Part V, Robert Rosen's "Autobiographical Reminiscences"

["Judith Rosen" <***>]

Enclosed is the next installment. As always, "Autobiographical
Reminiscences" was written by Robert Rosen, (copyright Judith Rosen)


PART V, ROBERT ROSEN'S AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL REMINISCENCES"

"As I suspect you have ascertained by now, my relations to General System
Theory follow no direct, straight-line trail. There were many sources which
fed into it, prepared in many cases by my own independent work, before I had
ever heard of General System theory per se.

For instance, I had early been much taken with the "Mechano-Optical Analogy"
of William Rowan Hamilton, which seemed to me so different in character from
anything else in theoretical physics. Hamilton (whom I consider one of the
most original minds of the 19th century; perhaps only Poincare' and a few
others are even comparable to him) did not try to "reduce" optics to
mechanics, nor vice versa, as Maxwell fruitlessly tried to do later, but
rather related them through mathematically homologous action principles.
This was an incredibly fertile thing to do; among other things, it led
Schrodinger to his Wave Mechanics (which Hamilton himself had all but
derived), and, in a completely different direction, to all modern approaches
to Optimal Control. I have found many occasions to invoke it myself, in many
contexts. Thus, when (much later) I heard General System Theory
characterized as comprising anything bearing directly on independent
disciplines, I thought of it as an attempt to do on a broad scale what
Hamilton had done in Physics; as a way of relating apparently diverse kinds
of systems in a way different from simply trying to reduce them both to a
set of common parts. I was also independently familiar with Bertalanffy's
development of the "open system" metaphor, which I always viewed as similar
in spirit to Hamilton's. That is, diverse systems behaved as they did simply
because they were open; not because of irrelevant structural details. In
fact, it was largely this metaphor which led me to think of stability as a
basic organizing concept, and ultimately to my text on Dynamical Systems
mentioned above.

When I came to Chicago, I learned, of course, of Anatol Rapoport's work on
random neural networds, done during the decade when Rapoport was a member of
the Committee on Mathematical Biology. This too turned out to have
application to many diverse subject areas; originally developed to show how
specific architectural features could be robustly generated through simple
statistical biases (thus freeing these features from the burdens of
specifying precise wirings), it gave insight into e.g. the nature of
epidemics, the spread of rumors, and many other things.

So it was that my own independent work and study were leading me precisely
in the direction marked out by General System Theory.  I became aware of the
Society for General System Research, however, only around 1962, when I was
asked to have some of my early papers reprinted in one of the SGSR Yearbooks
(I think it was the third).

I looked at some of the other papers in these Yearbooks, and must confess I
found them disappointing. They tended to start from a premise that "General
System Theory" was about something they called a "General System" and spent
a great deal of effort trying to characterize what that was. It was not an
activity I found particualrly germane. Indeed, I regarded the field as
General (System  Theory), not as (General System) Theory.

In addition, I was by then beginning to travel to meetings and conferences,
at many of which people who called themselves "system theorists" were in
attendance. By and large, I did not find much common ground with these
people, or with what they were doing. That distanced me to some extent from
the field itself, though I continued to keep an eye on it.

The situation changed considerably when I met Ross Ashby in 1967, at a
six-week Workshop on Theoretical Biology in Fort Collins, Colorado. On those
picturesque surroundings, we had many provocative discussions, and
discovered many commonalities of interests and inclinations.

The situation changed still further when, in 1968, Ludwig von Bertalanffy
moved to the State University of New York at Buffalo, and was providentially
quartered in the Center for Theoretical Biology (thought his appointment was
in one of the Social Science departments).  I vividly remember meeting him
for the first time. When I introduced myself, he impulsively embraced me,
like a long-lost brother. A rich and, I think, mutually rewarding symbiotic
relation developed between Bertalanffy and myself, and with the CTB at
large; it provided a natural home for him, as it had for me. However, he
arrived when things were going very sour at SUNY-Buffalo, as noted above,
and I have no doubt that the anxieties and uncertainties generated by
repudiation of firm agreements by his department played a major role in
precipitating the heart attacks which killed him.

I got to understand Bertalanffy's view of System Theory, not only as a
scientific, but also as a social instrument. Until then, I had always found
the term "General Systems Movement" uncomfortable; but that is exactly how
von Bertalanffy perceived it. Whereas I viewed the reductionisms and
materialisms rampant in biology merely as scientifically inadequate, von
Bertalanffy saw them as evil and dehumanizing; in the deepest sense immoral.
Animated by his profound love of both science and of humanity, he was
inspired to project his view of Systems, governed by ways of relating things
rather than stressing differences, into an alternate world view; a paradigm,
as he called it, which would offer both science and mankind something
better. He viewed his vision, then, not merely as something to be reported,
but as a Gospel to be preached.

