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Monday, May 03, 2004

CELTIC KNOTS AND ORGANIZATIONAL IMPORTANCE...

I have been giving the idea of how to best discuss my father's scientific work in general terms... It seems to me that I have to follow my instincts on this one, and my instincts say that "general terms", by virtue of being different from the scientific and technical terms my father used in expressing the ideas, can be more than just his books replicated with less-technical language. Instead, I think the ideas will be better served if the presentation is general as well as the linguistic terms and definitions. So, the mode will be general. But where shall I start? I'm thinking that, since this is taking up time out of my life, I will indulge my own preferences on this one. Therefore, the aspects which stand out clearly for me with regard to his theories are the place I choose to begin.
Rosennean Complexity Theory is different from any other scientific theory of a foundational nature in several ways. One of the main ones is that it sets the organization of all "systems" in the universe on the same level of importance (or even above that level) as the material "stuff" the system is made out of. This is a fundamental mind shift away from the Newtonian/Cartesian philosophy that has influenced science for hundreds of years. It's an outrageous claim and proving that it is, indeed, justified, has constituted my father's life's work. One of the examples that I find useful for representing this set of concepts is a Celtic knot design.
A Celtic knot is created by interweaving a long strip of some material into a symmetrical, stable, design using only itself as the design material. In other words, it is entirely the way the material is organized that creates the design. The way it does so is in how the material relates to itself in certain ways. The direction it turns to make a loop, the interlaced weaving of alternating under and over positions in a symmetrical way, the manner in which these things are repeated in space, including the "negative space" where the design material leaves gaps... all work together in newly-formed relationships that collectively create a stable, recognizable design. We could use some other material that served the required purposes-- a suitably long strip of something else-- and create the exact same design with it. Thus, it is the design, not the specific material, that is what makes a Celtic knot a Celtic knot.

Furthermore, if we were curious about this "system" called our Celtic knot design, and wanted to analyze it so we could understand it more thoroughly, we would not be able to do that using a reductionist approach. If we take the knot apart and study the material it was made of, it will not tell us very much about the Celtic knot, itself. When we disassemble it, all the relationships are destroyed and there is nothing about the material that describes what those relationships were or what the effects, which those relationships created, were. Only certain subtle qualities of the material bespeak some aspect of the Celtic knot.... but it's not obvious. The reason it's not obvious is because the nature of the material must be able to serve a purpose in the knot in order to make a knot out of it and that purpose only makes sense in the context of the Celtic knot design itself. (My father described this situation as a backward causal loop where the material entails the design and the design entails the material) There is a functional need involved, which reductionistic/mechanistic foundations in science reject as "unscientific". Even if you know that this material is supposed to satisfy a need, it's not always possible to figure out the need from analysis of the material.
The fact that we have "purposes" which we use as criteria in choosing a medium (to use an art term) to serve as our design material-- with which to make our Celtic knot design-- is illustrative of the concept of "function". Function is a natural, emergent property of living complex systems (along with life, itself), according to Rosennean Complexity Theory. The organization of such systems is circumscribed, or controlled by the functional necessities of each system. For example, we can't make our Celtic knot design out of something that is the wrong shape, the wrong size, the wrong texture, the wrong "medium". It has to fit certain functional criteria, just as the food source of an organism must fit within certain critical parameters that are required by the organism in order to serve as "food" and satisfy that functional need. Our functional requirements with our Celtic knot design are that we need a material that is sufficiently long, thin, flexible, and stable enough to withstand the rigors of being woven into the particular organization that creates our design. Many different materials can satisfy our requirements: leather strips, satin ribbon, rope, cording, shoelaces..... it's a long list. Furthermore, we can make our design out of each of the materials on our list, using the same organization and... when we're done, we see the same relationships and the same exact design of our particular Celtic knot are the result. It is clearly recognizable as the same Celtic knot design, no matter what it's made of. Why? Because the relationships themselves have a causal influence that is, collectively, the very essence of making the "system" what it is.
These facts about the organizational importance of certain systems are all obvious when we are looking at, and analyzing, a Celtic knot design. We could all probably agree that to try and analyze the Celtic knot without keeping these principles in mind will not generate information that truly enlightens us about this particular Celtic knot design or even about Celtic knot designs in general. The only way to understand the Celtic knot is to study the design, or organization, of it. The only way to study the organization is to do so while the design is intact. So.... If we are going to study the organization, how shall we go about it-- what techniques shall we use?
That's the 50-Gazillion dollar question. It just so happens that this is an area of science that doesn't exist yet. My father only achieved a coherent development of the set of ideas that proves there is a need to develop new approaches of scientific analysis based on the organizational aspects of complex systems-- and he occasionally pointed out potentially fruitful pathways in the process, but he didn't have time to begin work on developing those pathways himself. He died at the age of 64, from complications of diabetes. However, the fact that the atom is a complex system, as Rosennean Complexity defines a complex system, is proof enough that we need to develop some new modes of approach for analysis of these systems-- if we truly want to understand their essence. The fundamental nature of the atom's place in material reality allows us to make some logical conclusions. Namely, it follows that there must be a fundamental organizational aspect that has causal implications as an innate property of all systems in this universe. Atoms, like Celtic knots, are only "atoms" while their organization is intact. The same is true of organisms, as well. Each of these types of systems has the bulk of its system properties and behaviors generated by the way the systems are organized. Thus the ideas developed by my father, Dr. Robert Rosen, in what I am now (since his death) referring to as Rosennean Complexity Theory, can logically be seen as describing fundamental natural principles that accurately reflect the way material reality organizes itself in the universe and the effects such organization has on the nature and behavior of the systems all around us-- systems, which humanity is both an example of and a participant in. Judith Rosen
May 3, 2004 # [>]

posted at 05:05 AM #

Sunday, May 02, 2004

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. # [>]

posted at 12:12 PM #

Friday, April 30, 2004

THE NATURE OF LANGUAGE...

