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January 11, 2006
A nice quote from here about machine metaphysics in science:
Over the past decades, the machine metaphor has invaded the language of biologists. In the early times of molecular biology, such metaphors were exclusively used for DNA transcription and translation. Nowadays each entity active in the cell is described as a machine: ribosomes are assembly lines, ATP synthases are motors, polymerases are copy machines, proteases and proteosomes are bulldozers, membranes are electric fences, and so on ..... Although biologists generally agree that living systems are the product of evolution rather than of design, they describe them as devices designed for specific tasks. Indeed, if biology can teach us about engineering and manufacturing, it is because the living cell is now viewed as a factory crowded with numerous bionanomachines in action. At the same time, in chemistry and materials science, machine metaphors have also become prominent. One major objective of nanotechnology programs is to build nanomachines that will do a better job than conventional machines. As they seek to design functional materials, physicists and chemists readily redefine the product of their design as machines: wheelbarrow molecules, cantilever molecules, springs, and switches are specimens of the inventions commonly reported in materials journals.
Thus the languages of molecular biology and materials science converge in a stream of machine metaphors that indicate a common paradigm based on a mechanistic] view of nature. Some go so far as to argue that if you look inside cell machines you will find smaller machines that cause disease. Machines causing death? Where does that leave obesity, stress and lifestyle-related illness?
This mechanistic concept of life is held to refute vitalism because biology can give chemical and physical explanations for every aspect of living cells, and so vitalism is akin to superstitution or a metaphysical belief in a lifeforce. Welcome to the return of positivism. There is little acknowledgement that a machine understanding of nature is also a metaphysics:
[Eric] Drexler and his supporters have developed a concept of machine that combines an old mechanistic model inherited from Cartesian mechanics ---a passive matter moved by external agents---with a more recent computational model of machines inherited from cybernetics. Both the mechanistic model and the cybernetic one rest on the assumption of a blind mechanism operating without intentionality under the control of a program. Biological evolution itself is conceived of as a blind mechanism operated and controlled by an all-powerful algorithm.
These guys see themselves are doing hard science, not metaphysics; and a conception of a hard science that has its roots in quantum physics.
Though worlds collide we do not have to accept the reductionist construction of vitalist conception fo life as presupposing an occult force; or as a reworking of the Cartesian conception of non-physical substance. We can argue that a biological organism has inherent activity, an intrinsic dynamis allowing the construction of a variety of forms (or geometrical shapes such as helix, spiral, etc.). We can refuse the construction of vitalism as standing for an obscure and mysterious vital force, a breath, or animus that would come from the outside to give life to inanimate matter; argue that a machine metaphysics of science ignores inner dynamics and power at work in living organisms; argue that biological activity such as sentient life is intrinsically goal-directed that mechanism over looks this; and that the mechanization of life is inseparable from a project of instrumentalization of life and control over nature.
Mechanism assumes the conception of life of Cartesian mechanics --- passive matter moved by external agents---and suggests that vitalism requires extrinsic goals to explain sentient life. It interprets this by replacing the classic religious account of external agent and extrinsic goal as God with that of a mysterious vital force. That representation makes vitalism anti-evolutionary, as explanation in mechanism had replaced God with natural evolutionary processes.
What is overlooked by this account is the emphasis on intrinsic goal directed activity of organic life. This is what demarcates the living out from the non-living in biology as it became an autonomous discipline in the 19th century.
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In a number of interviews or essays (in NEGOTIATIONS), Deleuze calls himself a vitalist -- very much in the 'spirit' of vitalism you describe above ("goal directed activity of organic life") rather than "mysterious vital force". But Deleuze and Guattari also proposed a "machinic" view of life, in that same 'spirit', as opposed to a "mechanistic" view. The INTERACTIVISM of Mark Bickhard (lots of articles at http://www.lehigh.edu/~mhb0/pubspage.html) proposes a similar distinction between "encodingist" representation (mechanistic) and "interactivist" representation (machinic).