2/3/2006 9:12 AM
Discussion with Paul Werbos and others
Hmmm.... I think there is a communication glitch here, somewhere... the conclusions at the other side of the "ether" are not in congruence with the concepts I was attempting to describe. I take full responsibility for that failure and I hope you will allow me a brief (yes, I promise) clarification of my own.
There is a difference between recognizing the limitations of some tool and condemning it. I was not aware of any movement to ban physics or reductionist approaches in science, nor am I aware of any movement to condemn same. Indeed, to do so would be foolish as well as counter-productive. On the other hand, the limitations of these tools, as developed so far, are manifesting themselves more and more as humanity advances in our capability to either control or seriously interfere with complex systems which, in turn, affect our own welfare, perhaps even survival, as a species. Most of these are biological in origin, including human social systems and economic systems. The human psyche, itself, is a biological system and follows patterns of entailment which are life-based and life is complexity-based.
Robert Rosen's work did not seek to destroy science but to advance it. Surely that is what the National Science Foundation seeks to do as well? The issue at hand, as I have understood it, is whether the current course of science is progressing farther down a path of ancient assumption (which is that "all systems in the universe are like machines") or whether we have seen enough evidence for a judicious change of course in a slightly different direction. My father, as a biologist (some called him a bio-physicist), never intended to develop a paradigmatic shift in science. He just wanted to discover why living organisms are alive, from a scientific point of view. It turned out that he didn't have the tools he needed in order to do that, so he began developing them and at the same time he began a private investigation into why the heck the tools "on the shelf" were not working. He discovered that the tools were based on that ancient assumption, which has been preserved, unchallenged and essentially intact, right up to the present day (February 4, 2006).
It is clear that a great number of people from all fields of science and many other areas of human inquiry are aware that there are limitations to what science can tell us about each respective field, which is often perceived as a limitation of science, itself. In Robert Rosen's view, that was an incorrect conclusion: Instead, it is the current paradigm of science which is limited and must be expanded to encompass the actual nature of causality in a complex universe.
The nature of complexity, in his view, is relational. Since the current paradigm of science is based on the machine metaphor, all scientific approaches which have been developed are based, on some level and/or to some degree, on the human perception of how machines work (such that what can be done in analysis with any machine can, in theory, be done with all systems in the universe and will provide the same level of comprehension). What my father was saying about this situation is that it is the machine metaphor which is unscientific, and unsound-- not physics, per se, and not reductionism.
I hope I have presented these truths accurately, for I have only myself to blame if I have not. Be well, Paul Werbos.
Judith Rose
Web address: http://www.rosen-enterprises.co
BioTheory: An electronic journal of general science based on the Relational (Rosennean) Complexity Paradigm