Such a book should of course contain a big cautionary note on
the use of buzzwords. Buzzwords are especially frequent in the
area of complex systems, they are helpful to sell something,
but sometimes problematic in order to understand something.
Self-organization, "emergence", and "edge of chaos" are some
of these fascinating and sometimes frustrating concepts.
Yet how far-reaching are they really ? I think it is important
to say clearly once and for all what is possible and what is
not, to distinguish between buzz and facts, although probably
not everybody would like to hear the truth.
For instance self-organizing systems in the strict sense as
organization without organizer are rare (and therefore also
interesting), whereas adaptive systems are common, etc.
You might disagree here, certainly it will be hard to come
to an agreement about every buzzword, but I think it's worth it.
The hallmark of a science is the existence of basic laws,
We discussed recently for example the question of necessity
and chance - if there are laws of history or if the events
are just accidental ("Does it matter that there was a Napoleon,
a Beethoven, a Newton, etc.").
Interesting questions that could be addressed further are:
"Why is growth so fundamental for many organizations and systems?"
"To what extent are there laws of history?"
"Is there a unified theory for complex systems in terms of agents ?"
"What are the basic agent-based models ?"
"How do laws and rules appear in such systems ?"
"Is a theory of everything identical to a theory of nothing?"
We have discussed many of these questions here, and I think
they have to be answered if we want to make a step forward
on the road to a theory of complex systems. Anyone else
interested in contributing to such a book ? What other
questions should be on the agenda (besides the one if
Robert is a deterministic system or not?)
-J.
-----Original Message-----
From: Phil Henshaw
Sent: Saturday, July 29, 2006 2:59 PM
To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group'
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] FRIAM book
It's always a great idea for someone to synthesize the diverse
directions of an expanding fringe of research. It's curious, though,
that the book idea was immediately preceded by a cautionary note on the
contagious invasion of buzzwords. The surest way to force buzzwords to
mean something useful is to connect them with the observed phenomena of
the physical world, but I find the whole complexity community quite
resistant to doing that. As a community we'd clearly prefer to think of
complexity as theory.
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