Re: [Fis] Continuing Discussion of Social and Cultural Complexity
Loet wrote: Yes: because the economy is equilibrating. Innovations upset the tendency towards equilibrium (Schumpeter) and thus induce cycles into the economy. This is the very subject of evolutionary economics. Marx's problem was that the cycles cannot be stopped and have a tendency to become self-reinforcing. However, the modern state adds the institutional mechanism as another subdynamics. Besides innovations, even stronger cause of instability of the capitalist economy is its tendency to create diversity as a consequence of competitive interactions. Diversity, like in ecosystems, means redundancy and informational entropy (just think about the variety of any consumer product available on the market). Because of general technical constraints in production (production indivisibility, economy of scale, etc.) and forward-looking investment decisions which are based on incomplete information, redundancy of firms transfers aperiodically in absolute redundancy of output (overcapacity) that clears itself during the downward phase of the economic cycle. Marx was right in that the cycles cannot be stopped but wrong on the prediction that they will become worse. After the Great Depression an nstitutional toolbox of countercyclical policies was gradually put in effect, which constrained the absolute values of peaks and bottoms, but did not eliminate the business cycle. Redundancy/diversity, on the other hand, is essential for competition and innovation to persist in a economy. It creates informational entropy and gives a momentum to material/energy entropy production, as the constant influx of diversity maintains the economic system in it juvenile, highly dissipative state. Best Igor - Original Message - From: Loet Leydesdorff [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: 'Stanley N. Salthe' [EMAIL PROTECTED]; fis@listas.unizar.es Sent: Monday, March 05, 2007 8:22 AM Subject: RE: [Fis] Continuing Discussion of Social and Cultural Complexity It is indeed tempting to suppose that, in the philosophical perspective, the object of human economies is to produce entropy! STAN Yes: because the economy is equilibrating. Innovations upset the tendency towards equilibrium (Schumpeter) and thus induce cycles into the economy. This is the very subject of evolutionary economics. Marx's problem was that the cycles cannot be stopped and have a tendency to become self-reinforcing. However, the modern state adds the institutional mechanism as another subdynamics. I am sometimes using the metaphor of a triple helix among these three difference subsystems of communication and control: economic equilibration, institutional regulation, and innovation. A triple helix unlike a double one cannot be expected to stabilize (in a coevolution), but remains meta-stable with possible globalization. I suppose that this has happened. With best wishes, Loet ___ fis mailing list fis@listas.unizar.es http://webmail.unizar.es/mailman/listinfo/fis ___ fis mailing list fis@listas.unizar.es http://webmail.unizar.es/mailman/listinfo/fis
Re: [Fis] Continuing Discussion of Social and Cultural Complexity
reply to Karl: In fact I meant it creates informational entropy for an external observer. For the sake of precision, we may say that diversity neither get created nor it is always there - it evolves - initially there was no diversity at all, than it increased discontinuously in evolutionary time. Best Igor - Original Message - From: karl javorszky To: fis@listas.unizar.es Sent: Thursday, March 08, 2007 1:00 PM Subject: Re: [Fis] Continuing Discussion of Social and Cultural Complexity Let me add to Igor's points about instability: Redundancy/diversity, on the other hand, is essential ... It creates informational entropy and gives a momentum to material/energy entropy production ... that redundancy/diversity DOES NOT GET CREATED it isd always there, but we choose to neglect it, because Darwin has preferred those who recognise the constant, alike, similar before the background of diversity and similarity. The background DOES NOT GET CREATED by the figures in the foreground, it is there. In our case, it is the background of discontinuity before which we recognise the uniformity, continuity and existence of our logical units. Karl -- ___ fis mailing list fis@listas.unizar.es http://webmail.unizar.es/mailman/listinfo/fis ___ fis mailing list fis@listas.unizar.es http://webmail.unizar.es/mailman/listinfo/fis
Re: [Fis] Continuing Discussion of Social and Cultural Complexity
