This is the second installment in the new series. In the first installment A new series: Books that will help you see the world anew. we remembered the ideas of Robert Maynard Hutchins about the meaning of knowledge in the context of human existence and its problems. These ideas were taken from the beginnings of Robert Rosen's book Anticipatory Systems. In this installment we look to Rosen to translate these ideas into a more modern context and to do this we examine some passages from his book Life Itself: A Comprehensive Inquiry into the Nature, Origin, and Fabrication of Life This is a summary of the book's contents:
Why are living things alive? As a theoretical biologist, Robert Rosen saw this as the most fundamental of all questions-and yet it had never been answered satisfactorily by science. The answers to this question would allow humanity to make an enormous leap forward in our understanding of the principles at work in our world.
For centuries, it was believed that the only scientific approach to the question "What is life?" must proceed from the Cartesian metaphor (organism as machine). Classical approaches in science, which also borrow heavily from Newtonian mechanics, are based on a process called "reductionism." The thinking was that we can better learn about an intricate, complicated system (like an organism) if we take it apart, study the components, and then reconstruct the system-thereby gaining an understanding of the whole.
However, Rosen argues that reductionism does not work in biology and ignores the complexity of organisms. Life Itself, a landmark work, represents the scientific and intellectual journey that led Rosen to question reductionism and develop new scientific approaches to understanding the nature of life. Ultimately, Rosen proposes an answer to the original question about the causal basis of life in organisms. He asserts that renouncing the mechanistic and reductionistic paradigm does not mean abandoning science. Instead, Rosen offers an alternate paradigm for science that takes into account the relational impacts of organization in natural systems and is based on organized matter rather than on particulate matter alone.
Central to Rosen's work is the idea of a "complex system," defined as any system that cannot be fully understood by reducing it to its parts. In this sense, complexity refers to the causal impact of organization on the system as a whole. Since both the atom and the organism can be seen to fit that description, Rosen asserts that complex organization is a general feature not just of the biosphere on Earth-but of the universe itself.
Read on below and we will begin to delve into the way that Hutchins ideas became real in Rosen's
relational approach to the issue of life and what it is and is not. The relevance of Rosen's conclusions is now being missed in the political debates centered around the word "Life". It is time to bring that set of debates into focus using what Rosen has been able to do to clarify that very ill defined word used to describe what should be one of the clearest concepts we have in our human intellectual experience. This will take some time and we begin with the problem that Hutchins told us about: The artificiality of the distinction we refer to as "hard" science vs "soft" science.
Let us begin with Rosen's words from that book:
Some years ago, the novelist C. P. Snow drew attention to a dualism that permeates and poisons the intellectual life of our times, a dualism between science and art, between science and humanism.
The dualism to which Snow, among others, drew attention is indeed real. It has always been real and has existed since human beings first learned to think and communicate their thoughts. But the situation is, and always has been, far worse than Snow has depicted. He painted a picture of science itself as a kind of pure phase, and its relation to other aspects of our culture as a kind of phase separation; scientists and humanists separating from each other as oil separates from water, through a preference of like for like, and an antipathy of like for unlike. But the dualities that Snow depicted permeate science itself.
Rosen wrote that a little over two decades ago. We are now in a much better position to appreciate how insightful his perception was and how, in fact, the permeation of the dualities had gone far beyond the context of science, humanism or any other single aspect of human intellectual activity to the very core of our world view. Fortunately, we have Rosen's framework on which we can put ideas from people like George Lakoff and an increasing number of people who are trying to understand how we got here. I will state my bias here. The ideas that Hutchins gave me and that Rosen helped add meat to have now helped me formulate a world view that seems to explain most of what we have become. If this sounds arrogant, forgive me, but I have to say what I think as honestly as possible. Rosen, as we will see in more detail later, was a "systems" thinker and, like everything else he did, his systems thinking was unique and revealing. My concept of what we have become is a recognition of the interplay of history, economic, science, humanism, religion, and politics in a manner that makes their identification as separate influences more than artificial. I don't expect this to be understood at this point, but it will unfold as we go on. The situation we find ourselves in today, even as Rosen described it is the tip of an iceberg and has implications for our entire field of political, educational, economic and other forms of social discourse. It is especially useful as an explanation for why we have degenerated into the kind of theater we now substitute for the necessary discourse a people need to govern themselves effectively.
He goes on to speak of something I am all too familiar with having shared it with him for a while then only later to have it haunt me as I did my own thing:
I have,much against my will, been immersed my whole life in one of these dualities, namely the antagonism between "theory" and "experiment." My subject matter herein is another , in fact closely related duality, that between "hard" science and "soft" science, between quantitative and qualitative, between "exact" and "inexact."...It is thus not a matter of logical argumentation or persuasion that is involved here; it is a matter more akin to religious conversion.
Had he lived to see this day he would have had to feel like a prophet. The entire realm of interaction now has that flavor and even science itself, in its most strictly quantitative form has suffered the effects of this. One need only read Michael Mann's
The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines to get a good picture of how bad the situation has become. The trick is to understand the relationship between these developments and the failure to deal with gaps in understanding that resulted from the dualities under discussion here. The next section of the chapter starts like this:
QUALITIES AND QUANTITIES IN THE SCIENCES
I can perhaps illustrate the dichotomy between quality and quantity in the sciences with two quotations. The first is due to Ernest Rutherford:
Qualitative is nothing but poor quantitative
The emphasis is mine. The second quotation is due to Robert Hutchins, a man who is no less clever than Rutherford:
A social scientist is a person who counts telephone poles.
I chose these, out of countless others that could have been used, because these words are fighting words; they most vividly exhibit the emotional character of the issues involved.
Emotional indeed! To this day as I write and speak and teach about these ideas I am quite often met with a response that has no place in civil discourse! The reference above to the religious nature of people's beliefs on these matters is no exaggeration. Rosen points out that using Rutherford's thinking Hutchins sees the term "social scientist" as an oxymoron! Rosen goes on to help us with this apparent impasse:
There is nothing inherently illogical or unscientific about either of these positions. They differ so radically because they clearly start from entirely different presuppositions about the nature of the perceptual world and the relation of the perceiver to percepts.
What Rosen is saying here is that the difference he has focused us on is one that is fundamental. What Rosen does do is to go back to fundamentals and correct this problem at its roots. This is a rather involved project and we will spend some time recasting Rosen's work in a slightly different form that we will integrate with what others have recently done to address this problem. This will not be a hollow esoteric exercise for it will get us to the root of our present day difficulties. The reward will be worth the effort.
This sets the stage for the third installment, How policy making depends on the theory of modelling, where we will go back to Anticipatory Systems to learn about the way we actually come to possess knowledge about our world.