Well, Nicholas Thompson wrote: > Ok, let me ask the question less coyly. Most of the impact of complexity > has been to tunnel under and loosen the foundations of ordinary science. > Aeration (in moderation) is good for the garden. One likes to believe we can do more, though. > Is that correct, or is it not? One of the important messages of > complexity is that no matter what we know about a process, we cannot ever > know what it is going to do next. Let's not so fully conflate Chaos with Complexity. It seems to me that the Complexity work enables us to search for better sense of what the available transformations and paths are, though of course it is not news that a better characterization of climate (or biological development) doesn't necessarily tell us what the weather will be two weeks from now. Especially in Santa Fe. > It is like the problem of induction: no > matter how much evidence we collect for the proposition that Grass is > green, that evidence equally supports the proposition that grass is > "grue", i.e., green up til the time we stopped measuring it, and blue > thereafter. So in order to do any inference, we have to believe aprori > that properties like grue are just shitty properties and we arent going to > consider them. With enough properties, you can wave parameter settings around in the dark and say anything. > But think of some of those models in A NEW KIND OF SCIENCE > that are "green" for a gazillion repllications only suddenly to bloom into > "blueness" on the 34, 739th run. Shorn of semantic context, the new improved clarity does not seem much of an improvement on the good old-fashioned kind. A definition, perhaps, of compost. Oh boy, more compost... (this seems harsh, but it's directed towards the book). > Surely complexity tells us that there is > Grueness in the world. Complexity (or any community of practice) does not "tell" us anything, any more than a microscope "tells" us specifics about cells. It may, we hope, enable better contextualization of a set of environments and issues, and thereby help some community of practice gain better focus on a set of problems. > What can complexity science do other than humble us all? If scientists > dont induct, then they dont DEduct because every deduction requires an > induction along the way. So what DO we do? Build social consensus? > Ugh!!!! > > Nick From Corfield, "For Lakatos the remedy is to take a larger entity as the right unit to assess a piece of science. This is his notion of a /research programme/, a series of theories, with a unifying heuristic spirit which provides the resources for deciding which path to travel, how to react to obstacles, and so on. Rationality is not about which proposition to believe, but about which programme it is rational to sign up to..." He goes on to talk about how communities of practice may emerge around such research programs.
Consensus building around such a focus does seem to be more a core (necessary though not necessarily sufficient) of complexity or any other science, so I'm not prepared to say Ugh here. As to hope here, I see it more in Havel's terms, not so much the conviction that our work will turn out well or contribute to some worthy cause, but the certainty that what we are doing makes sense. In that context, opposite of complexity is not simplicity, for simplicity is about accessibility and exposition. The opposite of complexity is the inconsequential, the trivial, the banal. So, complexity is about sense-making and focus; it's a good thing. Carl ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
