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I was away from the list for most of yesterday, and so missed the
explosion. I have to say, I think Tim is entirely justified in his decision,
especially on the basis of one sentence:
Howard Pattee wrote: Why does the machine metaphor have to
go?
All of Robert Rosen's work was generated because the
scientific tools he needed to answer his own questions in Biology did not
exist. He tried using the tools "on the shelf"
(physics/mathematics/chemistry/etc), making sure he educated himself as to what
they had been used for and what they COULD be used for... and it was not
possible. Once he ascertained that it was not possible to deal with foundational
questions in Biology with current scientific methodology and approach, it was
time to turn to the foundations of that scientific methodology and approach and
examine IT; looking for the reasons why Biological systems should present such
an impervious territory to science, at anything deeper than a
superficial level.
He documented all that he discovered, including his thought
process, his conclusions, and his proofs. He then used the tools he created
to answer not only his own foundational questions, but achieved a great deal
more than that, into the bargain.
Before he died, my father said to me that the written body of work
had, within it, all that anybody needed to continue the work. "It's all in
there," he said. Clearly, his mode of writing can be difficult to follow.
However, I have discovered that using a different mode doesn't help with that
and I think Howard's post is a case in point. All of Robert Rosen's work
answers that very question.
How many times have I rephrased these same ideas??? Just in the
last couple weeks I found a new way to depict what is lacking in the entailment
patterns of machines.... sheesh! I'm done! I remember once having a
discussion with my Dad about his response to attacks on his work. He was so
unafraid-- and he never got mad. He said, "I'm not out to convince anybody of
anything. This isn't a religion. I'm not an apostle. I don't care whether people
believe it or not; that's not what I'm here for. I'm doing what I want to do and
I'm fulfilling a duty to report what I find. End of story." He said that there
comes a time, after you say things once, then say them twice, when you have to
recognize that someone does not want to see it, does not want to hear or let the
ideas in. Howard is one of those who cannot let go of long standing belief
structures. I don't understand why he would subscribe to this list! If my
father, himself, couldn't get Howard to see what he was talking about, what
chance do I have???
After the Center at SUNY Buffalo was dismantled, and Dad went to
Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, he wrote Anticipatory Systems and
Fundamentals of Measurement, in that order, although they were published the
other way around. This was a major breakthrough, and was the culmination of the
insights that began two years prior to the move, during that
sabbatical year he spent in Santa Barbara, at the Center for the Study of
Democratic Institutions. In retrospect, it appears that most of Dad's work at
Buffalo was just a prelude to the really huge breakthroughs, and those
breakthroughs led Robert Rosen in a direction that old friends and colleagues
could not always follow. I find it rather sad and I'm relieved that my father is
not here to know this. It would hurt him. He considered Pattee a
friend.
"I come, not to praise Caesar, but to damn him."
"Et tu, Brute?"
Robert Rosen would say, "Hey, guess what, old friend...
I'm not Caesar. And what do you think you're going to achieve
now, with that knife? I'm already dead! You can't kill the work.
"
Judith Rosen
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Thursday, February 03, 2005 5:52
PM
Subject: Re: [ROSEN] Reductionist
philosophy
Judith and Tim,
As I said in my post beginning, I was
expressing irritation at Rosen's labeling entire fields of science, whole
classes of scientists as well as individual scientists as "reductionists" and
criticizing their research strategies. My only point was to suggest that such
labeling should not be propagated on Tim's list. I was agreeing with John that
this blanket labeling is not fair. I don't like to be labeled as a
reductionist or be told I have a "mindset" and I don't know anybody who
does.
Rosen: "But above all, the machine metaphor (supported of course
by the corpus of modern physics) is what drives, and justifies, the
reductionism so characteristic of modern biology" [LI p. 21].
Judith:
This is turning around what he actually said.
HP: What do you mean?
This is what he actually said. As you say:
Judith:
He attributes the huge explosion of molecular biology development to a
reductionist frame of reference. He's calling it like he sees it. You
apparently don't agree, which is fine.
HP: What is wrong with molecular
biology? Try to understand that doing detailed experiments is not necessarily
the result of what you see as "a reductionist frame of reference" or
"mindset." Even if it is, so what? Consider that it may be only one aspect of
a carefully thought out strategy by very intelligent and expert biologists.
For example, look at the detailed experiments on Caenorhabditis elegans http://www.biotech.missouri.edu/Dauer-World/index.html
the nematode that we know more about than any other organism because of over
30 years of painstaking experiments on its DNA sequence and the development of
its 959 cells from a single cell.
I do not agree with Rosen
that, "the machine metaphor is what drives, and justifies" these biological
experiments. The justification was much more complex, but the basic motivation
is that C. elegans is a good "model organism" which is a key concept in
biology, what Rosen should see as an analog system. From these detailed
molecular mechanisms we have learned many things about hierarchical
organization and function in human development, metabolic control, pattern
recognition, ageing and death. ["You have made your way from worm to man, and
much within you is still worm." Nietzsche's Zarathustra]
Judith:
His whole point: Science needs to expand beyond what it has already developed
(not "get rid of it"). In order to do that, the machine metaphor has to go.
Period.
HP: Do you think science requires this ideological litmus
test? Why does the machine metaphor have to go? Why do you think the
detailed models of molecular mechanisms in worms are in conflict with their
higher level relational models of organization and function?
