Steve, Good, so if we're "only to create a similarly huge number of unconsidered regions" by acknowledging that some systems are both highly systematic and completely out of control, let's pick it apart a little. It is indeed sad that we seem to need such dramatic demonstrations as having our whole economic world vaporize to get our attention. The Missouri mule problem I guess, a little something to spark our attention. My take, for many years, is that standard procedure is the problem, systematically transferring earned incomes to unearned incomes, by accumulative %'s. In a physical world that's the only cause needed. So I think that's what we're seeing snap back this week, the elastic links between limitless and limited things, as I and others have said would be the direct consequence of continuing to use that procedure while waiting to see what would happened. After a rubber band has snapped there's less one can do, of course, but still worth having strategies reflect an understanding of the problem.
I think there are several kinds of "uncontrolled systems". Some appear uncontrolled but actually represent continuing unaltered regular processes, like random walks, chaotic systems, bifurcation and ABM systems where all the parts follow the same unchanging rules. That sets a kind of odd partition, as these all seem to be "logical systems". The ones that don't have rules to follow, and display systematic behaviors that come and go are generally found to be "individual physical systems". Of course that's sort of begging the question, since it's saying that all mathematical control is 'imaginary' and has to work through individual physical systems that are uncontrolled, but that's one of the weird walls (categorical differences) I think you naturally run into. One of the most interesting groups of uncontrolled phenomena are the temporary divergent processes, maybe looking like a kind of 'tunneling' through potential barriers, that may be rather quick but you can often catch a glimpse of. Energy transfer by fluid convection begins like that, as when warm air is under cool air and needs to have a 'hole' in the barrier layers above develop to make the energy flow channel. The little "run-aways" that start that process don't seem to have precedents or to be responding to any influence from what will disrupt them later, but to propagate freely for a short period. That separation between things that will collide but can't respond to approaching collision till it happens. is a key characteristic. Another more personal example would be your own quick smile in waving to a friend that carries no pretense of the grimace, when in your exuberance, your hand accidentally clips the person you're sitting with. I did that this week!! Those kinds of systems that are part of "happening" wouldn't work at all the same way if there wasn't space and time gaps between them, their beginnings, ends and collisions, etc. Whether predictable or not, individual events often start with events that have no past and then as they develop, shuttle back and forth between being divergent from everything around them and then achieving behavior quite close to some equilibrium. That when they run into things that have no past for them they are disrupted and change form in locally emergent ways puts the same big "?" at the end of the chain too. It's not that one couldn't perhaps develop a 'God's eye view' of local circumstances and devise some equation that could imitate recorded measures, and get a reasonable single circumstance emulation. Modeling artificially controlled conditions has worked extremely well for lots of things. The larger operational definition of 'uncontrolled' then is all the stuff which that method and interest in control hasn't worked for, and then throw in all interests other than control we might have asked about. The trick for exploring the divergent processes in my view is that the parts that are interacting don't have the option to know the unknown, nor a place to store such a formula, or any ways to follow one. They have to act without knowing what they're going to run into. That makes the theory of endless compound multiplying economies, guaranteed to never run into anything, seem more ironic than any irony scale could possibly measure. Yet it "made perfect sense" to so very many! The most useful identifier I found was that the continuity of events requires every systemic change in behavior to begin with a "little bang", a divergent eruption of behaviors having no direct precedent. Where those "little bangs" are evident or implied the uncontrolled systems they initiate I call "independent", in that their beginnings have no precedent causes that the later developed system could have had any information about. Too bad about the several hundred trillion we blew this week. but maybe it'll turn out to be well worth it. It's a little like getting our first peek over the edge of the teacup we thought was the whole universe, full of strange delights. I think that category of uncontrolled individual 'happenings' of conserved change is a big category, and my methods for investigating them is probably of general use and needing work. There might well be other ways to explore them and other kinds of phenomena that can be turned into windows into nature and either fun or useful ways to explore them. Any ideas for what part of the spectrum you'd find interesting to poke into? Phil From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Steve Smith Sent: Thursday, October 09, 2008 3:54 PM To: Aku; The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: [FRIAM] Self-awareness and blind spots Was: Self-awareness Phil - Spot on Phil. I'm CC:ing a friend (Aku) with whom I often discuss this point (thus I'm leaving the cruft at the bottom). Science's biggest failing (perhaps) is it's (natural) blind spots. When I came to LANL in 1981, the Center for Non-Linear Studies was pretty new and for the most part there was little, if any, study of non-linear systems going on in the world. This was mainly because of a lack of tools to work with nonlinear systems. Once (most) scientists got over their fear of computation, many more complex systems could be studied than before. Like the man looking for his lost keys under the streetlamp even though he dropped them a block away "because the light is better here". "... because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns -- the ones we don't know we don't know." - Rummy Rummy is the new Rumi? The emerging work in Science studying itself (primarily through studying Citation Networks) offers some hope that we can begin to fill in some of the blind spots. Our own Marko Rodriguez & friends, for example: http://www2007.org/poster860.php That is not to say (as you seem to here) that we haven't just filled out a huge amount of unexplored territory only to create a similarly huge number of unconsidered regions within that territory. I'm not completely up on your view on this topic but there also seems to be a theme regarding "far from equilibrium systems"? Is that what you mean by "uncontrolled systems"? carry on! - Steve Steve, Well, might you also say science is self-organized to be 'robustly' avoiding the subject of uncontrolled systems too?? If something doesn't come to your attention because you're only looking for something else, it could seem to not exist. How do you explain the very large variety of complex systems that take care of themselves somehow, sharing environments with very low specific variety corresponding to their evident highly complex internal designs and internally coordinated behaviors? Phil -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Steve Smith Sent: Thursday, October 09, 2008 11:48 AM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Self-awareness Well said Russ. Science as a self-organizing system which is relatively robust and self-healing. Russ Abbott wrote: Richard Feynman said that "Science is what we have learned about how not to fool ourselves about the way the world is." To the extent that it achieves that goal, science works even without individual self-awareness. That's really quite an accomplishment, to have created a way of being in the world that succeeds reasonably well without having to depend on individual subjective honesty. For the most part, if we aren't honest with ourselves and with each other, we all suffer negative consequences. Now that I've written that, it seems to me that "honesty with oneself" is not a bad definition of "self-awareness." Another way of putting it is that self-awareness is what keeps us from fooling ourselves about our subjective experience. Contrast this with Feynman's definition. Science works reasonably well even without individual self-awareness in that it relies on community self-verification. In some ways science is the self-awareness of a community of people about what can be known about the world. Obviously science is not about everything -- in particular inter-personal values. But within its domain I think it does a pretty good job of keeping everyone involved reasonably honest -- and especially keeping the community as a whole reasonably honest. There are failures and detours. But they are usually corrected. I hadn't intended my original post to be about science. It was about the importance of self-awareness when dealing with political and governance issues. But now that we are talking about science it's an interesting comparison. Perhaps that's why science has been so successful. It's a methodology that isn't ultimately dependent on individual human honesty. Can we say that about anything else? ============================================================ 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 ============================================================ 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
============================================================ 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
