Re: Godel's Incompleteness Theorems

[James N Rose <***>]

Judith,

    Oh, no, I -do- appreciate that he would have said that
atoms -do- qualify as complex (-pre-animate), I know that very
well. I had posed the question to Howard, to see where he might
now stand on such a notion.  He has an esteemed reputation, is
excellently familiar with RR personally and his work (and of
others).  I was just wondering where he himself was at on that
possible change in cladistic paradigm - regrouping systems by
performance rather than structure.

    Look, I studued with Larry Slobodkin at SUNY Stonybrook
back in 1972/3.  Was in touch with him again a few months ago.
He wrote a beautiful little tome titled "Simplicity & Complexity
in the Games of the Intellect" (autographed and sent me a copy).
Larry was also a past Pres of the Genl Systems group.  He has
incredible scope and insight about these things also, but he too
came 'just so far' and no further.  Which just floors me!  In
the latter part of the 1990's I had several conversations with
Howard Odum [of "emergy" fame] at ISSS conferences.  He got
extraordinarily close also, but he took standard entropy
dynamics to the extreme; elucidating some phenomenally important
relations and preformance structures in ecological systems, but
he too had an achilles heel (at least in my opinion), and that
was his inability to re-frame entropy into a more general schema.

   Now, what is interesting, is that Larry was classmate (roommate
I believe) and friend to Howard O. - who he referred to as "Tom" Odum -
and Larry told me that he and Tom butted heads on basic General
Systems notions.  Which only left me silently befuddled that such
an important holistic field of 'general systems' is legionly filled
with people who can't/won't 'generalize' together.  In Toronto,
summer of 2000 I was at another ISSS conf - spending some time with
Stafford Beer and Anatole Rapoport there - when another conversant
(can't remember who at this moment, might have been Ken Bausch)
told me a story of I. Prigogine being on a podium with Stu Kauffman
and they were openly discordial/hostile to one another in public
because of their professional dispute over the nature of how
complexity (non-Rosen form) arises.

It seems to me now that the only person I should have
talked/worked with is now beyond my reach - except through
you and this group.  I can't tell you how annoyed I am at
myself about this right now.  A frustration I'll carry for
a long time.

Tag line re Elsasser. I spent an afternoon talking with him
at his home on the U. Maryland campus while I came to visit
some relatives in the Potomac area.  His "Atom & Organism"
excited me and I needed to discuss details with him.  The
hole in his theories, however, revolved around how he treated
'information' in systems.  He reached the standard plateau
and pushed it to it's limits, but couldn't get past the
information-as-monolith approach.

So, dear Judith, if the General Systems elite won't give
anything but grudging deference to colleagues (I suppose
the tone of my above remarks places me among them, but I
can only say in defense that I'd be the first to stand and
defend each of their works/accomplishments where they -did-
advance human knowledge .. albeit that your father's ideas
rank that far ahead that I've been reluctant to scrutinize
them more deeply, his conclusions so accurately hitting the
mark on most every score, concurring with mine arrived at
though an alternative route of inquiry/exploration.

I didn't want to be told, "oh, that's nothing new, RR got
there decades before you." (!) )

..then (in this long multi-paragraphed -single sentence-) it
should be no surprise that conventional thinkers hold back
.. until the smoke has cleared, to see whose ideas and
insights are still standing after all the concepts-jousting.

Thank you for having this forum, Judith, to keep his
achievements thriving and prominent.

Jamie



Judith Rosen wrote:
>
> James,
>
> I think you have "gotten" a great deal of what my father was saying, but
> there are certain aspects of it that you may have missed. For example, he
> said that atoms are complex, and life is entailed by complexity. So right
> there, your question about whether there are aspects of life in "physics"
> (which he was pretty careful to qualify as "contemporary physics") would be
> answered "Yes." And "Pre-animate" would be exactly the right word to
> describe "complex, but not alive". Simple systems would be more likely to
> deserve the term "inanimate" because what he said about simple systems is
> that there is no way to get to complexity from simplicity. Simplicity is not
> the natural state of our universe. As to how atoms themselves "formed" or
> "happened", and whether my father wrote anything on that subject, I haven't
> found any evidence that he officially went there. I'm still looking though.
>
> Judith
> PS: My father did discuss Elasser quite a bit in his books, and I will post
> some of that, I just haven't had a chance. But I didn't want you to think I
> had ignored the question!
>
>
> =======================
> > [Jamie wrote]...
> > What I don't carry well at the moment is the realization that RR
> > never looked to find an access route past Godel and thusly to
> > solidify and identify an accessibility between the world of
> > limited models and the extended world of the natural.
> >
> > I think this is why conventional science is having such a difficult
> > time rising to the panoramic thinking RR was at and expressing. He
> > was 'there' but couldn't show others how to get there .. in terms
> > they'd understand.  He had had an insight and revelation, could
> > assert so many aspects of the differences between the limited and
> > the unbounded, could talk about the differential qualiae at length
> > and in all sorts of ways, but he had quantum leaped .. like Ramanujan
> > .. and couldn't identify an alternative - mundane - path for conventional
> > thinkers to take to join him.
> >
> > Waiting for 'companions in epiphany' had to have been a very lonely wait.
> >
> > What's gratifying for me though is to know that he had at least
> > identified the incompleteness theorems as hobbled regional
> > mathematics.  But, he never mounted an attack, in equations or
> > discourse. Strange.
> >
> > Since 1995, I've ... {snipped}