Dear Pedro and colleagues,
I want to respond only to the first paragraph of your recent post.
on 12/15/06 3:11 AM, Pedro Marijuan at marijuan@unizar.es wrote:
> Dear FIS colleagues,
>
> I disagree with the comments by Steven and Stan on the nature of
> complexity. How can one substantiate and quantify social complexity if
the
> previous complexity within the society's individuals has not been solved?
> At the time being, there is no accepted rigorous evaluation of biological
> complexity --neither number of genes, RNA transcripts, proteins, nor
genome
> size, chromosome number etc., provide individually any solid estimation;
> together more or less. Perhaps, the only accepted single number as a
proxy
> of organismic complexity is the number of differentiated cell types
> ---becoming similar to Joe's approach in societies (social roles, or
> professions, plus other issues related to number of artifacts, etc.).
[snip]
In my view, measures of complexity at one level of organization ought not
depend on the details or complexity of the lower levels upon which it is
built. This is to me the essence of systems emergence, which is the
functional unification of lower level parts. These parts may or may not be
highly complex themselves. In the social sphere of biology, the parts are
organisms, or groups of organisms, but I see the complexity of a social
system as utterly independent of the complexity of organisms. The stock
exchange, or the economy in general, is extraordinarily complex. We would
indeed need an objective measure to compare compare the complexities of
organisms to that of economies, but economies need not be more complex than
organisms. The system manifested by food coops, for example, is a system of
very low complexity compared to the complexity of the people who compose the
coop.
I am not saying that I expect there to be no correlation between a system's
complexity and the complexities of its component parts. Indeed, I think
this is a reasonable expectation, because more complex parts are likely to
have a much more diverse and unpredictable range of behaviors than less
complex, or non-complex, parts. However, this need not always hold true,
and it is not the only factor determining system complexity.
To sum up, I like the catch phrase "complexity breeds simplicity", because
it emphasizes the notion that functional unification through system
emergence releases us from the need to drill down to the bottom in order to
FULLY understand higher order systems. In other words, it frees us from the
tedious demands of the reductionistic paradigm.
Regards,
Guy Hoelzer
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Received on Fri Dec 15 19:54:07 2006
