Re:

["Judith Rosen" <***>]

I believe Roberto is correct in what he believes my father was saying: when
discussing how systems are regarded as discrete (whole) systems even when
they are clearly part of larger systems and made up of smaller (sub)systems.
My father would admit that the human way of dealing with the world
cognitively is, by necessity, "reductionist" in a certain sense. We are not
able to "do science" at all if we don't use our minds to get at what we
perceive as reality all around us. This is simply a given. We are not
capable of using telepathy to probe  the material world and absorb the truth
from it. We have to get at it indirectly via out senses and our ability to
use abstract, cerebral thinking. Anything we see is an abstraction in a
sense, and we may never be able to get at the entire "truth" of the material
world, but to say that there's no point even trying is defeatest. My father
believed that the human mind is capable of understanding why living things
are alive. He believed that science could divine this truth. That's what he
spent his life working on and he felt he had found it.

Reductionism wasn't a dirty word to my father, even though he sometimes spat
it out like it was. He was often sick to death of hitting that brick wall,
as one can understand. People would attack his work as having no value
because it wasn't in the reductionist vein, he had publisher's referees
advise against publication of his work, using that criteria to judge the
"fitness" of his manuscript. So he got really tired of always having that
thrown in his face. But in more peaceful surroundings, he would talk about
how both aspects of science needed each other and that many useful, indeed
irreplaceable, things have come out of using reductionist approaches. He
just felt that there is a time and a place for when it is required and there
are many more times/places where it is not only unhelpful, but completely
useless. His main interest: why living things were alive, was the area where
he concluded that reductionism was useless. If he had been born in the
1700's, before reductionist techniques were fully developed and implemented,
he would probably not have come to the conclusions that he did. Because he
was born in 1934, he had the benefit of examining the cumulative evidence
that was (and was not) uncovered by reductionist methods so he could proceed
from the conclusions he derived from that examination.

But he said often that the only way science and scientists (by which,
incidentally, "science" is created-- science is not something that exists
outside of the human mind) must use the abilities and ways of expression
available to us as human beings (is: limited natural systems with limited
intelligence, and etc, etc, etc....) In a perfect universe, perhaps there
would be better ways than the use of language to convey ideas that are based
on information collected through subjective means (senses).... But science
is the best way to figure out why living things are alive, that's what he
believed. The only other ways were philosophy and/or theology. He was sure
it was feasible to do via science, even accepting our human limitations.

Therefore, there will always be this reductionist aspect when using language
to convey ideas. It is an inescapable aspect of human ability to absorb and
then discuss what we are trying to accomplish. So the idea that any hint of
"reductionism" with regards to my father's work being all wrong.... that's
just not the way to look at it. He would say to keep your viewpoint
non-reductionist in contemplating these areas of science and these ideas,
but don't get all tangled up in whether the language used to discuss them
seems reductionist. Categorizing anything as a discrete system when it is
clearly made up of "stuff" and part of other "stuff" is one reductionist
aspect that cannot be avoided. It's the only way to understand the nature of
the whole, in the end.

Judith
Website address: http://www.rosen-enterprises.com/
----- Original Message -----
From: "Roberto Poli" <***>
To: <***>
Sent: Tuesday, June 24, 2003 3:21 AM
Subject: [ROSEN]


John,
see comments below

>Dear Roberto,

>what you wrote makes a lot of sense - in the sense of conventional i.e.
>reductionist science thinking.

difficult to believe. My levels of reality have been designed precisely
as a rigorous antireductionist viewpoint. The dialectics between "wholes"
and "levels" makes the antereductionist stance even stronger. For details
you may look at my "the basic problem of the theory of levels of reality"
(http://www.kluweronline.com/issn/1122-1151). Please note that I didn't
know Rosen's work when I wrote that paper.


>I think Rosen stepped a bit ahead of that to say it mildly.
>However...what Judith wrote was for the 'detatched' crowd as an entrainer
into accepting (and maybe getting interested in) Rosen's world. R.R. >let
it
go as such. As Judith wrote:

> It was the kind of thing he would leave for other people to do if they
wanted to.

