Using my last posting for the week, I will support Guy's posting below: As
I pointed out in my 1985 book on scale/compositional hierarchically
organized systems, the fact that different levels cannot dynamically
interact (must be separated by order of magnitude differences if they ARE
to be separated) means that we cannot sum informational constraints across
levels. Information at any level is 'incommensurable' with information at
any other level(cells could not 'understand' molecular talk!), and so one
cannot evaluate one level as more complex than another. The whole system
of levels is, however, seen to be complex (I call it 'extensional
complexity') by most commentators.
STAN
>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 22:12:00 2006
