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Judith,
The following paragraph extracted from your post obliged me
to add to your thought process a few ideas, benefitting from the views
of few historians/philosophers of science -in its wider context-,
who I assume well-known to many in this list. I share them.
This is my spontaneous response especially to your
phrase that is underlined. I hope it has some relevance to the
ongoing scrutiny of your father's work.
"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."
Following on the arguments put forward on my previous post on
"Ken Wilber's book "Eye to Eye" I would like to add a few more statements
from the same hoping they help trigger new thoughts. He states that '
physicists with their one-dimentional interpretation tells us that all sorts
of atomic events are interwoven one with the other - which itself a significant
discovery. But they tell us nothing whatsoever about the interactionof
non-living matter with the biological level, and of that level's interaction
with the higher fields, i.e biological, mental, subtle, causal upto infinity and
the reverse interaction and interpretation all the way back down through lower
levels. ...Each level heterarchically interpenetrate within the same level and
hierarchically interpenetrate with other levels. Each level are no more than two
mutually exclusive approaches to one reality than botany and mathematics. The
latter transcens but includes the former, not excludes it. They are not
complementary, in the sense used in physics, as defined by Bohr's complementary
principle.
The study of physics is at the first floor. ..The very
nature of empiric-scientific discoveries that they ceaselessly change and alter
that last decade's scientific proof is this decade's fallacy .....The implicate
realm does not transcend matter, it subscends matter and expresses a coherence,
unity and wholeness of the entire physical plane (the first level). I does
indeed go beyond explicit matter, but in a subscending or underlying manner, not
a transcending one. As a matter of fact, the concept explicitely excludes higher
realms such as mind and consciousness. .... By virtue of hierarchy, any elementy
from a senior level is higher in ontological status than any element of a junior
dimension. Each world has a more limited and controlled level of consciousness
than the world above it. The lower world is unaware of the existence of that of
higher, although it is interpenetrated by them. The higher world becomes
manifest to them, when their existing consciousness level is raised to a higher
level. ... All of the mineral world is in a plant, but not vice-versa and so on.
More highly evolved is a new entity.
Wilhem Dilthey pointed out that alongside the natural
sciences there has grown up the Geistes-Wissenschaften, the mental and spiritual
sciences. While the natural sciences deal with the pure objective, natural
world, the geist-sciences with the culrural, historical, and spiritual world,
notheless geist itself - the human mind and spirit- can and does form and
inform, mold and alter, the objective world of material sensibilia formde and
informed by intelligibilia which in turn by transcendelia. Geist everywhere
objectifies itself, and part of geist-service is not only dealing with the
higher realms in and as themselves but also in grasping, and understanding the
meaning and intent of their particular objectifications in their junior levels,
the intermediate realms of culture and history, and the lower realms of nature
and physical material....
Commenting on the
space/level of the QM in the physical / material world Bohm himself was opposed
to introducing mind or consciousness into the formalism of quantum mechanics. as
some physicists would like to. According to his conclusion: " there seem to
be certain quantum phenomena that present us with a new order or a new structure
process, that does not fit into Newtonian scheme. It seems his theory of
explicite matter rests upon a sea of implicate physical energy of extraordinary
magnitude and potential, and that the equations of quantum mechanics are
describing that implicate order, a reality immensely beyond matter, but
still of the realm of physics or nonliving mass/energy in general. Thus the
implicate order is the unitary structure of the first level-physics which
subscends the explicate surface structure of elementary particals and
waves.
Evelyne Fox Keller, in her book "Making Sense of Life - Chapter 3-
Untimely birth of Matematical Biology, discusses the difficulties
encountered in applying matematical model to biology in line with Turing
theories and says Turing may have been too soon and in Chapter 8 discuss a
number of indicators poining to at least the beginning of a
rapprochement between the cultures of mathematical and biological science
and suggesting that the day of mathematical biology may finally have
arrived.
Based on the above, I am wondering
whether some of the difficulties in grasping Rosennean ideas have
been and may still be arising from a perception and/or a
category error emerging from the application of lower level
knowledge/understanding/consciousness to a higher plane, i.e
physical/matterialistic/nonliving system principles to those of
living systems - while mathematics could help any level with its wide
spectrum covering all levels, and the living system experiences may enhance and
upgrade the knowledge and perception concerning nonliving world/physical
plane, not vice-versa ??
Ayten
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Thursday, March 25, 2004 8:31
PM
Subject: von Neumann, et al, complexity
with a small "c"
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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