Guy wrote: I agree with Loet and Pedro that it seems important to distinguish between environmental constraints (including material constraints emanating from the qualities of components of a system) and self-imposed limitations associated with the particular path taken as a dynamical system unfolds through time. This distinction is recognized in ecological economics with natural environment as an ultimate material (sorurce and sink) constraint and institutions as socially self-imposed limitations that send a sociatey along only one of the available pathways of evolution. Best Igor - Original Message - From: Guy A Hoelzer [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Pedro Marijuan [EMAIL PROTECTED]; fis@listas.unizar.es Sent: Tuesday, February 27, 2007 8:29 PM Subject: Re: [Fis] Continuing Discussion of Social and Cultural Complexity Greetings, I agree with Loet and Pedro that it seems important to distinguish between environmental constraints (including material constraints emanating from the qualities of components of a system) and self-imposed limitations associated with the particular path taken as a dynamical system unfolds through time. In other words, I see some information being generated by the dynamics of a system, much of which can emerge from the interaction between a system and the constraints of it's environment. I have come to this view largely by considering the process of biological development. For example, I have come to the conclusion that the genome is far from a blueprint of a phenotype, although it is more than a static list of building parts. I see the genome as containing a small fraction of the information ultimately represented by an adult organism, and I think that most of that information is generated internally to the system as a consequence of the interaction between the genome and its environment. Regards, Guy on 2/27/07 6:24 AM, Pedro Marijuan at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Dear colleagues, As for the first track (planning vs. markets) I would try to plainly put the informational problem in terms of distinction on the adjacent (Guy has also argued in a similar vein). Social structures either in markets or in central plans become facultative instances of networking within the whole social set. Then the market grants the fulfillment of any weak-functional bonding potentiality, in terms of say energy, speed, materials or organization of process; while the planning instances restrict those multiple possibilities of self-organization to just a few rigid instances of hierarchical networking. This is very rough, but if we relate the nodes (individuals living their lives, with the adjacency-networking structure, there appears some overall congruence on info terms... maybe. On the second track, about hierarchies and boundary conditions, shouldn't we distinguish more clearly between the latter (bound. cond.) and constraints? If I am not wrong, boundary conditions talk with our system and mutually establish which laws have to be called into action, which equations.. But somehow constraints reside within the laws, polishing their parameter space and fine-tuning which version will talk, dressing it more or less. These aspects contribute to make the general analysis of the dynamics of open systems a pain on the neck--don't they? I will really appreciate input from theoretical scientist about this rough comment. best regards Pedro ___ fis mailing list fis@listas.unizar.es http://webmail.unizar.es/mailman/listinfo/fis ___ fis mailing list fis@listas.unizar.es http://webmail.unizar.es/mailman/listinfo/fis ___ fis mailing list fis@listas.unizar.es http://webmail.unizar.es/mailman/listinfo/fis
Re: [Fis] Continuing Discussion of Social and Cultural Complexity
Dear Pedro the mediation of markets for the production and distribution of goods and services that serve the majority of human needs is possible also outside of the capitalistic system, albeit its dynamics is then slower and the rate of novelty and technological change it may generate is significantly lower. The case in point is the system of socialist self-management which was operative in the former Yugoslavia for the period of 40 years. It was the combination of plan and market, which was more efficient than the Soviet planning system but less efficient than the Western, full market model. However, it was very efficient in bringing the bread and butter to the everyday table. Insisting on surrogates, eg, hierarchical schemes, or even most of complexity science, is worse than wrong: self-defeating, cul-de-sac. Well, social science may use all kind of tools and models, including statistical and econometric modeling, but also narratives and agent-based modelling, all depending on the problem at hand. What we cannot hope to achieve is the precision and reliability of the same models and tools when used for problems in natural sciences. This has been known for long - but choice do we have...? Best Igor - Original Message - From: Pedro Marijuan [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: fis@listas.unizar.es Sent: Wednesday, February 21, 2007 12:45 PM Subject: Re: [Fis] Continuing Discussion of Social