Re: Ideas, language, and science

[Judith Rosen <***>]

I think John M. is describing one of the greatest frustrations of all human
interaction:

>John M. wrote:  Tim, I think you think too pragmatically black and white.
> We are in a very
> gray domain of ignorance, RR started to pour clear water in the heads, in
> very recent time (the 70s?) and we are all novices.
> Things are ambiguous in our classical terms, we have no good words to
> express what we want to express. Our thinking is the classical, all raised
> in reductionism and we all are brainwashed by the ancient terms. That is
> the 'filtering/interpreting' experience we have.

Language is a way to express information and ideas; as such, it is only one
of many ways, and in the subset we call language, there are many different
kinds. Is it limited? Of course! But that's no reason to stop using it. Even
so, the kind of ideas my father was trying to express are particularly
difficult to streamline into a linear narrative and he wrote this in the
Preface of "Life, Itself":

Robert Rosen wrote: "I must add that writing this text is the hardest thing
I have ever tried to do, much harder than doing the research work it
embodies. The problem was to compress a host of interlocking ideas, drawn
from many sources, which coexist happily in my head, into a form coherently
expressible in a linear script. Moreover, there was the problem of trying to
indicate the richness of many of the ideas, which in themselves want to
ramify off in many directions, while keeping them focused on the primary
problem. This last has involved a rigorous, and at times exquisitely
painful, selection process; I could easily have expanded almost every
chapter, and indeed many of the chapter sections, into separate volumes each
the size of the present one. I have tried to address these problems of
organization and exposition in the same way as I approach research, namely,
to try to let the problems tell me what to do. Everything to be found
herein, and the manner in which it is expressed, is what it is because it
seemed to me to be necessary. And about each, I can say in truth that it is
the best I can do. It is for the reader to say whether this has been
enough."

Science is a human activity, and human perceptions, no matter how much
technology we augment them with, are a limited subset of what there is to
perceive and the modes in which it could be possible to perceive them.
Therefore, science will always be a "reductionist" activity in a certain
sense. To regard any particular thing as "a system" requires that it be
isolated in some manner, if only by our language-based description of it.
These are potential negatives, particularly if scienTISTS begin to think our
human  perception of the universe constitutes all the universe is. But I
think my father's work is living proof that one does not need to be quite as
limited in understanding as one is forced to be via human physiological and
perceptual realities. Nor is it necessary to limit our understanding to the
modes with which science forces us to segregate systems in the universe for
study. One of those modes is language. Understanding can be greater than the
sum of all modes of approach, although to describe that comprehensive
understanding to anyone else requires us to use some mode of communication,
and we're back to language again.

Human minds are not capable of absorbing knowledge from the universe the
same way our lungs pull in air and absorb the oxygen out of it. It would be
nice if we COULD employ some sort of psychic communion with the "ambience"
(as my father referred to all that is not "self"), but that's not our
reality. So, among other things, we do science instead.

Judith