Thank you for your refreshing post. It conveyed the
first 'good morning' message to me. I fully understand your father
and you who continues living breathing the same air as RR did.
I guess, in our group, we are all on the way to changing
the world. Our mission has no selling value nowadays. This mission has
to be achieved with grace to hit the incorruptable soul by quickly
bypassing through the corruptable body and mind realms. Robert Rosen is a good
example to take, not necessarily a prophet willing to convert us to his ideas
alone. I take his thinking/theories as a motivating power and
confidence inspiring to further our thinking with courage.
These are my morning externations. They are very
ontological as the _expression_ of my internal sensations, though they have
come out as instigated by your words as its epistemology. This is another
meeting point I had in mind in my earlier post: a healthy and friendly
meeting of concepts of epistomology and ontology.
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Sunday, April 04, 2004 7:39
PM
Subject: Art and Science
Ayten brings up an interesting subject:
Ayten Aydin wrote: This topic is important for me for my other study on
an enquiry into seeing
where(at what level) the art and science meet, in a
way where the
subjectivity and objectivity unite, where the time and space
become one
entity. I wonder how much all these are relevant to RR's all
encompassing philosophy?
The beginning of the essay that I referenced for the discussion
about Rosennean approaches in modeling, titled "On the Philosophy of Craft"
(p. 297 of Essays...) begins:
Robert Rosen wrote: "Medicine has been called an art and it has
been called a science. Indeed, it must possess elements of both. But
primarily, it is a craft in its practice, and a technology in its aspirations.
It is applied science-- primarily applied biology. In some of its aspects, it
is even rather more applied technology than applied science."
"Science has always had philosophy associated with it; indeed,
for a long time, science was called natural philosophy. The ancient Greeks
were keenly interested in the way the world was put together and how it
worked, and they had laid out the major alternatives in this connection (e.g.
atomicity or infinite divisibility; evolution or special creation) two
millennia ago. But perhaps because the Greeks affected to despise craft and
considered technology to be the province of slaves, there has never been much
of a philosophy of either craft or technology in general."
"Indeed, one would be surprised to find a work entitled "The
Philosophy of the Airplane" or "The Philosophy of the Automobile," and even
more so to find one entitled "The Philosophy of Automobile Repair and
Maintenance." The former involve technologies; the latter is a craft. Although
a medical doctors would surely resent being analogized to a repairman, there
are powerful grounds for doing just this. Indeed, contemporary biological
science is currently locked in the grip of a Cartesian tradition that asserts
that organism IS machine-- nowadays perhaps qualified to read "molecular
machine," but machine nevertheless."
It might interest people to know that my father was of a
temperament usually associated with artists and musicians. He was intensely
creative. I have found that most people tend to visualize scientists in
general as techno-nerds or the natural version of a mechanical engineer. But
that was not the way Robert Rosen could be described at all. He was keenly
awake to all of his senses and had enormous love for music, art, a great
single malt scotch or Armagnac, and incredible food. He appreciated beauty,
whether it was the beauty of a sunset, a Bach fugue, a Michelangelo sculpture,
a well-turned phrase, or a mountain vista. He could also see beauty in the
symmetry of some complicated mathematical proof and he saw it in biology as
well. The symmetry of how organisms are adapted to fit into their ecosystems,
the way the organization of these systems makes such seeming miracles
possible; all of that was intensely beautiful to him.
If he hadn't had the talent in mathematics, physics, and the
more technical aspects of science, he would probably have been a scientific
philosopher or a painter, or perhaps a fiction writer. But he did have that
technical ability as well. He had a friend that he had known ever since
Stuyvesant High School, in NYC. On one of my father's trips, we stayed at
the home of this friend passing through NY. Sitting in the kitchen over
breakfast, one morning, this friend told me that my father had a
combination of qualities that are almost never present in the same mind. This
friend was a very smart man and he knew it; he had his own lucrative
technological business and made a lot of money. But
he lamented that, while he could measure anything, could solve
any problem that was put in front of him, could figure out how to make the
machinery work better... he simply did not have the ability to come
up with his own problems to solve. He didn't have the creative aspect and
without it, he said, he could never change the world. "Your father," he told
me (as if I didn't know this already) "is going to change the world." He had a
flair for the dramatic, this guy, and was disconcerted when I just grinned and
shrugged, saying, "Yeah, but he can't balance his checkbook."
Judith