and Cultural Complexity Dear Igor and Stan, Just a couple of pills to continue the e-conversation. Rather than an outlandish theme, I consider this discussion of social complexity as central to FIS agenda and --should be crucial-- to the new science of this century. it is so obvious that our personal limitations and the limitations of our shared knowledge are not conducing to proper managements of social complexity, either in economic, political, ecological (global warming), or energy grounds... As often argued in this list, the mental schemes and modes of thought so successful in physics during past centuries, do not provide those overall contemplations needed for the social realm. Insisting on surrogates, eg, hierarchical schemes, or even most of complexity science, is worse than wrong: self-defeating, cul-de-sac. The realm of economy is almost pure information. Rather than planning, markets are very clever ways to handle informational complexity. They partake a number of formal properties (eg, power laws) indicating that they work as info conveyors on global, regional sectorial, local scales. Paradoxically, rational planning can take a man to the moon, or win a war, but cannot bring bread and butter to the breakfast table every day. Planning only, lacks the openness, flexibility, resilience, etc. of markets. A combination of both, with relative market superiority looks better... with regards, Pedro ___ fis mailing list fis@listas.unizar.es http://webmail.unizar.es/mailman/listinfo/fis ___ fis mailing list fis@listas.unizar.es http://webmail.unizar.es/mailman/listinfo/fis
Re: [Fis] Continuing Discussion of Social and Cultural Complexity
Dear Pedro
regarding social openness: very tenuous rumor may destroy an entire company,
or put a sector on its knees.. This can only happen if there is a
fundamental reason for the company or the sector to get into trouble (e.g. time
before the collapse the WorldCom had been in financial troubles but was
corrupting its accounting data to hide it). Therefore, a rumor is only a
trigger, and if it is rumor only, nothing will happen to the system.
When I refer to {biological {sociocultural }} constraints in understanding and
managing complexity I primarily have in mind the nature of constraints as such,
in terms that certain things cannot or are not likely to happen under their
influence. For example, our brains cannot handle more than 3 or 4 variables at
one time and grasp their causative interrelations, so we have a natural
heuristic process that cuts trough the many and reduces it to few. This
results in oversimplification of the reality and overemphasizing of the
variables that were not left out. A lot political and economic reasoning
suffers from that bias. Mathematical procedures and modeling can help us with
this biological constraint but math, unfortunately, did not prove itself yet to
be helpful to deal complex social problems. Artificial societies may be a
hopeful way, but this is yet to be seen.
Another biological constraint on our capacity to manage complex social reality
is that we intermittently use rational procedures and emotions, so a situation
which may be solved by an analytic process can erupt in conflict only because
certain words have been uttered or misinterpreted, which steers the whole
interaction and the problem solving process in a different direction. This
biological trait is only partially controlled by the culture at the next
integrative level, trough norms and rules of behavior (institutions).
The impact of sociocultural constraints on managing complexity is evident form
my last example on managing the energy sector: there is no reason as why the
energy sector could not be managed in a fully planned and rational way by a
group of experts who would optimize the production and transmission processes.
Did we need the market process to send the spacecraft to the Moon or it was a
large-scale project carefully managed for years before it succeeded? Or, is the
carbon trading the best response to climate change problem? However, the
primacy of markets is part of our dominant worldview, so we have the propensity
to exclude other options that may do the job better or with less uncertainty.
So I have the feeling that as we continue to build more socio-economic
complexity our biological and cultral capabilities to manage it are lagging
seriously behind.
The best
Igor
Original Message -
From: Pedro Marijuan
To: fis@listas.unizar.es
Sent: Friday, February 16, 2007 2:46 PM
Subject: Re: [Fis] Continuing Discussion of Social and Cultural Complexity
Dear Igor and colleagues,
I have the impression that there is an agreement about the existence of
biological and sociocultural constraints that impact on our ability to
understand and manage socioeconomic complexity. These constraints are organized
hierarchically, as Stan puts it, {biological {sociocultural }}.
