relations which comprise them, are as real and objective and perceptible as the products of any Reductionistic fragmentation; indeed in some ways more so."

There is more but that gets to the point. And it gets to the point of just who is being exercised by words here as well. I've taught about vitalism for lots of years now. The reason is the way history gets rewritten. The vitalists were NOT a uniform group and on one end of the spectrum was a group waiting for what Rosen says above. They believed that living organisms were in some way more representative of reality and that the world described by material science was an inadequate and incomplete picture. Unfortunately, history tends to ignore that group and to stereotype vitalism by its most ridiculous and intellectually impoverished members.

I have no problem with a notion of a "new vitalsim" within an expanded science which encompasses all of what Rosen was so vitally interested in (pun intended).

Respectfully,

Don Mikulecky