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Ayten's post was very thought-provoking for me. My first response
is to clarify a misinterpretation, but in thinking on it, her misinterpretation
actually provokes the memory of a larger truth.
The misinterpretation was regarding my statement that my father
couldn't balance his checkbook. The meaning was simply that he was capable of
amazing intellectual feats and could manipulate math, among other things, at a
level that "changes the world", but when it came to mundane details, he was so
hopelessly disorganized that he actually made ME feel organized by comparison.
(Those who know me would be laughing at the thought of the word "organized" ever
being remotely applicable to ME.) My father was, of course, not interested in
spending his time on such mundane things. He just did the bare minimum-- at the
best of times. Thus, he had a tendency to pay all the bills at once,
without doing the subtraction and checking the timing of paychecks, etc, because
he knew he earned enough money to pay them. But they would often go through the
bank before his check was deposited and payments bounced, etc. He was not
practical. So my mother took over the job of balancing the checkbook. At the
office, it was the secretary's job to keep track of details.
As far as wealth goes, my father made a very good
salary as a professor, but that is not the same thing as being wealthy. Wealth,
of course, is one of those slippery terms that can mean different things to
different people and apply to much more than money. As far as the bank account--
compared to his parent's humble beginnings in this country, my father was
financially wealthy. But he was purely middle class in what he could afford in a
house, a car, etc. It was "enough" most of the time. He had very few complaints,
really.
On the other hand, he was at the mercy of the academic system,
because he needed to earn "a living" which was what made his research possible.
That involved the constant politics of dealing with ambitious and egocentric
administrations and the "bottom line" attitudes of university bean-counters
(accountants). In Halifax, one incoming Dean of the BioPhysics department
actually said that PhD programs are not as important as undergraduate programs
because hundreds of undergraduate students could attend a lecture by my father
instead of the one-on-one work he was doing with PhD students. This guy felt
that the university was not getting its money's worth out of Dad's salary. That
was the guy my father did battle with, organizing the faculty senate to
unprecedented acts of censure of the dean, which finally got this moron
turfed out on his ear. Dad arranged the procurement of another department
"house" because the Dean had arranged to sell off the BioPhysics house (the
famous "red house" which had been home to the BioPhysics faculty for decades).
But the battle took time, thought, effort, and was a major source of stress. He
would rather have been working!
Those kinds of things happened with such depressing regularity at
every single university he had ever known that he concluded the academic
system was dead as far as meaningful research was concerned. He liked the idea
of the Max Planck institutes and it was in that spirit that he came up with
the concept of BioTheory. I'm pretty sure I've mentioned BioTheory on the
list. If not, let me know (cuz I'm disorganized! I can't remember if I have or
if I haven't....).
Judith
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Monday, April 05, 2004 4:23
AM
Subject: Re: [ROSEN] Art and
Science
Judith,
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.
Now turning to your message: It is a matter of level and
certain levels , where every human being has the potential to reach if and
as motivated, can not be confined to straight jackets and to living
in the 'Flatland'. Especially those who have reached the fourth dimension can
not live within the boundaries of one professional field anymore be it
biology, as more scientific, or engineering, as more of an applied
science (my field) and technology. They go deeper to areas where all
fields meet at their natural foundations, generally more etheral than
material. For that matter mathematics is a good shelter. Needs provide the
motivating power and without a philosopy or theory or good thinking nothing
reaches to a practical action. Those who do the first thinking move beyond and
do more thinking etc. They become rich and richer human beings as they
move up and expand but THEY CAN NOT BALANCE THEIR CHECKBOOKS, if they do not
sell their ability to create to others. Some, unfortunately, do and their
findings are used by lower level, at times inhuman
applications. Those who administer them, SURELY AND WELL, BALANCE
THEIR CHECKBOOKS.
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.
What do you think?
My best,
Ayten
Ayten
----- 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
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