A FEW OF ROBERT ROSEN'S THOUGHTS... Since this entire blog experiment is designed to acquaint a larger audience with the scientific theory of Robert Rosen, I felt it was appropriate to post excerpts of his from various pieces of his work which I inherited, and add my translations, if necessary or comments, etc, as a modus operandi. (If I insert comments or make changes to the text as it was initially written, those will be marked with [ ] brackets.) So, without any further ado, here is Dr. Robert Rosen (taken from Page 271, Essays on Life, Itself): "The chapters in this part [of the book] are of a different character from those preceding. They bear not so much on what we can learn about biology from other disciplines as on what we can learn about other disciplines from an understanding of biological modes of organization. Most particularly, they bear on technologies-- how to solve problems. Hence I shall use "technology" in the broadest sense, to include problems of an environmental and social nature, not just the fabrication of better mechanical devices, and to connote the execution of functions. I have long believed, and argued, that biology provides us with a vast encyclopedia about how to solve complex problems, and also about how not to solve them. Indeed, biological evolution is nothing if not this, but its method of solution (natural selection) is, by human standards, profligate, wasteful, and cruel. Nevertheless, the solutions themselves are of the greatest elegance and beauty, utterly opposite to the discordances and moral conflicts that created them. We cannot use Nature's methods, but we can (and, I believe, must) use Nature's solutions. I have also long believed that there are many deep homologies between social modes of organization and biological ones that make it possible to learn deep things about each by studying the other. I believe the situation here is vary much akin to the Hamiltonian mechano-optical analogy that I touched on in chapter 14, an analogy that enabled us to learn new and profound things about optics while studying mechanics, and vice versa (while having nothing to do with reducing the one to the other). The thread that weaves such disparate subjects together is rather of a mathematical character; a congruence between their distinct entailment modes-- common models that are diversely realized. In this case, the models are relational, and they are complex. The common relational models that bridge biology and the technologies allow us, in principle, to separate the fruits of selection without needing to emulate its methods. They provide a Rosetta stone that allows us to utilize the billions of years of biological experience contained in Nature's encyclopedia, and to realize them in our own ways, applied to our own problems. These matters were all resolutely, although with great reluctance, excluded from "Life, Itself". However, they played an integral role in the development of the lines of argument detailed therein. For instance, the idea of (biological) function developed [in that volume] (in which a subsystem is described in terms of what it entails, rather than exclusively in terms of what entails it) has an indelible technological slant, which I exploit as a point of departure in the chapters of this part. I make many uses of this notion, even though it is dismissed by reductionistic biology as merely a vulgar anthropomorphism. [Not too politically correct, there, sorry!-- J.R.] It should be noted that this concept of function exists even in contemporary mechanical physics; it is closely related to the distinction between inertial and gravitational aspects of matter described in part 1 (see specifically chapter 1). A metaphor I use to motivate the study of this biological encyclopedia in technological contexts is that of the chimera. In biology, this term connotes a single organism possessing more than the usual number of parents-- e.g., whose cells arise from genetically diverse sources. [It is also a common mythical beast, having the body parts of several different animals, such as a horse with wings, a sphinx, a centaur, etc.] The chimera is in fact a point of departure from biology into technological considerations, and this in many ways. Our civilization has become replete with man-machine chimeras, and even machine-machine chimeras, which manifest emergent functions their constituents do not possess. Social structures, and even ecosystems, are chimerical in this sense. Even such things as activated complexes in biochemistry can be regarded as chimeras. Yet they have been little studied, being looked upon in biology as mere curiosities. [The example in biology that my father used often was that of a hermit crab, which utilizes an empty shell it finds to provide several functions that it is not well equipped to handle on its own. The shell serves a function and its use is a technological act. Very few people know what a hermit crab looks like without an adopted shell even though these animals are now common pets and can be found in the average pet store-- cheap. The shell is "a part of" the crab, even though it is not part of the crab's genotype...] However, the mysterious interplay between genotype and phenotype is deeply probed by chimera. And the notion of function is central. One aspect is that the interplay of function in chimeras is an inherently cooperative notion, not a competitive one. Indeed, one of the