objectivity, complexity, systems science ala Rosen

DON MIKULECKY (MIKULECKY%VCUVAX.BITNET@letterbox.rl.ac.uk)
Sun, 8 Oct 1995 11:18:52 -0400

Don Mikulecky,MCV/VCU, Mikulecky@gems.vcu.edu
As I promised, here's a section from "Anticipatory Systems" by Robert Rosen,
Pergamon, 1985..pp83...
"One further aspect of [the modeling relation] may be mentioned briefly here.
We are subsequently going to relate our capacity to produce independent
encodings of a given natural system N with the COMPLEXITY of N. Roughly
speaking, the more such encoding we can produce, the more complex we will
regard the system N. Thus, contrary to the traditional views regarding system
complexity, we do not treat complexity as the property of some particular
encoding [note..here's where I am afraid Jeff has led us off the path a bit] ,
and hence indentifiable with the mathematical property of a formal system
(such as dimensionality, number of generators,or the like). Nor is complexity
entirely an objective property of N, in the sense of being itself a directly
perceptible quality, which can be measured by a meter. Rather, complexity
pertains as much to US AS OBSERVERS as it does to N; it reflects OUR ABILITY
TO INTERACT WITH N in such a way as to make its qualities visible to us.
Intuitively speaking, if N is such that we can interact with it in only a few
ways, there will be a correspondingly few distinct encodings we can make of
the qualities we percieve thereby, and N will appear to us as a SIMPLE system;
if N is such that we can interact with it in many ways, we will be able to
produce many distinct encodings, and will correspondingly regard N as complex.
It must be recognized that we are speaking here complexity as an attribute of
NATURAL systems; the same word (complexity) may, and often is, used to
describe some attributes of a FORMAL system. But this involves quite a
different concept, with which we are not presently concerned."

This seems to be as near self contained as possible, but in fact is very
context dependent still. Chapters are devoted to preparig us for this. The
book "Fundamentals of Measurement" lays the grounwork to understanding the
modeling relation in terms of measurement. Others have written lots on the
problem of measurement. And, most clearly, Rosen is challenging our notion of
SCIENTIFIC objectivity without delving into the deeper questions of
subjective/objective human perception at this time. We seem to be going
afield here too.

Be reminded that Rosen has experienced some of the worst of scientific
sociology. His reasons for asking and trying to answer these questions are
bringing us necessarily into the COMPLEX nature of science and epistemology.
Any attempt to "sterilize" this is a reduction of the worst kind and misses
the point entirely. In this sense, Rosen is the ULTIMATE pragmatist as well
as an exquisite theoretician.
I will add a seperate quote on reductionism in the next transmission.
Best regards,
Don Mikulecky