>A conciliant philosopher (although he did not like to be called one), not
a warrior. (IMO). The "levels of complexity" she mentioned is a
hard-to->understand concept, it involves the different kinds of models RR
described, including the "natural systems" with 'really' reductionist
modeling, >but extended into impredicative connotations of unlimited natural
features. My wording is a bit different, I follow the opposite route to
RR: he >extended the biologic vue into general, I start from the general
vue and identify IN IT the sciences we know (as reductionistic - topically
cut >models).  In the end we come very close together (except for his
mathematics what I don't condone in a wholistically unlimited worldview,
but >now this is beside the point).
>

>Let us take a look at some of your concepts:

>part-whole hierarchies: partds are limited models of the whole, a hierarchy
is constructed according to our modelling of cause, history, >subordination
of ideas/parts, etc. - as I believe mentioned by Rosen as "the other"
system.


Looks rather weird. Entities have structure, i.e. they are made of something
arranged in some specific way. Entities may be decomposed and the resulting
parts may still be decomposed at a finer degree of granularity. What results
is a hierarchy of part/whole connections. Where's the odds?

What really matters is to have the capacity of distinguishign different
kinds of wholes, say; aggregates, wholes in the proper sense, and systems.
Descriptively: aggregates are given by parts "close enough" to each other
(according to some criterium of closeness); wholes are given by parts with
"proximity" plus "solidarity", meaning that they "move togheter": if you
push one of the legs of your chair to the left, the whole chair moves to
the
left (take this as the default situation); systems are given by proximity,
plus solidarity plus dynamicity: i.e. systems are dynamical wholes. Each
type of whole has its own set of laws. Needless to say, problems start to
arise at the system layer .

All this may looks rather reductionistic. It would be such if it were the
whole picture. On the other hand, my proposal is to consider the part/whole
analysis as one of the dimensions of analysis, not as the whole picture.



>main realms of reality: my tuppence on reality is the mind's (quite
subjective) interpretation of impacts it receives - bith from inside and
outside. It >is "our" reality, a subjective, virtual representation.



that's your viewpoint. I simply disagree. Cognitions and internal
representations are activities performed by some types of system, namely
systems able to represent themselves and their environment. One may provide
a perfectly objective description of the conditions that those systems have
to respect in order to play their role. I may be wrong, but understand
Rosen's work as a perfectly objective reconstruction of this viewpoint.

Please note that you have completely skipped what I was saying about levels
of reality.



>Don't be misled by long term and generally accepted beliefs, the historical
thought is based on ancient reductionist development based on much >less
information than acquired lately. Epistemology is progressing and we don't
want to stagnate at a less comprehensive level of the cognitive >inventory
of human thinking.


this may be the real point of departure between us: I am developing an
ontological analysis, not an epistemological one. In this sense, it is you
that are following the 20th century dominant viewpoint according to which
epistemology governs analysis. To my mind, the truth is the other way round:
ontology sets the agenda.



>simplest kinds of entities: in the total interconnectedness we form models
according to the topic, our needs, our capabilities etc. and we 'study'
>such "entities" in reductionist science (analytically, to dissect the mpdel
into 'parts' we contemplated as knowable, useful and necessary for the
>appropriate study). An entity is simple, if we cut it short at very
restricted connotations - although the "thing" may have very complicated

>(contrary of simple) connotations we just did  not include into the model.

>

>"life": As far as I heard, RR never identified it, only "living state".



Taken



>A sort of interinfluencing process (complexity) in my terms.

>There are extended discussions on lists whether organizations,     (both
social and biologic), systems (both ideational and social etc.) are 'live',
>extending the "water-carbon" based Darwinian cut-off into a general vue,
even including the entire universe.



>time: a similar quagmire to life. A matter of unrelenting debates.

>I consider atemporal and aspatial thinking as well, with time and space
parameters for the vue we developed within the universe. (This is in my
>personal worldview - multi-universal and beyond).



I can understand "atemporal" (say: math). I can understand "aspatial"
(feelings). Have troubles with "atemporal AND aspatial".



>I think your views are not anti-Roseanite, rather, as ALL OF US, deeply
anchored in the reductionist thinking (the only one we can muster >really).
I did a strenuous exercise to get out of it - partially succeeded only -
and
so did Rosen.



Let's come back after you have read my paper referred to above, if you would
like to do it.



cheers, r

*************************************
Dr Roberto Poli, PhD
Editor-in-chief of Axiomathes, Kluwer:
http://www.kluweronline.com/issn/1122-1151
Papers and other information
http://www.mitteleuropafoundation.it
preferred e-mail: ***