More Than Life Itself A Synthetic Continuation in Relational Biology Categories A H Louie 9783868380446 Books
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A. H. Louie's More Than Life Itself is an exploratory journey in relational biology, a study of life in terms of the organization of entailment relations in living systems. This book represents a synergy of the mathematical theories of categories, lattices, and modelling, and the result is a synthetic biology that provides a characterization of life. Biology extends physics. Life is not a specialization of mechanism, but an expansive generalization of it. Organisms and machines share some common features, but organisms are not machines. Life is defined by a relational closure that places it beyond the reach of physicochemical and mechanistic dogma, outside the reductionistic universe, and into the realm of impredicativity. Function dictates structure. Complexity brings forth living beings.
More Than Life Itself A Synthetic Continuation in Relational Biology Categories A H Louie 9783868380446 Books
This book is required reading for any reader of Robert Rosen's Life Itself or, indeed, anyone interested the question "what is life?" (i.e., "what distinguishes a living system from a non-living one?"). Rosen's Life Itself was a mostly expository summation of his decades of work with relational biology on this question, with just enough of the mathematics to carry the reader along through the journey . While this form of presentation helped to explain his profound work and its ramifications, as well as appeal to a wider audience, the reader was sometimes left with questions about the finer details and the strength of the mathematical foundations, unless they had the desire to research Rosen's published papers, going back as far as the 1950's.As a mathematical biologist and an actual student of Rosen's (he refers to Nicolas Rashevsky and Robert Rosen as his "academic grandfather and father", respectively), Louie provides in More Than Life Itself a thoroughly rigourous and self-contained treatment of the pivotal question. With his mathematical prowess and deep comprehension of relational biology, Louie provides the reader with the mathematical tools - via a succinct course in ordered sets, lattice theory, category theory, modelling, traversability, and algebraic topology - necessary to carry forth with rigor the discussions of simple and complex systems, analytic and synthetic models, simulability, impredicativity and more. All of which underlies the chapter on anticipatory systems, and finally culminates in the answering of the question "what is life?"
After tackling the epistemological form of the question "what is life?", Louie then proceeds to the ontogenetic form of the question, i.e. "what makes a natural system alive?" This is a deep topic in itself, and we are offered a glimpse into this depth in the final chapter "Ontogenetic Vignettes". This topic also is the subject of his subsequent book, The Reflection of Life: Functional Entailment and Imminence in Relational Biology.
More Than Life Itself is lucid and thought-provoking, which is quite a challenge for material which spans philosophy, biology, logic and mathematics. In many ways, it is a textbook (in the best possible sense) of relational biology. To be clear, relational biology is a form of mathematical biology and the reader should expect to be presented with a mathematical treatment. As Louie noted in the Praefatio: "Relational biology can no more be done without the mathematics than without the biology. Heuristically, exploratory, and expository discussions of a topic, valuable as they may be, do not become the topic itself; one must distinguish the science from the meta-science."
Table of Contents
================
Praefatio: Unus non sufficit orbio
Nota bene
Prolegomenon: Concepts from Logic
PART I - Exordium
1) Praeludium: Ordered Sets
2) Principium: The Lattices of Equivalence Relations
3) Continuatio: Further Lattice Theory
PART II - Systems, Models and Entailment
4) The Modelling Relation
5) Causation
6) Topology
PART III - Simplex and Complex
7) The Category of Formal Systems
8) Simple Systems
9) Complex Systems
PART IV - Hypothesis Fingo
10) Anticipation
11) Living Systems
12) Synthesis of (M,R)-Systems
PART V - Epilogus
13) Ontogenic Vignettes
Appendix: Category Theory
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More Than Life Itself A Synthetic Continuation in Relational Biology Categories A H Louie 9783868380446 Books Reviews
This is a brilliant but low-key contribution to research on anticipatory systems and relational biology. It develops in full mathematical detail the main ideas of Rashevsky-Rosen school of relational biology, clarifying many of the points that have sometimes made it difficult to understand the depth and breadth of Robert Rosen's radical visions. Louie knows and understands what Rosen did and tried to do, and he is able to rephrase Rosen's work in a mathematical form that elevates the debates on Rosen and mathematical biology to a new level. At the same time, he carries the themes of relational biology, extends them to new directions, and composes new art from them.
The book introduces the required mathematics. It is, however, slow reading if you don't have background in graduate level mathematics. Worth the effort, though, and required reading for those who want to understand relational biology and the limits of conventional physical models and algorithms in modeling living systems.
This book is required reading for any reader of Robert Rosen's Life Itself or, indeed, anyone interested the question "what is life?" (i.e., "what distinguishes a living system from a non-living one?"). Rosen's Life Itself was a mostly expository summation of his decades of work with relational biology on this question, with just enough of the mathematics to carry the reader along through the journey . While this form of presentation helped to explain his profound work and its ramifications, as well as appeal to a wider audience, the reader was sometimes left with questions about the finer details and the strength of the mathematical foundations, unless they had the desire to research Rosen's published papers, going back as far as the 1950's.
As a mathematical biologist and an actual student of Rosen's (he refers to Nicolas Rashevsky and Robert Rosen as his "academic grandfather and father", respectively), Louie provides in More Than Life Itself a thoroughly rigourous and self-contained treatment of the pivotal question. With his mathematical prowess and deep comprehension of relational biology, Louie provides the reader with the mathematical tools - via a succinct course in ordered sets, lattice theory, category theory, modelling, traversability, and algebraic topology - necessary to carry forth with rigor the discussions of simple and complex systems, analytic and synthetic models, simulability, impredicativity and more. All of which underlies the chapter on anticipatory systems, and finally culminates in the answering of the question "what is life?"
After tackling the epistemological form of the question "what is life?", Louie then proceeds to the ontogenetic form of the question, i.e. "what makes a natural system alive?" This is a deep topic in itself, and we are offered a glimpse into this depth in the final chapter "Ontogenetic Vignettes". This topic also is the subject of his subsequent book, The Reflection of Life Functional Entailment and Imminence in Relational Biology.
More Than Life Itself is lucid and thought-provoking, which is quite a challenge for material which spans philosophy, biology, logic and mathematics. In many ways, it is a textbook (in the best possible sense) of relational biology. To be clear, relational biology is a form of mathematical biology and the reader should expect to be presented with a mathematical treatment. As Louie noted in the Praefatio "Relational biology can no more be done without the mathematics than without the biology. Heuristically, exploratory, and expository discussions of a topic, valuable as they may be, do not become the topic itself; one must distinguish the science from the meta-science."
Table of Contents
================
Praefatio Unus non sufficit orbio
Nota bene
Prolegomenon Concepts from Logic
PART I - Exordium
1) Praeludium Ordered Sets
2) Principium The Lattices of Equivalence Relations
3) Continuatio Further Lattice Theory
PART II - Systems, Models and Entailment
4) The Modelling Relation
5) Causation
6) Topology
PART III - Simplex and Complex
7) The Category of Formal Systems
8) Simple Systems
9) Complex Systems
PART IV - Hypothesis Fingo
10) Anticipation
11) Living Systems
12) Synthesis of (M,R)-Systems
PART V - Epilogus
13) Ontogenic Vignettes
Appendix Category Theory
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