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Regarding Howard's objections to various aspects of my father's
modes of expressing himself, his opinions so expressed, and his refusal to
change his evaluation results, etc as well as the recent discussions here on
this list:
There are several things in Howard's post that I agree with; in
other words I see those as legitimate bones of contention and some are
issues that I actually discussed with my father. His mode of expressing his
ideas was a biggie. There are lots of sub-issues within that set of issues, but
I won't detail them here because there's not much point. He's gone and the books
are written the way they are. Some of the language choices (like
"impoverished") ARE incendiary and Howard's instincts are right if he
believes those WERE deliberate. My father was pissed off, and those
words were extremely accurate but also a form of returning fire. He really
didn't give a damn if his ideas were ignored by other scientists or not, because
he wasn't writing the books for their approval. He was writing them because
Rashevsky made him realize he had a duty "to report". He felt his duty extended
only that far, as a scientist, and no farther. He was human and he was often
under attack for his ideas, by physicists who said that his area of interest was
of no consequence because physics was the 'big' science, the 'science of
everything' and biology was its own little world and therefore of no serious
interest. Is it any wonder that, as my father realized the
implications of what biology was saying (complexity), he fired off a couple
incendiary words? They were entirely accurate, they were just not politic or
diplomatic. Neither was he.
There are several things in Howard's post that I feel he is
misinterpreting-- both about my father's point of view and about how I have
characterized that point of view. I'll get into those details in a
moment.
But the third set of reactions I have to the issues raised in his
post is this: I believe there is a fundamental wrong expectation in the
perspective Howard is using. I want to address that first because it resolves a
goodly number of the issues he raised.
My participation here is not to say whether my father was always
right. My participation is motivated by my desire for people to get what he was
saying RIGHT. If people in science or elsewhere are going to get mad over what
he says, they better be understanding him correctly and completely. It offends
my sense of justice for him to be lambasted by people who don't understand what
he was truly saying. "Violins on Television!" "Endangered Feces!" (Anyone
remember the original Saturday Night Live?) So when I clarify an idea, the idea
I'm clarifying is WHAT HE SAID, or thought, or wrote, so that people's
understanding is at least consistent with his actual views. You would be amazed
at how often people misinterpret him.
This goes back to my perennial complaint with him about how he
phrased things and how much math he used to illustrate ideas, etc. Because he
chose to do things that way, I feel many people who want to learn from him need
a translator. That's me. If there's any of the aspect of trying to get his ideas
more widely known in my own efforts or activities, it's simply my own
personal sense that his work could help our species in myriad ways. But I
don't feel any need whatsoever to be more diplomatic than basic politeness or
consideration for other people's feelings normally make me... or to try
and persuade people to LIKE my father. What does that have to do with
science? How would that make a wrong idea less wrong or a correct idea more
correct? Either the scientific ideas are sound or they are not. Either
they help or they do not. I couldn't fix it with diplomacy if he got his
premises wrong and he wouldn't want me to try, either. So quite a bit
of Howard's criticism on that subject is unwarranted, in my opinion. I
particularly object to the epithet "disciple". That's a religious term, which
offends me by the very realm from whence it comes. He was no prophet and had no
messianic delusions whatsoever. He was a thinker and was using his mind for his
own purposes. His philosophy was: He did his duty and reported. If others want
to use the work to achieve something, they have to do that for themselves.
Now, as to the subject of misinterpretation: Howard, I am not sure
but I think you may be misunderstanding my father's basic quarrel with the point
of view von Neumann had (and I want to point out that you are the one who
brought the whole subject up!). I thought I had explained the clear distinction
he saw in comparing von Neumann's view with his own, but apparently I didn't do
it well enough, so I will try again.
