Rosennean Models, Physics, Physicists, etc...

[Judith Rosen <***>]

I've been sort of incommunicado the past couple days because the sasser worm got into my 
other computer and it's offline at the moment. Until I get that situation straightened 
away, I'll have to use my laptop (which is a Mac)..

Anyway, I've finally been able to read some of this discussion that's been taking place 
on the list and there are a few points that I'd like to add.

One is a very basic point in Rosennean Complexity Theory that seems to be confusing 
people. In talking about it, it's kind of important to bear in mind that Physics and 
physicists have changed quite a bit since my father was writing the bulk of his ideas 
down. The changes seemed to begin really happening in the very late 1980's but the bulk 
happened in the 1990's, and these changes surprised my father no end! The first "fan 
letter" he got in the mail was (from my perspective) a hilarious event. Dad treated it 
like it was some new species of organism that wandered into his house-- something never 
before seen on Earth-- and potentially dangerous... poisonous or toxic. He viewed it as a 
strange anomaly. But that kind of thing began to happen more and more frequently over the 
last several trips we made before his health really crashed and traveling became such a 
complicated and expensive matter that no organizations wanted to deal with it-- not even 
the Anticipatory Systems folks, in their first inaugural symposium where they wanted him 
to be the keynote speaker. People at the last trip we actually made, which was to Amiens, 
France, were acting like he was a rock star, which made him extremely uncomfortable and 
he often quoted Oscar Wilde (When too many people start agreeing with me, I begin to feel 
I must be wrong!). One of the people at that set of meetings was Seth Roberts, who was 
still a student at that point, earning his MD/PhD. Folks from the old list may remember 
Seth (a very nice guy).

Anyway, the point is that the physics that was being referred to in my father's books is 
not quite what we are looking at today, in 2004. When he was first discussing these 
ideas, there was a violent recoil as reaction to the most basic premises of my father's 
complexity theory. The notion that biological systems are part of a continuum that begins 
with the basic structural building blocks of matter, atoms, was one that Physics refused 
to accept. The notion that there were aspects to the nature of atoms that physics had 
gotten wrong was an outrage to most of the physicists that my father knew. He found that 
to be astonishing: that physicists would react as though they, themselves, had some 
personal connection to the history of the science they were manipulating such that it 
reflected negatively on them if the science was questioned.....

Secondly, the main thing that mid-20th Century physics (which my father refers to as 
"contemporary physics") was "too impoverished" to deal with just so happened to also be 
THE basic tenet of all systems in this universe, according to Rosennean Complexity 
Theory: That it is the organization of systems that determines the bulk of the properties 
of those systems, rather than just the material "stuff" of which those systems are made. 
That was the fundamental, and very human, mistake that science originally made. 
Throughout human evolution, human beings just assumed that what our senses detect is what 
matters. If we can pick it up, manipulate it, eat it, use it, whatever.... then it exists 
and that's what we studied-- from the moment we had the ability to use our intelligence 
to generate and then answer questions about the world around us. That basic assumption 
got built into science, as science was becoming more formal and disciplined, and the 
approach hasn't changed very much since the beginning of human consciousness. The reason 
it persists is because it has worked well enough to get us to this point. But my father 
wanted to take it further and understand why living organisms were the way they were. If 
living organisms are part of the material world, then physics should apply to them, right?

What he found as he went through the process we've already discussed here is that physics 
DOES apply. But it's not the physics of the mid-20th Century. He uncovered the 
fundamental flaw in the history of science and it was precisely this focus on the 
material "stuff" rather than how that stuff is organized.

Certainly, there is a great deal more to it, which is why his body of work is so huge. 
But that main point is the crux of the whole situation. So, the next issue that the 
current list discussion has been puzzling over is "How does one make models from a 
Rosennean point of view?" What my father basically said was, we make models the same 
general WAY, using the same general tools (computers, pencil and paper, popsicle sticks, 
whatever) but we make them from a different THOUGHT PROCESS. The change isn't in what you 
make the model out of or what the model will look like; the change is in the mind of the 
person making the model. That's where the Rosennean aspect has to be implemented. The 
causal effect of creating models from a Rosennean perspective will be found in things 
like: what aspects of the system you choose to focus on in your model; what kind of 
information about the system you choose to plug into your model; what details you decide 
can be ignored so that the model can even be made (because they ARE reductions of the 
original system)... These are the kinds of things that come from a Rosennean approach 
when first studying the system that needs to be modeled.

So, in our latent project of creating a Rosennean medical model, what we need to do is 
the preliminary work of making the choices, using the perspective that Complexity gives 
us, which is the bigger task in making any kind of model. The actual construction of the 
model is going to be relatively easy for people who make models already (and frankly is 
outside my purview). The trouble with current medical models is that they are about the 
extremely complex system that is a human being, in totality, but they approach this 
system from a reductionistic, mechanistic point of view that is intrinsically unchanged 
from the "Quest For Fire" guys' perspective on things (if you can see it, feel it, smell 
it, eat it, etc... then it EXISTS). If we want to minimize the side effects of taking 
action based on models generated by such an incomplete understanding of the human 
organism as a system, we need to begin from a perspective that realizes how important the 
RELATIONAL ASPECT (of all "parts" of the system) IS (to the way those parts behave, 
within the system). In other words, we have to study the organization of the total 
system, from that perspective, before we can model any subsystem or part, and in modeling 
that part, we have to incorporate our knowledge of the relational aspect, the role in the 
larger organization, of our part that we want to model... such that the model can give us 
fuller information as far as accurately predicting, or generating real understanding, of 
the behavior of our total system goes. Currently, medical models only give us (at best) 
partially useful information, which is a hit or miss affair based on the aspects of the 
system that are not as relational as others, or which left out details that would be safe 
to ignore even from a Rosennean perspective. At worst, these models are far more wrong 
than right, and the therapies generated by these models are a nightmare. Like thalidomide 
as a treatment for nausea in the first trimester of pregnancy.

Now, this is not to say that medical models generated from a Rosennean perspective are 
going to eliminate all side effects. My father's theory clearly states that no amount of 
models of a complex system is going to be able, as a total collection, to accurately 
formalize a complex system. But it will greatly minimize the side effects of using models 
in science or medicine-- which is necessarily a reductionist exercise. Furthermore, since 
most of the work is in the initial study of the system to be modeled, the Rosennean 
perspective used in the approach while studying the system is bound to increase our 
collective understanding of both that particular kind of system (the human organism, in 
medicine) but also our understanding of complexity. That kind of understanding is 
applicable to other complex systems and the whole of science is enriched by the work in 
each subspecialty. Thus, my father felt that his approach would help build a far more 
integrated set of disciplines that cross pollinate one another rather than the kind of 
disconnected set of disciplines scientific/medical/environmental/etc study currently is.

Judith


Web address: www.rosen-enterprises.com