Narrow Results

Robert Rosen's (M,R)-systems are a class of relational models with a structure that defines a necessary distinguishing feature of organisms. That feature is an impredicative hierarchy of constraint on the properties of the model that correspond to the closure of an organism's entailment relations with respect to efficient cause. As a consequence, a computable model cannot be an (M,R)-system. This has been mathematically proven, and hence indisputable. Nevertheless, "computable" implementations of the mappings in an (M,R)-system have been reported. This paper explains the logical impossibility of the existence of these "counterexamples." In particular, it examines the errors in the construction of one of the most interesting among them. The relevance of this result to neuroscientists is that the same structure of closure to efficient cause is observed in brain dynamics.

An approach which has the purpose to catch what characterizes the specificity of a living system, pointing out what makes it different with respect to physical and artificial systems, needs to find a new point of view — new descriptive modalities. In particular it needs to be able to describe not only the single processes which can be observed in an organism, but what integrates them in a unitary system. In order to do so, it is necessary to consider a higher level of description which takes into consideration the relations between these processes, that is the organization rather than the structure of the system. Once on this level of analysis we can focus on an abstract relational order that does not belong to the individual components and does not show itself as a pattern, but is realized and maintained in the continuous flux of processes of transformation of the constituents. Using Tibor Ganti's words we call it "Order in the Nothing". In order to explain this approach we analyse the historical path that generated the distinction between organization and structure and produced its most mature theoretical expression in the autopoietic biology of Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela. We then briefly analyse Robert Rosen's (M,R)-Systems, a formal model conceptually built with the aim to catch the organization of living beings, and which can be considered coherent with the autopoietic theory. In conclusion we will propose some remarks on these relational descriptions, pointing out their limits and their possible developments with respect to the structural thermodynamical description.

In this article we analyse the problem of downward causation in emergent systems. Our thesis, based on constructivist epistemological remarks, is that downward causation in synchronic emergence cannot be characterized by a direct causal role of the whole on the parts, as these levels belong to two different epistemological domains, but by the way the components are related: that is by their organization. According to these remarks downward causation, considered as relatedness, can be re-expressed as the non-coincidence of the operations of analysis and synthesis performed by the observer on the system.