I would agree that this is the way to organize our explanations. But
dynamically the real world is open at all levels: very simple amplification or
feed forward processes would produce phenomena capable of escalating levels and
percolate around (e.g., minuscule oxidation-combustion phenomena initiating
fires that scorch ecosystems, regions). Socially there is even more openness:
a very tenuous rumor may destroy an entire company, or put a sector on its
knees... Arguing logically about those hierarchical schemes may be interesting
only for semi-closed, capsule like entities, but not really for say
(individuals (cities (countries)))... My contention is that we should produce
a new way of thinking going beyond that classical systemic, non-informational
view.
To some extent, it may be a sign of diminishing returns to complexity in
problem solving that Joe addressed in his book The collapse of complex
societies... If we cannot manage the energy sector to serve certain social and
economic goals, how can we hope to be able to manage more complex situations
like the climate change, poverty reduction and population growth in the South?
Did we reach the limits (cognitive and cultural) to manage our complex
world?
After the industrial revolution, on average every passing generation (say
each 30 years) has doubled both the material and the immaterial basis of
societies: social wealth, income, accumulated knowledge, scientific fields,
technological development, social complexity... provided the environment could
withstand, maybe the process of generational doubling would continue around
almost indefinitely, or maybe not! Euristic visions like
Re: [Fis] Re: Continuing Discussion of Social and Cultural Complexity
Reply to Steven and Ted By genetic constraints I assume you simply mean that we have certain capacities and are not omnipotent. Is not conflict and war an indicator of our individual failure to manage social complexity? Or would you argue that war is social complexity management? I was referring to the hypothesis that we have the propensity to function in relatively small groups bind by strong cultural bonds. Since our species did evolve in small bands, this social trait may have some genetic underpinnings. Our disposition to use violence, to exercise power over others, and to use emotions in dealing with social problems is likely to have genetic basis because we find similar traits also in primates. In this context, conflict and war are to be seen as an indicator of our individual and social failure to deal with challenges of social complexity. To put it tentatively simple: globalization with its economic interdependence, migrations with its cultural mixing but not melting, and the fact that the planet is becoming a crowded place because of population growth in the South, creates a particular aspect of social complexity, for which effective handling we may have certain, species-specific, biological limits. If these biological limits are hard to prove, then we call in a bad record in our history concerning our cultural ability to handle the other, the different, to make major institutional changes without recurring to violence, etc.. On the other hand, we may have cognitive limits to deal with the implications of social and technological complexity that we have created so recently in our evolution. Ted wrote: I do believe that there are limits to complexity of any system. I believe the limits exhibit not only in the behavior of the system as seen by that actions of its members, but also in the abstractions those members use in the information that is exchanged. Ted, can you give us an example from the social realm for your statement My understanding is that when those information abstractions (which evolve with the system) become overloaded, a new level of the system is created, with new, cleaner abstractions. Best Igor ___ fis mailing list fis@listas.unizar.es http://webmail.unizar.es/mailman/listinfo/fis
Re: [Fis] Re: Continuing Discussion of Social and Cultural Complexity
Dear All I agree with Pedro's perspective, it looks very reasonable from the standpoint of social sciences. I would like to put a question to Joe and other colleagues regarding the constraints of managing social complexity (whatever, objective or perceived). Humanity has reached a high historical degree of interconnectance, where we exchange material (products), energy, and information over a variety of different pathways and across the globe. At the same time we have been introducing new chemical compounds, new materials (e.g. nanotechnology) and even new species in the natural and human environment. This at a pace which is likely to favor unintended consequences. New institutions (rules, habits, organizations) emerge to deal with the complexity of these overlapping networks of communication and material exchange. These