Here's my caveat, up front: I don't know what von Neumann's
theories are-- I have never studied them. I'm not addressing whether my father
had them right-- or whether von Neumann was right or wrong. My sole purpose here
is to illuminate the inner workings of my father's mind. Everything I know about
von Neumann's theories comes directly from my father. So here
goes:
One of the biggest wrong turns made in the history of science was
the mechanistic one, in my father's opinion. Newton was a
big influence in the adoption of those perspectives. The notion that
everything in the universe could be reduced to a small set of syntactic rules or
equations was a lovely notion for people at the time, and it seemed to explain
quite a lot. Even after some of the main tenets of Newtonian mechanics were
disproved by Einstein, the approach remained. The approach was based on
assumptions that were proven to be false in many respects, so why did science
hold on to the approach even after the premises were changed? Lots of reasons.
One set of them is based on the human propensity for habit and
tradition. But these unnecessary limits to what "science" could address and how
"science" could approach the problems in biology were precisely what has
been holding science back in our attempts to understand the universe
and ourselves.
When my father realized that it was the presence of a
few simple false assumptions at the root of various modes of scientific
approach or theory that were to blame for both the artificial limits in science
and for the "inexplicability" of life in an organismal sense, he was blown
away by it. He worked hard to re-imagine a new framework that didn't have those
old prejudices built in. So, when he got to the point of writing books about
what he was discovering and some reader said, "Oh, complexity,
you mean-- like von Neumann?"... he realized what he was up against. Like it or
not, he felt it was very important to disconnect his work from a set
of ideas he had evaluated and decided were infected with the same old
approaches. Von Neumann's way, he was sure, leads back to
mechanics: The ideas on which von Neumann's complexity is based,
as obscured as they may be from the top down, are
mechanistic.
In researching the various written comments my father made about
von Neumann's theories, it is obvious that Dad not only studied those ideas
thoroughly, but also thought at length about what they mean. In other words, he
took pains to understand what von Neumann was saying, and follow the lines of
entailment logically backwards and forwards from those assertions to see what it
came from and led to, scientifically. The books my father used to do his own
research are mentioned in the text notes or references, or the index, most of
the time, and often quotes from von Neumann's books are used. As
we have all seen, quotes can seem to say something different than what was
intended, so there's room for error here. However, the discussions of von
Neumann's ideas make it clear that this was a genuine disagreement-- on the
basis of fundamentals-- on my father's part. This was not a knee-jerk,
uninformed rejection of someone's ideas on frivolous grounds.
Note: All the following concepts are to be seen in the light of the
beliefs Robert Rosen developed towards them. Therefore, they are not categorical
statements, they are all to be taken as being preceded by this phrase-- "In
Robert Rosen's view:"
1.) von Neumann's theories about complexity were damned
by two main things: the equivalence of fabrication with computation and the
threshold of transformation of one to the other and back again, between simple
systems and complex systems, via algorithmic or other processes of
accretion.
2.) Both of those assertions are only possible from a
mechanistic view point and will not change the foundational mistakes that my
father discovered in his own scientific investigations. As such, the
complexity that von Neumann is talking about bears no resemblance to the
definitions that Rosennean Complexity deals with.
3.) The whole point in pursuing science at all is to get answers to
questions. He attempted to use von Neumann's ideas to get answers and ended up
right back in the same old playground: contemporary physics and the mechanistic,
syntax-driven, reductionistic universe.
In conclusion, while I cannot evaluate von Neumann's work
scientifically myself, it is clear to me that my father did, and did so
carefully. He did not agree with Howard that "von Neumann explains, broadly but
correctly, why real cells are organized the way they are, and why unique,
emergent, novel complexity evolves in living systems and does not occur in
non-living systems." I think it is the word "correctly" that my father would
disagree with in the above sentence of Howard's. Regardless, I would never, and
will never, try to hide my father's conclusions from people in an effort to
be politically correct. That would be unforgiveable. This comes down to a
question, for ME, of integrity to my father's work. I will not misrepresent what
he said, either for good or for ill. That's just the way it is. I have allowed
Howard to express his opinions, unopposed and unedited, and published them in
two books made from unpublished manuscripts of my father's that I created last
year, because I think it's important for opposing points of view to be
expressed and discussed. But I won't expurgate my father's opinions about the
non-validity of calling von Neumann's theories "complexity" (in his sense) from
the written record. How could that truly advance the process of scientific
development?
With Respect,
Judith
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