Re: [Fis] INTRODUCING SOCIAL AND CULTURAL COMPLEXITYRe: [Fis] INTRODUCING SOCIAL AND CULTURAL COMPLEXITY
From: Igor Matutinovic <[email protected]>
Date: Sun 17 Dec 2006 - 13:46:47 CET
Dear All
Steven raised a couple of intriguing question: How does an anthropologist quantify complexity? and,
"Does an individual in a hunter gatherer society, in fact, live in a more complex society than
an individual in today's society?"
Social complexity, like complexity of living systems in general, is multifaceted. Following Robert
Rosen's definition of complexity, we need to have at least two non-reducible descriptions of a
system if it is to be viewed as "complex". In that sense Steven's " simple
algorithmic definition of complexity" would not meet this criterion. In fact many aspects of
human life in a modern, urbanized society would appear algorithmically more complex than those in a
hunter gatherer society. Take, for example, the number of steps required to heal a person. In a
H&G tribe a person visits a sorcerer who supplies the "medicine" and perhaps performs
a healing ritual. In the "healing process" in a modern society there would be involved a
general practitioner, at least one specialist, nurses, hospital administration, the pharmaceutical
industry supplying drugs, a vast number of extrasomatic devices used for illness diagnosis,
transport infrastructure needed to supply the drug and equipment, the health care insurance system,
etc.. In the first case we have a one-to-one interaction and in the second we have one-to-network
interaction, where most of the network remains organizationally "hidden" from the patient.
The total number of (social) steps involved in the curing process is several orders of magnitude
higher than in the H&G tribe. From this example we can also deduce the non-trivial significance
of structural and organizational dimensions of social complexity that Joe initially addressed in his
paper.
On the other hand, a modern urban society need not be necessarily more complex in all its aspects
than a tribal society. Wolfgang Fikentscher (Sanata Fe Institute WP 98-09-087) for example, compares
the octopartite system governmental powers of Keresan speaking Pueblos with the tripartite system of
the US. Some aspects of our sociality - Steven mentions close kinship relations - may even be
simpler and less intense than in H&G tribe or in a Pueblo.
The very number of artifacts and exosomatic devices that Joe mentioned, combined with advanced
communication systems that we use - telecom & internet - and a diversified institutional
superstructure is not a simple addition of more things, more roles, links, and hierarchical levels
in a social network. All these combine to contribute to system's behavioral complexity (the capacity
of accessing many distinct states). The structural and organizational diversity, and scale
introduces, among other things, a new dimension of substantive uncertainty in the system's behavior.
One example: on January 17, 1966, a B-52 bomber collides with a jet tanker over Spain's
Mediterranean coast, dropping three 70-kiloton hydrogen bombs near the town of Palomares and one in
the sea. Fortunately the bombs did not explode. Consider the spatial dimension of this event (the
bombers covered an immense area in their routine missions and the bombs could have been dropped
anywhere); the time scale of the change in the system (time that the bombs take to devastate the
settled area and the time during which the radiation would still hang on in the region). It appears
that the society capable of creating the systemic conditions for a such sudden and large-scale flip
in its state space must be overall more complex than any of the past historic social formations.
Karl: "That human behavior is partly more complex than a weather system is only a gradual
difference, and in many cases, a weather system is less predictable than a human."
Although there exist huge econometric models of the world economy, nobody (could) have predicted that
the price of oil would rise from 10$ to 60$/barrel in eight years. Unlike the sensitivity to small
differences in initial conditions that govern chaotic systems like the weather, here we have to deal
with large unpredictable events like the attack on Twin Towers, and the subsequent war on
Afghanistan and Iraq. Similarly, other historic events that impinge significantly on the system
performance, like the invention of the printing press or the appearance in the market of MS DOS
cannot in principle be predicted from a "model" and they have no analogue in a physical
system like the weather. I put here the emphasis on the contribution of singular events (those that
occur once and only once throughout all time) on behavioral complexity of societies.
However, I fully agree with Karl's concluding thoughts: "Focusing on perceived differences will
keep motivating us to recognize similarities and rules that work on complex systems. A social system
is a self-regulating, cybernetical entity. It lives. So it can be described by rational means."
Perhaps the difference between our approach to social complexity is that I would drive a line
between the socioeconomic and ecological systems on the one side and meteorological, biochemical and
other physical systems on the other side, in terms of meaningful transfer of concepts, models and
analogies. In between the socioeconomic and ecological systems I would stress the
cognitive/informational peculiarities of the former that restricts the scope of the use of common
conceptual models. And it is precisely here that lurks the issue of human problem solving and its
relation to social complexity and sustainability that Joe addressed. We should not lose the sight of
the this main theme of our discussion.
The best
Dr. Igor Matutinovic
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