come at a cost for a society, a cost which is not only monetary or material but also taxes our ability to deal with the overwhelming information that is produced in the process. In a way we tend to produce complexity and respond to its challenges by introducing more complexity. Joe emphasized in his work the importance of diminishing returns to complexity in problem solving. Considering that we necessarily operate under certain genetic constraints, are there (absolute) upper limits to our ability to manage social complexity? I guess that there are also cultural constraints involved here, and that these can be stretched to some limit, but eventually, a threshold is reached where the culture may not be stretched beyond our biological underpinnings. The best Igor - Original Message - From: Pedro Marijuan [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: fis@listas.unizar.es Sent: Wednesday, January 31, 2007 2:04 PM Subject: [Fis] Re: Continuing Discussion of Social and Cultural Complexity Dear Joe and colleagues, Thanks for the new angle. The problem on how to ascribe complexity looks quite complex in itself... It connects with the aspect of decomposability in parts / components of entities which surfaced last month (when arguing on the human factor). For obscure reasons, maybe connected with the philosophical and methodological dominance of reductionism, we have not assimilated yet that informationally open systems (or entities) cannot be treated in isolation neither of their boundary conditions, nor of their intrinsic activity. The brain itself is an excellent case in point. Depending on both external boundaries and inner propensities it is not complex nor simple: it depends. (Thus I agree with the comments below). However, it should not be read as an argument in defense of relativism or radical perspectivism. Rather it means that informationally open entities cannot be treated cavalierly in the same way than mechanical, closed entities ... they are structured in a different, strange way. Perhaps this type of proper, general treatment should be, in other words, the info sci. methodology, the so much looked after sci. of open systems. regards, Pedro At 22:31 26/01/2007, you wrote: So the brain is simple for this purpose. Therein lies the broader question. Is the complexity of the brain relative to the perspective of the analyst? Or is the complexity of the brain innate? Surely a simple brain of three parts could not generate social and cultural complexity as we know them? But to a doctor treating a patient with epilepsy, this is irrelevant. The brain is simple, and so is the treatment. Inevitably we are led to more general issues. Is social/cultural complexity an attribute of a society/culture, or is it an attribute of the observer's perspective? Is complexity innate or asscribed? Clearly this question applies to any kind of complex system, not just social or cultural ones. ___ fis mailing list fis@listas.unizar.es http://webmail.unizar.es/mailman/listinfo/fis ___ fis mailing list fis@listas.unizar.es http://webmail.unizar.es/mailman/listinfo/fis
Fw: [Fis] INTRODUCING SOCIAL AND CULTURAL COMPLEXITY[Fis] INTRODUCING SOCIAL AND CULTURAL COMPLEXITY
I am sorry for crossposting - but it seams that the message was rejected by the server - Original Message - From: Igor Matutinovic To: fis@listas.unizar.es Sent: Sunday, December 10, 2006 6:35 PM Subject: [Fis] INTRODUCING SOCIAL AND CULTURAL COMPLEXITY[Fis] INTRODUCING SOCIAL AND CULTURAL COMPLEXITY Joe posed the question Are there other concepts of complexity that can fruitfully be applied to human systems? Besides structural and organizational aspects of social (and ecological) complexity that Joe mentioned in his text, there is a cognitive aspect of complexity that is peculiar to human systems. It concerns directly the issue of information processing and, consequently, the nature of the problem solving process, which Joe identified as one of the causes producing social complexity. Cognitive aspect of complexity in social systems can have at least three distinct dimensions. One deals with the virtual impossibility for humans to gather all the available information and compute the optimal decision among the possible alternatives. In literature this is usually called the problem of bounded rationality. Another dimension of complexity comes from the fact that human decision making is not only bounded by technical constraints related to information gathering and processing but is also significantly constrained by a bias that comes from the set of basic values and beliefs about the world and a society that a decision maker holds in his mind. In that sense certain solutions to a problem, which are technically accessible and rational, perhaps even optimal for an external observer, are discarded or unrecognized as such because they clash with certain