deepest lessons of biology is that such a cooperation is selected for; indeed, that life would be impossible without it [as in plants producing what animals need and vice versa.]; and hence that complex organizational problems can be solved via cooperation and not by power and competition. Actually, this is an old idea of mine. In 1975, I was invited to participate in a meeting entitled Adaptive Economics, despite my protests that I knew nothing about economics. Clearly, the organizers were of the opinion that adaptive is universally good, a word impossible to use pejoratively, and what was wrong with our economic system was, in some sense, its failure to be sufficiently adaptive. Equally clearly, they wanted me only to provide some biological examples of adaptation, to lend indirect support to this view. I thought I could easily provide a catalog of such, and set out to write a paper in this vein. However, I ultimately found myself writing something quite different. The lesson of biology turned out to be that adaptiveness is not universally good; too much of it, in the wrong places, will tear cooperative structures apart. Indeed, it turns out that organism physiology is very careful in its apportionment of adaptivity; survival depends on it. This is perhaps not the lesson the organizers wanted me to deliver from biology, but it is the one that biology itself wanted-- one small excerpt from its encyclopedia. (Although not explicitly developed on that paper, there are close ties to my development of model-based anticipatory controls, which were proceeding concurrently at that time.) Another thread in all these works is my warning about the side effects that arise inevitably when attempts are made to control a complex system with simple controls. These side effects generically cascade into a devastating infinite regress. Biology, seen in this light, consists of illustrations of how such cascading side effects can be forestalled or avoided; the result is, inevitably, a system with relational properties very like my (M,R)-systems. Specifically, there must be a characteristic backward loop, relating a "next stage" in such a cascade with earlier stages-- a future with a past. This, it should be noted, is the hallmark of impredicativity-- one of the characteristics of a complex system, and one of the main pillars on which Life, Itself is built. The idea of function is resisted in orthodox biology because it seems to carry with it a notion of design, and it seems necessary to expunge this at any cost. This is because design seems to presuppose a category of final causation, which in turn is confuted with teleology. Nevertheless, Kant (in his "Critique of Practical Reasons") was already likening organic life with art, and the lessons of life with craft. In chapter 20 [of Essays on Life, Itself], which deals with human technology in terms of art and craft, and with the role of the biological encyclopedia in furthering these endeavors, many of the individual threads just reviewed are interwoven into a single framework. An early attempt to pursue biological correlates of technology, was pursued under the general (though diffuse and ill-defined) rubric of bionics. Chapter 19 is a review of the history of this endeavor; it flourished for less than a brief decade (roughly 1960 to 1970). As we note, all that exists of it today is the field of artificial intelligence-- and that in a vastly mutated form based entirely on a concoction of software, very different from what was initially envisioned. A renewed and concerted effort in this direction, an effort to truly read the encyclopedia that biology has left for us, is an urgent national, indeed international, priority, in the face of the burgeoning problems faced by each of us as individuals, and by all of us as a species. Spending billions of dollars on a human genome mapping project, while ignoring the technological correlates of biological organization that bionics tried to address, is an egregious mistake-- the very kind of mistake that leads organisms to extinction. Chapters 21 and 22 deal with an approach to complex systems from the direction of dynamics. This direction I also reluctantly excluded from Life, Itself, but it is of great importance, especially when combined with what is presented therein. What is most interesting is its inherent semantic, or informational, flavor, expressed in terms of, for example, activations/inhibitions and agonisms/antagonisms. Here, impredicativities and unformalizability appear in the guise of non-exactness of differential forms. And, of course, most differential forms are not exact. In some ways, I regard the chapters in this part as the main thrust of this entire volume. I am always asked by experimentalists why I do not propose explicit experiments for them to perform, and subject my approaches to verification at their hands. I do not do so because, in my view, the basic questions of biology are not empirical questions at all, but rather conceptual ones; I tried to indicate this viewpoint in Life, Itself. But the chapters in this part, I hope, expound the true empirical correlates of biological theory. In the realm of art and craft, rather than in a traditional laboratory, will ample verification be found." "Essays on Life, Itself", by Robert Rosen. Copyright; Judith Rosen. Published by Columbia University Press in 1999.
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