social complexity

Dear FISers,

After Bob's eloquent claims in his last message, I cannot help but
recognizing (once more) the centrality of the VEMS idea concerning the
evolution of social complexity... VEMS have supposed a great start for our
socioinfo discussion, and have proven to be a terrific catalyst for
adumbrating the interconnections between fitness, morals, ethics, social
evolution, consciousness, economics, etc. I also agree that several weeks
of patient exchange and tutorials in between the different scientific
perspectives would be quite enticing, and really necessary. But ours is not
a fashionable topic (at least at the time being) and financing that type of
retreat looks an impossible task. Perhaps in the future things will
change...

Such a number of issues have been related these days to the socioinfo
matters that venturing oneself again into the discussion is really
frightening (I understand very well what you say about that, Bob). Anyhow,
here there are a couple of points:

The "fluidity" of the social and biological stuff is a "calculated" one. It
is the result of optimization processes running across scores of
specialized accounting entities: particularly from cellular signaling
systems to brain substructures and social institutions. I mean, there is
not a mere decay that has to be compensated in an "autopietic" or metabolic
manner, but a (really) calculated integration of opposing
constructive-destructive activities coupled in an endlessly variable way...
the amazing (financial & productive) accounting processes within a
company's life --remember that just only one out of the ten new ones will
survive more than one year-- are mirrored (so to speak) within our brains,
within each of our cells... It wonders me that power laws emerge as a
widespread outcome in most of these calculated fluidities. Please, do not
ask me why--Bak and Scarrott have given two very different responses
(hopefully, thanks to Soeren's and his journal courtesy, we will be able to
connect with Scarrott's paper through the fis site. then we can re-discuss
this matter)

About the role of several crucial inventions in the evolution of biological
complexity, particularly computers in the present "info revolution" (is
in't obvious that they have been the RELEVANT factor?, like printed books
were for renaissance and the scientific revolution, and steam engines were
for industrial revolution--of course this does not mean ONLY factor). But
beyond discussing on adjectives or adverbs, my point is that mostly through
these new artifacts, (as so often in history) we have unleashed powerful
economic-politic-cultural "globalization" forces changing our societies far
beyond our own understanding and social control... Coupled with the
inexorable problem of the ecological limits that the industrial societies
have stumbled upon, this means that the tasks ahead are too big and too
urgent for the very modest "global brain" that we are simultaneously
building thanks to these new technologies. Our survival problems seem to be
growing faster than our problem-solving capabilites...

Perhaps the two presenters originally planned (Tom and Wolfang) would like
to say something about that.

bests

Pedro

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Pedro C. Marijuan. TEL 34 976 761927, FAX --761861 and -- 762111
Dept. Ingen. Electronica y Comunicaciones, CPS Universidad de Zaragoza,
Maria de Luna 3, Zaragoza 50015, SPAIN
email: marijuan@posta.unizar.es
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Received on Wed Nov 25 10:34:58 1998