THE NATURE OF LANGUAGE In any discussion on Rosennean Complexity Theory, particularly as my father (Robert Rosen) formalized the concepts, there will be an inevitable side discussion about language, linguistics, semantics, definitions, and a whole bunch of other things relating to meaning. There are subtle but important differences in the way my father phrased various things, from one place to another, throughout the body of written work he created. Unless one is preternaturally insightful, one is likely to misconstrue various seemingly contradictory statements or definitions that give the impression of inconsistency. The most important thing to remember when reading my father's work is that context is nearly always essential. He will define a concept a certain way in one paragraph, using a phrase like;"in this sense, we can say that the system is..." and then in the next chapter he will define the same word a different way. The phrase; "in this sense," is the tip-off that the context has to be kept with the definition or else the definition won't make sense in any larger framework of Rosennean ideas. Some people take a definition out of a paragraph and reproduce it, standing alone, as if that definition is a general one. Bad idea, because that is rarely the case. The good news is that once you get the hang of how he did things, language-wise, it becomes easier to navigate through his work. When in doubt, go back and check the context. There is another aspect to language, in regards to my "translation" of my father's ideas, that needs to be discussed here at the beginning. I feel a need to make certain caveats at the outset of this whole enterprise-- my own version of ethical "full disclosure". I want to take steps to ensure that nobody gets a false impression (about who I am and what I'm doing) and builds expectations on such an unstable foundation. False impressions and unrealistic expectations are a pain in the ass, if I may be so honest. It's easier to avoid trouble than to remediate it. So, here goes: The first caveat is; I AM NOT A SCIENTIST. Never was, never will be. I'm a writer and an artist, among other things. As such, the only qualification I lay claim to is my knowledge of Robert Rosen and his work. I do believe that I am the only one on this planet who knew both the man and the work equally well. Secondly: I AM NOT A POLITICIAN, A SERMONIZER, A MISSIONARY, A DIPLOMAT, OR MY FATHER. I already know these things, but I want to make sure anyone else reading these "blog" entries also knows it-- and knows that I know it, etc... Jack Park has exhorted me to be as politically correct as possible, in this experiment. That's not easy for me to do, because given a choice between honesty and political correctness, I tend to prefer honesty. I love it when George Carlin or Dennis Leary goes on a rampage about how sick they are of Political Correctness... But I also understand Jack's point: I cannot abide abusiveness or injustice or prejudice in anyone, especially myself. I try really hard to root such things out when I discover them in my own thought process. I can't tell you I have achieved perfection in that effort-- mainly because I can promise that I HAVEN'T! I'm a human being who is discussing the work of a man I loved, deeply, and will always love. He was my best friend. He was my mentor, my teacher, my Star Trek buddy, my biggest role model, my favorite restaurant companion, and the most fun to talk to of anyone that I've ever known. In short; I'm BIASED. Not only that, but I'm protective of people I love. So be warned: a sure way to get on my wrong side is to make a personal attack against my Dad. I don't have any problem with people disagreeing with my father's work and saying so. Similarly, I don't have any problem with people discussing alternate points of view to my father's. I am not and never was under the impression that my father was "always right". (Nobody is always right!) Robert Rosen was far too interesting to be perfect, trust me. So I don't have the man or the work up on a pedestal. But this forum is meant as a place to talk about the science, the implications, and the applications. My intention is to offer information you can't get anywhere else but from me. If you're reading this, after everything I've already said, I can only assume you must be interested in such information. So let's stick to constructive criticism and intelligent discussion about ideas, not personal criticism about the man. Fair enough? Bottom line is that I promise to do my best to stick to the Golden Rule as a guiding principle throughout this experiment. I think it's probably a guarantee that I'll mess up somewhere, without meaning to. My sense of humor, alone, is irrepressible. It's hard to squash sometimes. Then there's my awkward tendency to say what I really think. After that, we have my blatantly liberal outlook and my dislike of orthadoxies of any kind. The final flaw is a tendency to fire back when fired upon. But I'll do my best-- that I can promise. I'll even apologize in advance for the times I may inadvertantly offend someone. It's hard to write about controversial ideas for a potentially global audience, without offending SOMEONE. I also think there's a danger in trying to hard to not offend, because the message gets lost when the mode is made more important. There is certainly no way to ever please everyone, but I will try to post these ideas with decorum and grace so that they at least don't offend.... most of you. Judith Rosen April 28, 2004 # [>]

posted at 03:02 AM #

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