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Howard Pattee wrote: I think our discussion of objectivity
is veering away from Rosen's ideas of modeling life.
Not at all. In fact, this is very much at the heart of what he was
wrestling with and I'm attempting to persuade you to change your mind-set. If
you want to understand the kind of modeling he was suggesting, you have to
abandon certain traditional patterns of thinking. It's an issue of
perspective, really. The kind of "objectivity" you are describing
(from Physics, which then pervades all of science) is derived from certain basic
assumptions, and models of the universe that were constructed from those
assumptions. His discovery was that those assumptions and models apply to
only a very small ("special") group of system types; those with "simple"
(non-complex) organization-- Systems that are approximately "the sum of
their parts". As you know, he came to the conclusion that most systems we know
of in the universe are not of that organization type. So, what is considered
"the general science" really isn't general. And, what initially seemed to
set biological systems apart from others turns out to be due to aspects which
are actually the general case-- systems where the relational causality conferred
upon the system by its organization is what makes such systems "more than the
sum of their parts". The pursuit of the type of "objectivity" you have
described is a part of the problem in science and it's no surprise that it was
generated from the same assumptions as the models and the approach. It's
also somewhat schizophrenic because, as I've tried to illustrate, they
are trying to subtract by adding more of what they're trying to
subtract...
From page 35 of "Life, Itself":
Robert Rosen wrote: "To assess the "level of generality"
of contemporary physics, or indeed of any other scientific or mathematical
discipline, in any kind of absolute terms is an extremely difficult thing. It
raises in fact a metatheoretic question; a question about the
theory, not a question within the theory. Intuitively, the
"level of generality" of a theory characterized the class of situations with
which the theory can cope, the class of phenomena it can in principle
accommodate. How, if at all, can such a thing be measured?
It is instructive, in this regard, to look at the Theory
of Numbers in pure mathematics, where the situation is much more under control.
Number Theory has historically been plagued with conjectures (really inductions,
based on limited experience or sampling with small numbers), which no one has
ever been able either to prove or produce a counterexample (disprove). Is
Fermat's Last Theorem a theorem? How about the Goldbach Conjecture, that every
even number is the sum of two odd primes? Is Number Theory general enough, even
in principle, to cope with these very specific
situations?
The situation is made even more interesting as a result of
Gödel's celebrated work on undecidability in Number Theory, which we shall see
much more of as we proceed. In brief, Gödel showed how to represent assertions
about Number Theory within Number Theory. On
this basis, he was able to show that Number Theory was not finitely
axiomatizable. In other words: given any finite set of axioms for Number Theory,
there are always propositions that are in some sense theorems but are unprovable
from those axioms (unless, of course, the axioms are inconsistent to begin
with-- in which case everything is a theorem). The conclusion here is that
every finitely axiomatized system of Number Theory is too
special, in some abstract, absolute sense. But there is no way of telling
whether a specific assertion or conjecture about numbers is provable, or
disprovable, or undecidable (unprovable) within such a system.
If this is already the situation in Number Theory, how
much more complicated to ask similar questions about physics. But that is
exactly the question raised by reductionism; it is an assertion, or conjecture,
or belief, pertaining to the generality of contemporary physics itself. And
indeed, it is not a conjecture based on any direct evidence
(as, say, Goldbach's Conjecture in Number Theory is), but rather on indirect
(circumstantial) evidence, insofar as evidence is adduced at all. In short, it
rests on faith."
Unless you completely disagree with all of that, it needn't be so
very difficult to jettison some of the physics-based patterns of thought that
are holding you back.
Judith
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