Steven's criticisms of of Joseph's text are good ones. I would like to
address one question he raises:
>I feel a clear definition of complexity is missing from Tainter's
>discussion and I see distinct concepts being >confused. I find myself,
for
>example, wanting a clear specification of complexity versus scale and
>diversity.
-snip-
>In my view scale and complexity are not necessarily correlated and problem
>solving efforts, in fact, do not >increase in complexity - they change
and
>get smarter.
I have (Development ad Evolution, 1993, MIT Press) characterized the kind
of complexity found in the kind of hierarchical structure referred to in
Joe's text as 'extensional complexity'. This is characterized as resulting
from the dynamical nesting of systems with very different rates of change
(large scale/slow versus smaller scale/fast), whereby systems at the
different levels cannot directly interact dynamically, and instead provide
contextual constraints on each other's dynamics -- constraints that may
change episodically because the different levels cannot synchronize. As
viewed from any given level, such systems are subject to unantissipatable
changes, resulting in what I now call 'perplex complexity'. This
perplexity characterizes systems which, even though we have good models of
many of their aspects, are not reliaby predictable using these models.
So, operational scale differences within one system are associated with one
kind of complexity (but not, of course, necessarily with other kinds of
complexity). It is not clear to me that any of the kinds of complexity
alluded to in Joe's text are of the kind I point to here, but, since he is
discussing hierarchcally organized systems, it must be involved.
STAN
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Received on Thu Dec 14 22:12:01 2006
