Department of Logic and Philosophy of Science, University of the Basque Country, Avenida de Tolosa 70, 20080 San Sebastian, Spain.
Hist Philos Life Sci. 2010;32(2-3):269-88.
The central aim of this paper consists in arguing that biological organisms realize a specific kind of causal regime that we call "organisational closure"; i.e., a distinct level of causation, operating in addition to physical laws, generated by the action of material structures acting as constraints. We argue that organisational closure constitutes a fundamental property of biological systems since even its minimal instances are likely to possess at least some of the typical features of biological organisation as exhibited by more complex organisms. Yet, while being a necessary condition for biological organization, organisational closure underdetermines, as such, the whole set of requirements that a system has to satisfy in order to be taken as a paradigmatic example of organism. As we suggest, additional properties, as modular templates and control mechanisms via dynamical decoupling between constraints, are required to get the complexity typical of full-fledged biological organisms.
本文的中心目标在于论证，生物有机体实现了一种特殊的因果机制，我们称之为“组织封闭性”；即一种独立于物理定律之外的因果关系，由作为约束的物质结构的作用产生。我们认为，组织封闭性是生物系统的一个基本属性，因为即使是其最小的实例也可能具有至少一些生物组织的典型特征，而这些特征在更复杂的生物中表现得更为明显。然而，虽然组织封闭性是生物组织的必要条件，但它并不能完全决定一个系统必须满足的所有要求，才能被视为典型的生物范例。正如我们所建议的，还需要其他属性，如模块化模板和通过约束之间的动态解耦来实现的控制机制，才能获得成熟生物有机体的典型复杂性。
