At the home page of her site, she is noted as "one of the most powerful
and popular critics of genetic engineering".
On this page: http://www.i-sis.org.uk/conventiononknowledge.php
there is some interesting discussion, some of which, I would imagine,
could be seen to be controversial in this forum. Just looking at the
"Proposed Elements of a 'Convention of Knowledge'", I see a list of
maxims, some of which seem incomprehensible if presented in a
relational framework which tries to cover all bases. How, I wonder, can
you claim to be a holistic thinker, then toss out such incomprehensible
maxims? Where's the debate which led to these maxims? Consider this
not-too-silly rewrite of maxims 1 and 3:
1- Knowledge must take the head-in-the-sand approach and ignore that
which might be harmfull.
3- Knowledge must be all-inclusive, except for that which violates 1.
It seems to me that if a biological entity is doing the right thing, it
is building its defenses. To do that, it may have to experiment with
things which are dangerous, even harmful. It also seems to me that a
Rosennean model(s) would necessarily cover or explore all possible
relationships, internal and external. The largest picture I get at
i-sis.org.uk is this: "Stop fighting, dammit." Like, that's gonna
happen real soon now. An eyes-open, look-in-all-possible-directions
approach to science cannot make the assumption that humanity will shed
its genetically-endowed behaviors anytime soon.
My takehome thought is that there may not be much "wiggle room" in
which to explain a different world view to i-isis.org.uk, though it
seems worth the effort.
She certainly is a prolific writer. At the same time, it would seem
that her heart is in the right place.
Jack
Judith Rosen wrote:
I've been in touch with Dr. Mae-Wan Ho, whose
site "i-sis.org" is, and asked her if she had ever seen any of Robert
Rosen's stuff. She said she had heard of him but hadn't read any of his
work and told me it sounded like something she would like to take a
look at. However, I doubt she will like what she sees if she does,
given what she has subsequently written about quantum theory and living
organisms. I will include a snippet from "Life, Itself", beginning on
page 103.
Robert Rosen wrote:
"As I have indicated, several basic presuppositions
of Newtonian mechanics break down when extrapolated from experience
with bulk matter to the realm of the small. That is, when we come to
actually think about atoms, the Newtonian encodings fail completely.
This has had several revolutionary consequences in physics. One of them
is the development of a new kind of mechanics, quantum mechanics,
which I have already [discussed]. Concomitant with this has been a
proverbial agonizing reappraisal of causality itself, which is worth
mentioning here. As we shall see, as far as causal entailment is
concerned, the quantum-theoretic revolutions were mainly technical; the
heart of Newtonian causality (recursion) has passed intact from
classical to quantum mechanics...
Yet when quantum mechanics seemed to contradict or
preclude classical ideas of causality, an enormous disquiet was
generated, which has still not been completely resolved. The problem is
that the Uncertainly Principle, or more generally, the commutation
relations on which Heisenberg based his quantum theory, are not
compatible with the notion of phase. As we have seen, phase is the
basic idea in the Newtonian description of particulate systems; it is
precisely what the recursion rules operate on to generate the
trajectories that encode causality in that formalism. The Heisenberg
commutation relations said that classical phase could no longer even be
defined at the quantum level, let alone be recursive.
But as was quickly realized, giving up the notion of
phase did not mean giving up the notion of state. It merely required an
encoding of that notion whose relation to actual observational
chronicles was now (to say the least) indirect. Formally, in quantum
mechanics, the wave functions that encode state remain completely
recursive, governed now be Schrödinger's equation (or its equivalents)
rather than by Newton's Second Law. The guts of classical causality
therefore passed intact to the new mechanics. It so happened that the
new encoding, into a formalism of wave functions and Schrödinger's
equation, could be related only in a statistical way to the old,
classical encoding, so that the two inferential structures in the
formalisms could not be brought into a complete homology. But as we
have seen, this is an entirely different matter; causality encodes
differently into the two kinds of formalisms, but that only says
something about the encodings, and not about causal entailment itself...