I repeat
what I said: There are many beautiful physics and biological models out there
that answer questions that are interesting and important. If they satisfy the
modeling relation, it is irrelevant whether they can be fit into a
reductionist metaphysics or not.
Howard
Try reading
Rosen LI Sec. 11C, D, E where he sounds like you can't do it that way.
You can't fractionate phenotype or consider it a chemical concept. He says,
"In this section and the next, we will consider the identification of somatic
phenotype with chemistry as mandated by the sequence hypothesis. Our
conclusion will be that it is false, unless chemistry itself is redefined" (p.
263). He says it is an "astonishing claim" that biological forms and
morphogenesis are ultimately chemical. It's all a "terrible mistake." I'm
abbreviating, but read the whole (pp. 258-267) so you can't claim its out of
context. I call this an unfair and irritating assessment.
As I said, I
think it is because of Rosen was irritated that his wording was so caustic.
Words have effects and his words produce a real disconnect here. Agreed, Rosen
would not want to look at worms in such detail, and that's fine. But there are
no terrible mistakes or false conclusions in the worm runners detailed
experiments. Furthermore, the founder of C. elegans research, Sidney Brenner,
has written about the complexity of this worm and understands as well as Rosen
that detailed experiments are not enough to understand its organization. In
fact, organization is now the focus of research. He is not a reductionist, nor
are all of the hundreds of biologists who study
worms.
Howard
HP: Reductionism is
not a property of a model!
Actually, it is (if we leave the
"ism" off the word). Even of a relational model. Even of an "internal
predictive model". Any model is a reduction. But it's not reduction-"ism".
That resides in the modeler, who would then create models that are
"reductionist".
HP: Reductionism is a relation between two or
more models.
It can be this, but I think the statement would
be more accurate if it said "Reductionism is a relation between human
perspective and the universe, such that the human perspective mistakes the
sum-total of what it perceives for what there is." A reductionist
model would be one that is labeled "all there is" and includes the name of
some complex system.
And while I'm on the subject, I would
like to dispell the notion from Jack's post that Robert Rosen viewed
reductionistic science per se as "a form of cancer". I've never said that,
nor did he. What he said is that the machine metaphor makes the reductionist
mind-set equatable to "science" and everything not in that mode is
considered "soft" or unscientific. His point was that this limits science to
a study of simple systems, which leaves most of the universe outside its
purview. He felt that kind of attitude was stupid, frankly, and I agree.
I have posted many times that Robert Rosen didn't view
"reductionism" as a "dirty word" or think it should be banned, etc. His
attitude was inclusional; we need all approaches. Just don't limit your
mind... He was accused of "trashing physics", here on the list, and my
response was that he was actually out to "save" physics, and keep it the
general science it purports to be, by expanding it to include notions of
relational causality and the importance of organization in governing such
relations in the universe. Someone coming along, reading the archives, may
not see those posts and I feel such statements about Robert Rosen must be
rebutted, in the same form in which the statements are made. Hence, my
frustration with the need to repeat such things again, here-- because these
statements keep being made.
HP: Rosen uses reductionism as the
general metaphysical belief that all models are formally derivable from, or
reducible to, what Rosen calls a "largest model."
Rosen
defines what you have described above as the outcome of modeling simple
systems. Their organizations are computable. Reductionism, in
contrast, is the general belief that all SYSTEMS are of this type. Indeed,
Reductionism is the belief that organization confers no important
information that cannot be reconstituted from a throrough study of the
parts.
HP: This "hard" reductionism is often associated with
Laplacean determinism that assumes everything can in principle be predicted
and explained by basic laws of physics.
I think you
misunderstand what his beef is, Howard. His view was that all models are a
"reduction" but of course, the use of modeling in science is not what makes
a scientist "reductionist". He came out and said as much, over and over
again, in his work and I have said it here on the list many times as well. A
reductionist approach is a mind-set; one which presumes that you won't lose
critical information that you can't get back, in taking a system apart.
That's directly a result of the machine metaphor, which is alive and well in
the foundations of science today. The foundations are what he said have to
change. The fact that many scientists today are actively looking for new
ways to address some of the aspects Robert Rosen was seeking to address is a
nice development-- except they are not questioning the foundations. They
don't even look at what's there, or question the reasons why certain things
are considered "unscientific". There will be very negative consequences to
leaving the flaws in place.
HP: Many postings on this list have
apparently taken their cue from Life Itself and misuse the phrase
"reductionist model" dismissively referring to physical and biological
models.
It is clear that you do not like the material in Life,
Itself, Howard. You made that obvious quite some time ago. In fact, once Dad
moved to Nova Scotia, in 1975, you and he saw very little of each other and
his main scientific development was really just taking flight. So, the
biggest discoveries were yet to come, when your "conversation" waned. It's a
fact that his realization that the foundations were at fault had several
consequences. Among them, it meant that he completely discarded the notions
of complexity built by von Neumann, for example-- and you seem to find that
utterly intolerable. To me, it looks perfectly logical and justified. Dad's
work was mostly foundational, after all. Von Neumann's work is a causalty of
the consequences of leaving the flaws in the foundation in place; they get
incorporated into the logic of one's work.
Judith
Rosen
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