And yet, as Einstein kept insisting, science involves a free creative act of their intellect; ultimately, it involves wisdom. It involves the ability to select what is important about a problem from what is irrelevant or incidental, and follow that. There is no algorithm for this, just as there is no algorithm for making a model. It would perhaps be nice if there were such algorithms, which would make wisdom irrelevant, and indeed put the wise and the unwise on an equal footing. But there are not and, as Herotodus remarked long ago: “Where wisdom is required, force is of little avail.”
— Robert RosenLife Itself

Archive for the 'Modeling Relation' Category

A Metaphor between Modeling Relations

Sunday, June 10th, 2007

One of the fundamental questions in quantum mechanics concerns the interpretation of the QM formalism: what does QM “say” about the material world?  Do the probability distributions in QM reflect corresponding innate properties in the material quantum world, or do they reflect only uncertainties in our state of knowledge about the material quantum world? In […]

Natural Law and the Rosen Modeling Relation

Saturday, May 19th, 2007

 
In Life Itself, Rosen discusses the minimal foundational premises upon which all of science rests:

1. The succession of events or phenomena that we perceive in the ambience is not entirely arbitrary or whimsical; there are relations (e.g., causal relations) manifest in the world of phenomena.
2.  The relations between phenomena that we have just posited are, […]

The Modeling Relation as a Complex System

Sunday, May 6th, 2007

Note: It is recommended that the reader first understand Rosennean Complexity, and the Rosen Modeling Relation prior to reading this page.

 

Decoding and Encoding Dictionaries
One of the most interesting aspects of the Rosen Modeling Relation is the fact that the Modeling Relation is itself complex, in Rosen’s sense of the word.
As we recall from […]

Error and Emergence

Sunday, May 6th, 2007

(Note: This post is a migration of a page form my old Rosen website.)

It is recommended that the reader first understand the Rosen Modeling Relation and Rosennean complexity prior to reading this page.

Introduction

The concept of “error”

Emergence

The mystery of emergence

References and footnotes

Introduction
Once we understand what is meant by Rosennean complexity, it becomes relatively easy to […]