Von Bertalanffy radiated a simple goodness, a largeness of mind, and a
dignity notably absent in those who attacked him so violently, such as
molecular biologist Jacques Monod. Monod was typical of the excessively
positivist, algorithmic, brute-force people who naturally cluster around the
idea that reductionism (or as Monod preferred, "analysis") is all there is
to science. Their political counterparts were then called "action
intellectuals" who, in practising their self-styled pragmatism and
realpolitik, only succeeded in committing blunder upon blunder.

Let me tell one story about Monod, who liked to say of himself "Je cherche a
comprendre". I met him only once, in 1964, when I attended the International
Biophysics Congress in Paris. Monod gave one of the big plenary lectures,
and it was about operons. The operon was a functional genetic unit, proposed
by Monod and his co-worker Francois Jacob in 1959. These authors had
proposed that networds of such operons could account for differential gene
expression (i.e. for differentiation) in higher organisms, and had
illustrated their thesis with a few simple networks which manifested these
behaviors. I was interested in these operons from the outset, for two
reasons: one, the were Functional units, not structural ones; you could not
isolate an operon per se and put it in a test tube. Thus, it seemed to me
that the molecular biologists were leading themselves into a realm they
claimed not to exist; a realm which transcended "analysis". Second, because
the operon itself is basically a switch, just like a neuron; an operon
network is thus very like a neural network. But instead of axons or any
other material channels for signals, operon networks relied on invisible
channels governed by specificities. Moreover, I had shown that the simple
"operon networks" proposed by Jacob and Monod to explain differentiation
were identical with the two-factor nets Rashevsky had published decades
earlier, to illustrate how "brainlike" behaviors such as discrimination,
learning and memory could arise in networks of neuronlike elements. At any
rate, in his talk, Monod stressed precisely these networks, and lamented
openly that there was as yet no "theory" of them. This encouraged me to
approach him after his talk, to suggest the above to him. He listened with
obvious irritation for a minute or two, then cut me off with the statement
"I am not an embryologist!", turned on his heel and walked away. I was
amazed by this; he really didn't want to know. This is why, in my eyes,
Monod and his ilk are little, and why Bertalanffy was great.

Experiences like that outlined above with Monod, repeated a hundredfold,
convinced me that it is useless to preach to those who will not hear,
whatever one's Gospel, and equally useless to preach to those who already
believe. Besides, my nature is not that of a preacher or advocate. I am, and
remain, a practitioner of von Bertalanffy's paradigm, and preach it only
implicitly, through that practice. And I practice it because my problem
tells me that I must.

There was one exception; I DID proselytize once. It was around 1974, when
George Klir and his dean Walter Lowen, came up to Buffalo from Binghamton to
talk to us at the CTB. At that time, CTB itself was undergoing its terminal
demolition, leaving many first-level people without faculty lines. George,
by contrast, then had faculty lines without people. So the obvious
arrangements were made, despite malevolent attempts by the highest levels of
the Buffalo administration to prevent it. Since then, George Klir and I have
had many fruitful interactions. In 1981, I believe it was, he persuaded me
to assume the presidency of the SGSR for one year, assuring me it was only a
ceremonial gesture. However, it turned out there was one small string
attached-- namely to organize the Annual Meeting. My proselytizing on that
occasion was aimed at the system theorists; my message, that they be aware
of cognate developments in the sciences. I invited only congenial scientists
to speak, and I think it went well. But that has been the extent of my overt
attempts at advocacy.

My recent book, "Life, Itself", published by Columbia University Press and
released in August 1991, could have been subtitled, "Why I am not a
Mechanist." I knew that Francis Crick had published a book with my title
about a decade earlier, taking exactly a mechanist stance, but I saw no need
to cede the title, nor indeed anything else, to Crick. In fact, I had
decided to someday write a book with this title when I was still in my
teens, after reading a strange little story by Poe called "The Oval
Portrait."

