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WOW.
Jeez, Pete... that was beautiful.
Regarding the part about my father's reaction over
the fact that academia was no better than any other realm at accepting
new ideas or at putting integrity and truth ahead of the next grant cycle or ego
or power-- yeah, he was disgusted. He never became a cynic, though, which kind
of surprised me. He was more like a disappointed idealist. But he was from
Brooklyn; he shrugged and figured he should've known better. [Hey, anybody
remember the movie "Angel Heart", with Robert DeNiro as the devil: "Are you a
religious man?" the devil asked. "No, I'm from Brooklyn," came the
reply.]
Judith
Pete G. wrote: Here's my take on that one. First of all, you'd have to
assume that anyone else had the epistemological perspicacity to spot the
inadequacies of reductionism, had the intellectual honesty to realize how
fundamentally important their implications are, had the energy, clarity of
thought, and scientific integrity to follow those implications through to their
logical conclusions, and then have the guts to stand up and say, "Hey, lookit... we've been way off
track!"
Any one of those assumptions might apply to some individuals in the scientific community, but not many. Any two of them would apply to a much narrower range of folks. But all of them together? No way. As far as we know, there's only one Robert Rosen, and only one body of work that has that specific content. Frankly, even if someone had perceived what RR did, how many people would cop to the ramifications part, by which I mean, how many people would have the integrity to say, "Sheesh... I've gotta reconstruct the whole epistemology of science from scratch if I want to be able to work over here in this area that contains the most interesting stuff (complex systems)." Yeah, I know it was really living systems that were his primary motivation -- at least initially -- but he had to do the thinking for complex systems in general to get to where he wanted to go. Works for me. |