There is something which one could call the “Pirx paradigm”, coming from Stanislav Lem:
The complexity of really nontrivial questions surpasses that of the formalized methods used by the conscious part of the scientist’s mind. Only the whole mind’s complexity meets the questions in view of complexity and flexibility. Therefore, a great mind/scientist works with his complete personality, which e.g. expresses in the observable unique and personal way big scientists write their work. What one perceives as “humbleness”, puzzlement, irrational curiosity, unsecurity or absentmindedness are then actually the marks of essential parts of the personality outside the narrow frame of conscious procedures (personal feelings, memories, associations, Lem stressed explicitely “honesty” too, because that is the absence of conscious “trickyness”).
Lem discussed in some of his stories the contrasting side too—the deformation and degeneration of attempted, but conscious and therefore subcomplex, “rationality” into crackpot-science and crackpot-engineering. There, seemingly rational approaches gradually exchange the issues to be tackled (and the parts of nature in which they are embedded) by misfigured echos of the researcher/engineer’s neurosis and mental entropy. I recommend to take a look into Lem’s stories: The Inquest, Ananke, Test.
There is something which one could call the “Pirx paradigm”, coming from Stanislav Lem:
The complexity of really nontrivial questions surpasses that of the formalized methods used by the conscious part of the scientist’s mind. Only the whole mind’s complexity meets the questions in view of complexity and flexibility. Therefore, a great mind/scientist works with his complete personality, which e.g. expresses in the observable unique and personal way big scientists write their work. What one perceives as “humbleness”, puzzlement, irrational curiosity, unsecurity or absentmindedness are then actually the marks of essential parts of the personality outside the narrow frame of conscious procedures (personal feelings, memories, associations, Lem stressed explicitely “honesty” too, because that is the absence of conscious “trickyness”).
Lem discussed in some of his stories the contrasting side too—the deformation and degeneration of attempted, but conscious and therefore subcomplex, “rationality” into crackpot-science and crackpot-engineering. There, seemingly rational approaches gradually exchange the issues to be tackled (and the parts of nature in which they are embedded) by misfigured echos of the researcher/engineer’s neurosis and mental entropy. I recommend to take a look into Lem’s stories: The Inquest, Ananke, Test.
BTW, this MIT reserach program looks very much like one of Lem’s jokes...