Re: Some pretty good alternate definitions of complexity

[Pete Giansante <***>]

Judith:

You wrote:

"Are you a religious man?" the devil asked. "No, I'm from Brooklyn," came the reply.]

Oh, that's TOO good. Being a transplanted New Yawka, I can relate. I was born & bred upstate, in the Finger Lakes region -- about an hour's drive eastward from where you live -- but my college days in Ithaca exposed me to folks from "the City". In my freshman year, my roommate was a Brooklynite. Life was never the same after that.

Within a few years my work brought me to New York, and I was living in a loft on 7th Avenue at 29th Street. It was my first hard-core, day-to-day exposure to those folks with boundless skepticism, mitigated by a deeply entrenched optimism that kept cynicism at bay. It doesn't seem probable that such a composite attitude could be found in the same volitional package, but I can corroborate that it really does exist. You have to experience it to understand it. Sounds like you did... firsthand -- and what a bonus that RR's interests led him to apply that phenomenal attitude in an endeavor of such transcendent importance.

I'm jealous. ;-)

Pete

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Judith Rosen wrote:

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.