Dear All,
Continuing with the other issues currently discussed, a nasty problem
around the necessary reductionism / integrationism complementarity revolves
in that while the former is bolstered by a very long tradition and a very
robust methodology, as John H has nicely put, the latter has suffered all
kind of misunderstandings and misconstructions (either caught in the
strictures of atheoretical pragmatism or directly in the hands of
pseudo-science). Integration is not just the opposite of reduction, but it
may be taken as another denomination for the untractable mutidisciplinary /
consilience problem. Several parties in this list have advocated systemic
views (Stan a number of times!, Jerry also produced a vast systemic
scheme). However, arguing seriously about systems theory, after the
pioneering views of von Bertalanffy in the 60's, very little has been
produced under the guidance of that school, and I really contend that,
concerning the integration problem, anything but triviality and
self-delusion can be found around the 'level' stuff nowadays.
The lack of appropriate metaphors to be handled in front of the apparent
naturality of the mechanistic and also of the "systemic" or "holistic"
complex of thought (composition and decomposition by manual operations upon
objects and their parts) is part of the missing informational
conceptualization too. So, discussing in depth the series of bio-economic
metaphors raised by Aleks would be quite interesting (impossible here, but
just as a detail, the ATP is presented as 'currency' in most textbooks:
wrong, at is just pure 'fuel'; the only cellular currency may be
established around "second messengers" cAMP, Ca++, cGMP, etc.). In general
I accept the difficulty on pointing at any clear-and-cut info metaphor to
be presented as an alternative to those seductive images from reductionism
& mechanism and pseudo-holism... Shouldn't we plan some devoted work on
advancing in this metaphorical aspect too?
Finally, my past message trying to "nail" down a metaphor on value within
social networks, may be formulated more succinctly as follows: when the
social value of some object gets "measured" as a price, what we
collectively perform is an estimation of the capability of that object to
promote "formation of social structures" around itself... Perhaps sort of a
middle road between Bob's and Karl's views (could multidimensional
partitions as descriptors of social nets complexity provide a complement to
the current conceptualization of ascendancy?). Then, a pressing issue to
consider in this tentative revision of social ascendancy may be that social
information is very largely "decoupled" from entropy growth (as biological
information itself). An additional problem concerning Karl's partitional
approach is that he has not developed a consistent methodology yet---and
the attempts made by me and Morris a few years ago, produced contradictory
results with him. So I friendly depart from his views when he heuristically
establishes the number of multidimensional partitions.
Today seems to be my disagreement day: Lots of stuff to discuss in Paris!
regards
Pedro
PS. Very cordial acknowledgements to Michel for his great organizing work.
Received on Fri May 27 14:43:16 2005