The theme of my  book,  "LIfe, Itself",  is that Mechanism and Vitalism pose
a false dichotomy. Roughly, I argue that the external, public, material
world is full of closed causal loops, just as the internal, mathematical
world is full of closed inferential ones (impredicativities). The "world" of
the mechanism, or machine (or, as I call it, the simple systems), and which
I believe is an artificial human limitation on reality,  does not allow such
loops. Accordingly, as a class, these simple systems are extremely poor, or
limited, in entailment and hence extremely nongeneric. I pose this in a
number of different languages, each bearing on a different part of System
Theory. In particular, I pose it in a causal language, and show that a
closed loop of entailment permits a perfectly rigorous notion of final
cause.

I call a system which is not simple "complex". Complex systems cannot be
exhausted by any finite number of simple (mechanical) models; they cannot be
described as software to a "machine". Life itself is tied up irretrievably
with this notion of complexity, which differs from conventional uses of this
word, but I could think of no other.

Complex systems constitute, to me, a perfectly objective and rigorous
universe, in which there are "enough" entailments for life, anticipation,
and many other things to exist. In the simple, mechanistic one, by contrast,
they cannot exist; their basis has been eliminated at the outset. Clearly I
cannot distill three hundred pages to a few paragraphs; indeed the three
hundred pages are highly distilled already. In a sense, the book is as much
about System Theory as it is about Biology; the two are so closely entwined
that I cannot, and would not, separate them. It is no accident that the
initiative for System Theory itself came mostly from Biology; of its
founders, only Kenneth Boulding came from another realm, and he told me he
was widely accused of "selling out" to biologists. I know that Ludwig von
Bertalanffy would be pleased by the effort; I hope he would be pleased the
the result of that effort."

************************************THE
END*********************************************************************

This is the conclusion of my father's paper. He gave it to me to read after
he finished it, saying, "Here, Jude. Give me your honest opinion, kid. I
can't be objective. I don't really feel comfortable working on this kind of
thing. It seems almost a conceit writing anything autobiographical." I told
him I didn't think so and, after I had read it,  said that it may someday
help someone a great deal because everyone has to start somewhere;  finding
dead-ends or having to turn around and change direction aren't failures. But
a lot of people just coming up and feeling their way like he did over those
early years might mistakenly feel that they aren't capable because of
similar obstacles. The fact that my father details some of his own dead ends
and detours in this paper makes it clear, for posterity, that it's something
that happens-- even to someone as focused and determined as he was all his
life. Therefore, my strong opinion is that his professional life's
experiences detailed in this paper give anyone reading this the reassurance
that  life is just like that for all of us.

This paper also shows that his strategy, which I think is highly original
and extremely effective,  was to not only scrutinize each dictum that was
offered as a given in any of these disciplines, but look all the way back at
what the original creator of the dictum was trying to accomplish and then
follow the logic (or "illogic") of the origins of it. He did this with many
of the accepted traditions in science. What he discovered by doing so is
that a large number of the seemingly ironclad tenets, or rules, of science
were merely habits based on flawed premises. That was, in my mind, one of
his greatest talents and one of the more unusual aspects to his perspective
on the universe.

What his paper doesn't talk about or illustrate is that his life was so much
more well-rounded than consisting of just his work. Even though he would say
that his "Imperative" was the core of who he was, the truth is that his
curiosity and his unusual ability to see the big picture AND the details all
at the same time were aspects of him that were applicable to every other
aspect of life. His astonishing "sticky-fly-paper-memory" (as he called it)
was so much fun to explore; he could retrieve facts from anywhere inside
there, in an instant. If you asked what was the gestation of an elephant, he
knew. If you asked when was JS Bach born, he knew. If you asked any obscure
homework question, he knew, and what's even more amazing is that he not only
knew the detail you were looking for but all the background and the context,
including dates, places, quotes, connections, and consequences... and he
could just pull it out of his memory at will. I have to rummage, at the best
of times, saying, "I KNOW the word I need is in here SOMEWHERE!"....But he
could recite pages of a Shakespeare play he had to read for high school and
hadn't looked at since.  He was a killer at Trivial Pursuit (we had to
change the rules for him because otherwise the game would be too short). He
was a blast to travel with, because he knew at least a half-dozen languages
and was so seasoned a traveller that he was able to handle any and all
bizarre travel-related situations, without getting the least bit flustered.
He loved to "play". Whether playing involved literal things like piano or
organ (Bach fugues were his favorite) or figurative things like hiking up a
mountain, going to a fine restaurant, watching an old Pink Panther movie on
tv, or a million other things, he was enthusiastic and great company. As far
as his ability to be a friend goes, well, speaking from personal experience,
I think that was perhaps his greatest talent of all.

Judith Rosen


Website address: http://www.rosen-enterprises.com/