My opinion is probably the least credible. But here it is anyway. Rosen's achievement was just like every other theoretician's achievement. He formulated hypotheses that *may* be testable. The Mikulecky paper Steve posted states one of them fairly well:
Mikulecky wrote: > The functional component itself is totally dependent on the context of the > whole system and has no meaning outside that context. This is why reducing > the system to its material parts loses information irreversibly. This is a > cornerstone to the overall discovery Rosen made. It captures a real > difference between complexity and reductionism which no other approach seems > to have been able to formulate. This distinction makes it impossible to > confuse computer models with complex systems. Rosen's formulation of the hypothesis has led to a number of attempts to find a counter example. And those attempts have been much criticized. Whatever one's conclusion about those attempts, the hypothesis is clear *enough* to allow those attempts to be in good faith. (E.g. Chu and Ho "A Category Theoretical Argument against the Possibility of Artificial Life".) Rosen's is yet another way to formulate (and perhaps formalize, if you believe Louie's work) the strong AI question. E.g. can human mathematicians do math in ways computers cannot? Personally, my favorite attempt at a counter example is Feferman's "schematic axiomatic formal systems". But the same basic hypothesis has resulted in some fun things like Penrose's objective reduction and Homotopy Type Theory's unification theorem. Does Rosen's formulation do any more work than the others? Probably not. But if it's true that science doesn't produce answers, only more questions, then Rosen's work qualifies because it's produced some interesting questions (or ways to ask the same question). Whether that body of questions is interesting to any particular person is a matter of their taste and history. On 10/24/18 2:01 PM, John Kennison wrote: > I guess I have missed much of the conversation on this issue. Maybe my > comments are way too late, but I would appreciate it if someone with a more > positive view of Rosen would try to explain what it is that Rosen achieved. -- ☣ uǝlƃ ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
