"Medicine is a form of engineering in which the physician takes some action (drug, surgery, etc.) to alter the behavior of a physical system, the patient. Its underlying science is biology. Hence our ability to characterize medical knowledge depends on our ability to represent and validate biological knowledge."
This is really very wrong. The 'physical system' is conscious and suffering, which excludes Medicine from even the most vaporous definition of engineering. Real progress in medicine is much more akin to exploration (in the Christopher Columbus sense) than engineering.
Anyway, this is a typical engineer writing about biology. They always make the same mistakes:
1. Ignoring evolution.
2. Treating mechanistic models as first class citizens with disdain for data (eventhough the latter in the form of DNA is the sine qua non of all life)
3. Failing to understand that "The simplest complete model of an organism is the organism itself."[1] as von Neumann noted.
> "The simplest complete model of an organism is the organism itself."
But that is trivially true about everything, including golf balls. The interesting question isn't if the model is complete, but if it is sufficient (or complete enough) to make predictions.
And in the case of golf balls we can make quite good predictions with a very simple model, mostly because we are only interested in if it ends up in the hole or not. But a complete model of a golf ball would need to include the exact dynamics of the different layers and the turbulence around it, which we just can't do. Luckily, we don't need to.
So what is a sufficient model of a living organism? That of course also depends on what we want to know. I am quite certain that modern egg farmers have, for their purposes, quite sufficient models of hens. They know how fast the hens grow, the effects of different amounts and types of food, how much heat they produce, and of course how many and how big eggs they lay, etc..
And it is of course possible that we need to know the exact wave function for the complete system that is the cell to model it sufficiently enough to, say, synthesise new drugs. But I don't think so.
It is definitely not trivially true about anything. A golf ball can be modelled easily. You are adding external complications to the system. An electron can be impossible to model if you inject it into a complex system.
Anyway the point is a golf ball will not evolve into a sentient being who will then fly to mars and write poetry, which is what cells have done. This shows you can’t even put a meaningful bound on what you need to model for an organism.
But that is not a complete model of a golf ball. A complete model will include the wave function of all the particles in golf ball. It won’t be simpler than the model an organism of the same size. And in this case I mean by simpler that the number of bits required would be lower.
How does the capacity of the thing you try to model affect the complexity of the model?
This is really very wrong. The 'physical system' is conscious and suffering, which excludes Medicine from even the most vaporous definition of engineering. Real progress in medicine is much more akin to exploration (in the Christopher Columbus sense) than engineering.
Anyway, this is a typical engineer writing about biology. They always make the same mistakes:
1. Ignoring evolution. 2. Treating mechanistic models as first class citizens with disdain for data (eventhough the latter in the form of DNA is the sine qua non of all life) 3. Failing to understand that "The simplest complete model of an organism is the organism itself."[1] as von Neumann noted.
[1] https://onezero.medium.com/the-future-of-computing-is-analog...