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arXiv · 2012.11648

Rosen's no-go theorem for regular categories

Fosco Loregian
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Abstract

The famous biologist Robert Rosen argued for an intrinsic difference between biological and artificial life, supporting the claim that `living systems are not mechanisms'. This result, understood as the claim that life-like mechanisms are non-computable, can be phrased as the non-existence of an equivalence between a category of `static'/analytic elements and a category of `variable'/synthetic elements. The property of a system of being synthetic, understood as being the gluing of `variable families' of analytica, must imply that the latter class of objects does not retain sufficient information in order to describe said variability; we contribute to this thesis with an argument rooted in elementary category theory. Seen as such, Rosen's `proof' that no living system can be a mechanism arises from a tension between two contrapuntal needs: on one side, the necessity to consider (synthetically) variable families of systems; on the other, the necessity to describe a syntheticum via an universally chosen analyticum.

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Fosco Loregian. 2020-12-21. Rosen's no-go theorem for regular categories. https://arxiv.org/abs/2012.11648

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