Re: BioTheory launch

I just got back home from a short "vacation" (why is it that, as an adult, I seem to need a vacation AFTER vacation, to recover from the upheaval?)... anyway, I couldn't let this one wait until tomorrow for a reply. One of the many things I admire about John K. is his gift for diplomacy. However, there can sometimes be a danger in trying to please everyone. It's OK if diplomacy is the spoonful of sugar that helps the medicine go down, but the medicine still needs to go down. There are reasons why it is not possible, in this case, to equivocate on the paradigm change. My comments are interspersed, below:

This is one of the misconceptions that I most want to address: There is no way to "synthesize" the mechanistic/reductionistic "classical" paradigm (which is based on Newtonian and Cartesian conclusions) with an organization-based paradigm such as Rosennean Complexity Theory. That was one of my father's major conclusions. I believe it is also what frustrated Einstein, in his attempts to create a unified field theory. The classical paradigm is hopelessly flawed and needs to be discarded. As my father said, somewhere in one of his books (I think it was Life, Itself-- I'll find the page number tomorrow); "It is not just a little bit wrong, it is completely wrong." A new paradigm, based around organization rather than on particulate matter, (a paradigm called by whatever name you prefer) allows all the currently developed "reductionist" approaches to continue to be used and developed-- but doesn't try to limit science to those approaches (which is what the classical paradigm currently does). Secondly, using those approaches when your foundation is an organizational one will make such approaches more useful and less dangerous than they currently are-- operating in the classical paradigm under the belief that all systems are simple. I think it needs to be stated that holding on to the old paradigm (meaning the old foundations contemporary physics is built on) out of habit or for any other reason is a mistake.

I understand that there are costs in saying that and most of the list subscribership is involved in professions where such costs apply. It makes perfect sense to me that people in that position may not be willing or able to afford those costs, but for better or for worse... I don't have that problem. I'm not a scientist. My father was the scientist and he chose to pay the costs asssociated with following the problem where it led. His work is the result of his efforts. The fact that there IS a discussion list based on ideas my father developed through his work suggests that there is perceived value in those ideas. So, I won't gloss over one of my father's main points in an attempt to appease the status quo. I have absolutely no qualms over coming right out and saying the emperor is naked if it's true.

The trouble here is that we are not talking about an aesthetic judgement. We're not discussing whether Jackson Pollack was creating "ART" by standing on a ladder and dribbling paint onto a canvas on the floor-- or whether he was just making a mess... In this situation, decisions are being made based on science, scientific "evidence" that is assumed to reflect information about the universe we can rely on. But if the paradigm, the foundation, is flawed-- those decisions may be the wrong ones. That impacts US, our species, our planet, and our collective future.

Part of his discovery is that
description of nature requires many modes of description, so it is
inherently inclusive. In the end, if there is a unified
view, it will be a synthesis, I am quite sure. Sensory organisms, such
as we are, cannot fully reject the language that derives from sensory
perspective, which is what classical measurement is all about.

Ah... but you see, this is not the same as combining the Newtonian/Cartesian paradigm and a Rosennean paradigm into a hybrid. The Rosennean one states that organization is key, that there are different types of organization which have different causal ramifications, and that systems with simple organization can be studied with less attention paid to their organizational aspects. Perhaps this qualifies as being "inclusive"-- I would certainly define it that way. Yet, it is an organization based paradigm that generates that conclusion. In other words, the "classical" paradigm is gone. If the general tendency in the universe is complex organization, as my father stated, then science based on simplicity is of limited value. Why would you keep it? Keep the techniques, but toss the paradigm.

People
will still want to talk about "a car" and "a house", even if we know
those objects are really abstractions from a larger complex system. I
think the great revelation from Rosen is that this necessary and
persistent view turns out to be superimposed onto complex nature and not
the ontology it was thought to be, or to eventually lead to. This is a
very important discovery (R. Rosen didn't discover this, of course, but
he did perhaps the best job so far of explaining and describing it, and
providing a path to another view). This is a necessary shift for
answering new kinds of questions and some of the old ones that were
poorly answered. But many old ones are handled adequately in the
mechanistic view, so it is an enlargement of science, not a replacement,
much as the revolutions before it.

There is no way to enlarge from simplicity to complexity. There is no way to reach complexity from simplicity. That was part of the logic that led my father to make the conclusions he made. Therefore, it is, indeed, a replacement from a limited foundation to an unlimited one which is called for. Complexity allows the existence of simplicity. Simplicity cannot conceive of complexity and cannot be remade to answer complex questions. What I am suggesting will keep the aspects of science that, as you say "are handled adequately in the mechanistic view". But that mechanistic view will not be the foundation that all scientific analysis and exploration is based on. The foundation is what needs to change.

So, what I've done is to create an incarnation of my father's idea of a journal, called "BioTheory". The new journal is being created in order to allow science based on a new, organization-based paradigm to be published and made available without the politics associated with mainstream journals. I won't be making any money off it, I won't be winning any awards with it, and there is no status quo to preserve.