socially shared beliefs and values (a worldview). The third dimension might refer to self-referentiallity of human systems: we are inclined to conform our behavior to the predictions of our models of the world (e.g. self-fulfilling prophecies). According to Felix Geyer, self-referentiallity in human systems (called also second-order cybernetics) implies that a social system collects information about its functioning which in turn may alter this very functioning. The outcome of such a process is, however, unpredictable and may be recognized as a semiotic problem: what signs, among many, are captured as information, and what is its societal interpretation? Obviously, the specific cognitive dimensions of social systems, namely bounded rationality, perceptual bias that arise from a worldview, and self-referentiallity add to the complexity of societies which may be really different in kind (I refer here to Stan's remark that social complexity and ecological complexity look like different applications, not kinds). There appears simply to be more degrees of freedom in a social system which are also qualitatively different from ecological. Igor Dr. Igor Matutinovic Managing Director GfK-Center for Market Research Draskoviceva 54 100 00 Zagreb, Croatia Tel: 385 1 48 96 222, 4921 222 Fax: 385 1 49 21 223 www.gfk.hr ___ fis mailing list fis@listas.unizar.es http://webmail.unizar.es/mailman/listinfo/fis
Re: [Fis] The Identity of Ethics
Stan wrote:
.. At present I am considering that, if we allocate the same energies at
each level, then the remaining degrees of freedom in the higher levels will
benefit from having stronger embodiment than would have been possible in the
lower levels.That is to say that, e.g., behaviors which could only be weakly
supported in,
say, the biological level, become more possible to be manifested in, say,
the social level.
This reminds me of Konrad Loren'z conjecture expressed in his famous book
The so called Evil, that moral rules in human societies arise as a
compensation for a weak suppressing mechanism for intra-species aggression
at the genetic level. Genetic mechanism for aggression suppression in animal
species is positively correlated with their naturally weaponry (strong claws
and teeth). As humans do not possess strong somatic weapons but have
developed in the course of cultural evolution a strong ensemble of
extrasomatic ones, their biological basis for aggression suppression has
been further enhanced at the social level.
The best
Igor
- Original Message -
From: Stanley N. Salthe [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: fis@listas.unizar.es
Sent: Saturday, May 06, 2006 10:56 PM
Subject: Re: [Fis] The Identity of Ethics
Replying to Pedro's query below, we can have:
{physical / chemical affordances {biological behaviors {cultural norms
{social guidance {personal past learnings {{{...{continuing process of
individuation...}. Some of us would place ethics somewhere
between
social guidance and personal past learnings. An interesting question in
this scheme is 'where is transcendence?' The problem is that there is
added, with each integrative level, further constraints. At present I am
considering that, if we allocate the same energies at each level, then the
remaining degrees of freedom in the higher levels will benefit from having
stronger embodiment than would have been possible in the lower levels.
That
is to say that, e.g., behaviors which could only be weakly supported in,
say, the biological level, become more possible to be manifested in, say,
the social level.
STAN
Dear FIS colleagues,
The question recently raised by Luis, but also in a different way by Karl,
Stan and others, is a tough one. How do our formal disciplinary
approaches fare when confronting the global reality of social life? My
point is that most of knowledge impinging on social life matters is of
informal, implicit, practical, experiential nature. How can one gain
access
to cognitive stocks of such volatile nature? Only by living, by
socializing, by a direct hands-on participation... Each new generation
has
to find its own way, to co-create its own socialization path. No moral or
ethical progress then!!! (contrarily to the advancement of other areas of
knowledge). Obviously, learning machines or techno environments cannot
substitute for a socialization process --a side note for prophets of the
computational.
By the way, in those nice categorizations by Stan --it isn't logically
awkward that the subject tries to be both subject and observer at the same
time? If it is so, the categorization process goes amok with social
openness of relations and language open-endedness, I would put. Karl's
logic is very strict, provided one remains strictly within the same set of
reference. Anyhow, it is a very intriguing discussion.
best
Pedro
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