Essays on life itself / Robert Rosen.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Rosen, Robert, 1934-1998.

Series:

Complexity in ecological systems series

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Life (Biology)--Philosophy.

Life (Biology).

Physical Description:

x, 361 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm.

Place of Publication:

New York : Columbia University Press, [2000]

Summary:

Compiling twenty articles on the nature of life and on the objective of the natural sciences, this remarkable book complements Robert Rosen's groundbreaking "Life Itself" -- a work that influenced a wide range of philosophers, biologists, linguists, and social scientists. In "Essays on Life Itself," Rosen takes to task the central objective of the natural sciences, calling into question the attempt to create objectivity in a subjective world and forcing us to reconsider where science can lead us in the years to come.

Contents:

Part I On Biology and Physics 1

1. The Schrodinger Question, What Is Life? Fifty-Five Years Later 5

2. Biological Challenges to Contemporary Paradigms of Physics and Mimetics 33

3. What Is Biology? 45

Part II On Biology and the Mind 57

4. The Church-Pythagoras Thesis 63

5. Drawing the Boundary Between Subject and Object: Comments on the Mind-Brain Problem 82

6. Mind as Phenotype 96

7. On Psychomimesis 115

8. The Mind-Brain Problem and the Physics of Reductionism 126

Part III On Genericity 141

9. Genericity as Information 145

10. Syntactics and Semantics in Languages 156

11. How Universal Is a Universal Unfolding? 171

12. System Closure and Dynamical Degeneracy 175

13. Some Random Thoughts About Chaos and Some Chaotic Thoughts About Randomness 187

Part IV Similarity and Dissimilarity in Biology 197

14. Optimality in Biology and Medicine 201

15. Morphogenesis in Networks 224

16. Order and Disorder in Biological Control Systems 246

17. What Does It Take to Make an Organism? 254

Part V On Biology and Technology 271

18. Some Lessons of Biology 275

19. Bionics Revisited 283

20. On the Philosophy of Craft 297

21. Cooperation and Chimera 308

22. Are Our Modeling Paradigms Nongeneric? 324.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 341-346) and index.

ISBN:

023110510X

0231105118

OCLC:

41173594