212 Abir U. Igamberdiev
SEMIOTIC CONSTRAINTS OF THE “CLOSURE TO EFFICIENT
CAUSATION”
According to Rosen (1991), biological systems are closed to the efficient causation. The
closure to efficient causation corresponds to the entailment of efficient cause within the
system and thus to the generation of an internal stimulus for movement that we define as
living process. The system perceives the signals from outside to react on them according to its
internal efficient cause in the course of the Funktionkreis dynamics. To perceive external
signals as signs, the system needs to transform the signals through the internal sequence of
signal transduction cascades in which the elements serve both as carriers of information and
are embedded into internal energy flows. In such behavior, some elements of the system must
be doing a "double duty", as an ordinary material constituent, and as a predictor for
something apparently quite unrelated in material terms (Letelier et al., 2006). It means that
the element of the system represents an anticipatory relation, i.e. it belongs both to the sets of
elements and the sets of relations (Rosen, 1985). This kind of a "double duty" is difficult to
accommodate in the dynamical terms but it can be analyzed in the semiotic terms. It is related
to the phenotype-genotype dualism, which is characteristic of biological systems in general,
but which is essentially absent in the inorganic world. However, it is not completely reducible
to the phenotype-genotype dualism representing a quality of certain elements of the system
that can fulfill the duties of provision of the organizational invariance. They can belong
simultaneously both to the ―hardware‖ and the ―software‖ parts (Igamberdiev, 2009).
Rosen (1991, 2000) suggested and developed explicitly the alternative to the classical
dualistic genetic model of the biological system. He called it (M,R) system where he
considered M as metabolism and R as repair. The elements of metabolic system are
continuously repaired or, more correctly, replaced (Letelier et al., 2006), the elements that
replace them are also replaced, and this can go to infinite regression. However, Rosen stated
that the system can be ―closed to efficient causation‖ and contain the internal principle of the
organizational invariance (Rosen, 1991) which results in avoidance of the infinite regression
and closure of the system in a stable non-equilibrium state in which the system, remaining
open to the material flows, becomes selective to them and affords being closed to efficient
causes that are locked inside it. By formulating these basic principles, Rosen introduced the
general basic structure for life, which has a capacity for internal development via internal
rearrangements with simultaneous redefinition of the organizational invariance. In fact, the
structure imposed by Rosen is triadic and it includes the central principle of ―organizational
invariance‖ (can be defined as O) holding M and R in the state of avoidance of the infinite
regression for the internal system‘s time T.
Rosen‘s theory contains the formulation of a relevant formal apparatus for describing
biological systems. Although this apparatus needs further development, it represents a unique
attempt to structure the formal basis for description of living systems. Other approaches that
should be mentioned here are Eigen‘s theory of hypercycles (Eigen and Schuster, 1979)
having some features common to Rosen‘s ideas in the notion of hypercycle closure but
reducing evolution to random mutations within hypercycles and to their natural selection, the
phenomenological biosemiotic model of Pattee (1972), and the autopoietic theory of
Maturana and Varela (1980). Below we outline the basic principles of Rosen‘s concept and
describe its possible connection to semiotics. Rosen extensively used the category theory for