Re: Rosen as philosopher, his delayed impact

[Judith Rosen <***>]

Dan managed to sum up below very well what I believe to be the truth regarding my father's work. One of the reasons I signed up to an internet discussion group that focused on Robert Rosen's ideas was to assess where the development of these ideas stands currently. Frankly, I didn't think I would be very much help to people-- I planned mostly to lurk! I guess I had an  unfairly negative view of my own level of understanding regarding complexity. I thought I just had the bare bones... the basics. My education in Rosennean Complexity turns out to be rather more comprehensive than I realized. I've been trying to analyze why that is... Why did I absorb so much of the theory? And why did I think I hadn't?

 

Personally speaking, I think mainly it's the common sense bedrock in these theories that has made it so comprehensible to me. Much of Quantum theory, for example, defies common sense and therefore my brain balks at contemplating it any further. The universality of the basic ideas in Rosennean Complexity and the applicability to every and any other area of inquiry just make sense to me. The ideas are all logically connected and support each other rather than contradicting one another. That makes the whole group of ideas easy to absorb--especially when the one who developed the ideas was always explaining them in general terms rather than the dense scientific/mathematical language he used to communicate them in writing.

 

That's the issue, though: That's where I had the wrong idea about what was ahead of me. I thought "the devil" was going to be in the science and math particulars (as in that's where the difficulty would be in promulgating these ideas). If it was, then I would probably not be much help other than to provide access to the original work. However, it turns out that the "devil" is still mostly the general attitudes, the basic understanding of my father's ideas, and the general landscape of scientific thought. There is still a lack of exposure to these ideas and a lack of comprehension about what the ideas mean.  Lucky for me that this is the area where I'm strong, because that is what needs to be addressed before any widespread activity of the sort Dan mentioned (turning potential into application, etc.) can take place.

 

In the meantime, I hope all of you guys are going to be the ones to benefit from my father's ideas and written work right now. You already know about it. So? Use it! Solve problems with it. That's the best test of any scientific theory there is. Results will hopefully win more converts than all the talking in the world could do.

 

Judith

 

----- Original Message -----

From: "Dan Fiscus" <***>

To: <***>

Sent: Monday, February 02, 2004 8:30 AM

Subject: Re: [ROSEN] Rosen as philosopher, his delayed impact

> Part of my interest in Rosen's work is that it seems 
to be a resource
> or contribution or legacy or corpus that has not yet 
been fully
> appreciated, applied, understood, tested or extended. Thus 
there is
> this huge "potential gap" between the quality or power of the 
work
> he left us and the fruition or actualization of that power as in 
real
> world structures, functions, ideas, systems able to do work. So 
maybe
> his impact on his field and others has not yet "happened"? It is 
like an
> untapped reserve of oil or gold or some valuable resource that 
is
> waiting "underground" for conditions to be right for its harnessing 
to
> do good works for the betterment of humans and life itself 
(maybe
> oil and gold are not good examples - I am thinking "resource" 
able to
> do work or create value). Part of this gap between the potential 
and
> the actual Rosen impact comes from his own style and mode of work 
-
> how he wrote, who he wrote for, etc. Maybe some comes from the
> 
world not being willing or able to deal with the full implications of 
his
> work. His life was also cut short. For whatever combinations 
of
> reasons, this work goes largely under-utilized and until we take it 
out
> to the world and extend what he did, we can't know about the 
full
> range of what the actual impact can be.

> 
> 
Dan
>