I'd call it a philosophy book grounded in math, with ideas related to computation and biology. It's taken me a while to even approach it, because i assumed I needed to understand all the math and formulas involved. But no, not really. You really have to skim through each dense section, skip around through the chapters, multiple times over multiple occasions to partially digest it 🤣

If you want to start off, the new chapters provide nice background - Foreword, prefaces, prolegomena. The Autobiographical Reminiscences and "The Devil's Advocate" story are really incredible additions that bring in the human aspect of Rosen as a scientist. Overall, the Springer Second edition really is a tour, bringing together a dense work while also pointing out the philosophy it opens.