Did he "champion the holistic paradigm"?

[Judith Rosen <***>]

> James Rose wrote: Robert Rosen was a great innovative
> thinker .. but he didn't (as no one does) have a primator
> lock on an idea.  His detailed and delineated arguments
> went further than anyone in championing the holistic paradigm
> that is more real and appropriate than the planet's
> current one.  He will be lauded for that in perpetuity.
> Parallel thinkers are due their own niche of respect and
> accomplishment however.  Don't write-off WanHo because
> she came to her part of the play on her own.


Would you be surprised to hear that I don't consider my father a "champion
of the holistic paradigm"? First of all, there was no "holistic paradigm" to
champion until just recently, and he didn't create one. To be honest, the
word "holism" has certain mystical connotations that don't suit. He would
probably prefer "Whole-ism" except that he wouldn't champion a paradigm
based only on that, either. What my father was championing was an
organization-based scientific paradigm that understood the different types
of organization; whether they were simple, complex, complex/living,
chimerical, or
"other?"... and what causal "effects" those types of organization manifest
via the system. The thing is that, as a scientist, he was very comfortable
with experiment and modeling-- as tools used for learning something new
about an area of interest. Those are "reductionist" activities. I've said
before that my father didn't want to "ban" reductionistic approaches or
experimental science. He was a whiz in the laboratory. However, he said that
science must not limit the human capacity to learn to using only those
means. He believed both theory and experiment are necessary in science, and
he regarded theory as synonymous for "thought" (rational thought, creative
thought, contextual thought...) It's all required. Is that "whole-ism"? No.
I don't think so. He was a scientist.

Science cannot approach the universe whole. But the universe IS whole. So,
what my father suggested was to approach the universe from many different
scientific ways and always bear in mind the contexts and relational aspects.
Certain systems require us to study them intact. Intact refers to their
organization (because it is that aspect which causes most the others).
"Intact" isn't quite the same as "whole", though.

Dr. Ho is another matter. I respect her for what she's trying to do; I
thought I got that across? However, respecting her personally is not the
same as assessing her logical basis for the scientific claims she makes, and
she makes a lot of claims. I've read quite a few of them because I
subscribed to her newsletter once I discovered her work. I've also sent
some of her work to Dr. Aloisius Louie. Knowing my father, as he did, from
the "professorial" end, and having a mathematical biology background (which
I don't), Aloisius is one of my self-initiated reality checks for those
things. My intuition will tell me something, but I don't automatically trust
it. I double check. The question I ask is this: Is the bold step of
rejecting the machine metaphor in science enough? What if the ideas it is
replaced with are ideas that are still based on foundations/assumptions my
father went to great lengths to show the illogic of?

Ultimately, her work contradicts my father's. Therefore I investigated what
her basis was; What was her logic structure? How did she assign the flow of
causality? The basis of her claims in biology is Quantum Theory. When I
compare her analysis of science to my father's analysis, what I ultimately
come to as my conclusion is that Dr. Mae-Wan Ho did not go back far enough--
there were flaws in assumptions elsewhere in the matrix of ideas that were
incorporated into Quantum Theory before she came to it. So anything built on
Quantum Theory is suspect. That doesn't "write her off", it just expresses
my disquiet with what she is doing.

Judith
(PS: James, I generally never "write off" people, especially people who mean
well, and it's clear that Dr. Mae-Wan Ho means well. I find it much better
to stay open to the possibilities. The world is a strange place!)