Unlike machines, living systems are distinguished by the continual destruction and regeneration of their boundaries and other components. Stable Markov blankets may be a real feature of the world, or they may be merely a construction of particular models, but they are neither a feature of organisms nor of any model that can capture the necessary conditions of their existence.

More than a century ago, Russell launched a forceful attack on causation, arguing not only that modern physics has no need for causal notions but also that our belief in causation is a relic of a pre-scientific view of the world. He thereby initiated a debate about the relations between physics and causation that remains very much alive today. While virtually everybody nowadays rejects Russell's causal eliminativism, many philosophers have been convinced by Russell that the fundamental physical structure of our (...) world doesn't contain causal relations. This raises the question of how to reconcile the central role of causal concepts in the special sciences and in common sense with the putative absence of causation in fundamental physics. (shrink)