Nevertheless, the reappraisal of causality
occasioned by the advent of quantum theory has left physicists without
consensus on what causality is or on how it should be encoded into
contemporary physical formalisms. More generally, no one is today sure
what the formalism of quantum theory encodes, or even if it encodes
anything at all; in this latter view, advocated by Bohr under the
rubric of complementarity, the only thing that matters is the decoding.
I believe it fair to say that the "foundations" of quantum theory
remain a quagmire, to a far greater extent than has ever been true in
physics before.
It would therefore be idle, as well as perhaps
presumptuous, to enter into a more detailed discussion of quantum
theory here. My main point is, however, unarguagble: that the concept
of state plays the central role in its formalism, just as it did in its
classical predecessor, and the essential property of state is its
recursiveness. It thus perpetuates the duality between states and
dynamical laws that began with Newton. The inferential or entailment
structures in the two formalisms are different enough so that they
cannot be directly compared (and indeed, attempts to directly compare
the two formalisms have created much of the confusion to which I
alluded above), but they remain different species of the same genus."
My diagnosis of what Dr Ho has been trying to achieve is
a scientific description of what causes life in living systems from
within the accepted paradigm. She does not appear to
question the soundness of the foundational issues involved, only the
design of the structures built on these foundations. She recognizes the
mechanistic approach as being inapplicable, but she is still trying to
build structures on the same flawed foundations. If she reads my
father's work and sees what he saw, she will have to pull a "Rashevsky"
and go in a completely different direction (basically disavowing all
earlier work). That's a really painful thing to make one's self do and
is one reason why my father had so much respect for Rashevsky's courage
as well as his intelligence. It's also why he felt such protectiveness
towards Rashevsky when people like Lewontin tried to make a noose out
of the older work and hang Rashevsky's credibility with it.
I'd be interested in hearing thoughts to the contrary if
the group has some?
Judith
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Saturday, July 24, 2004 1:38 AM
Subject: Re: [ROSEN] "Process" Definition in the
SpaceTime of an Organism and in relation to Quantum theory?
> Hi, Tim:
>
> Related to the comments exchanged here, there seems to be also an
> interesting new reference that you might like to add a link to,
which is on
> non-reductionist views of organisms at:
>
> http://www.i-sis.org.uk/hoarchi.php
>
> The author does not seem to be aware of Robert Rosen's work, but I
might
> simply have not seen all that she wrote in several of her recent
books
> published in the UK.
>
> Regards,
> Ionel
> On Mon, 19 Jul 2004 08:31:32 -0400, Tim Gwinn <***>
wrote:
>
> >Hi Pete,
> >
> >My only comment in reply is to your (rhetorical) question:
> >
> > For example, is it meaningful to talk about the
"qualitatively or
> >quantitatively measured behavior" of, say, an ingot of lead
(Pb) inside an
> >evacuated Bell jar ("the system"), wherein the lead ingot and
the jar are
> in
> >thermal equilibrium with the jar's environment? No matter how
you pick your
> >delta t across the initial & final states, any
measurements you might make
> >of the system's "behavior" during the delta t are going to
show zero
> >variance (within the precision of the measuring instruments).
Is it
> >meaningful to say that the system states across the delta t
define a
> >"process"?
> >
> >From my particular (peculiar?) perspective, I would say "yes"
in answer to
> >that question. I take the view that 'process' is closely
allied with its
> >etymological roots: deriving from L. processus - "advance,
progress, lapse
> >of time", which in turn is from L. procedere - "go forward".
To me, the
> >commonality here is the spanning of time, what we are calling
the delta-t,
> >and the specifics of the behavior is not central to the
definition. Thus,
> >for me, the behavior of any system across some delta-t is a
process; the
> >specific nature of the behaviors encountered does not
generically qualify
> or
> >disqualify.
> >
> >But again, as you note, depending upon one's purpose, changes
(or lack of
> >them) in behavior may indeed be an appropriate qualifier (or
disqualifier)
> >from the application of the term 'process' in a given context.
> >
> >Regards,
> >Tim
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