Dear Igor and colleagues,
Your question is fascinating, perhaps at the time being rather puzzling or
even un-answerable...
What are the complexity limits of societies? Our individual limits are
obvious ---the size of "natural bands" depended both on ecosystems and on
the number of people with which an individual was able to communicate
"meaningfully", keeping a mutual strong bond. Of course, at the same
time the band was always dynamically subdividing in dozens and dozens of
possible multidimensional partitions and small groups (eg. the type of
evanescent grouping we may observe in any cocktail party). Pretty complex
in itself, apparently.
Comparatively, the real growth of complexity in societies is due (in a
rough simplification) to "weak bonds". In this way one can accumulate far
more identities and superficial relationships that imply the allegiance to
sectorial codes, with inner combinatory, and easy ways to rearrange rapidly
under general guidelines. Thus, the cumulative complexity is almost
unaccountable in relation with the natural band --Joe provided some curious
figures in his opening. And in the future, those figures may perfectly grow
further, see for instance the number of scientific specialties and
subspecialties (more than 5-6.000 today, less than 2-3.000 a generation ago).
Research on social networks has highlighted the paradoxical vulnerability
of societies to the loss of ... weak bonds. The loss of strong bonds is
comparatively assumed with more tolerance regarding the maintenance of the
complex structure (human feelings apart). Let us also note that
considering the acception of information as "distinction on the adjacent" I
argued weeks ago, networks appear as instances of new adjacencies... by
individual nodes provided with artificial means of communication ("channels").
In sum, an economic view on social complexity may be interesting but
secondary. What we centrally need, what we lack, is a serious info
perspective on complexity (more discussions like the current one!). By the
way, considering the ecological perspectives on complexity would be quite
interesting too.
best regards
Pedro
_______________________________________________
fis mailing list
fis@listas.unizar.es
http://webmail.unizar.es/mailman/listinfo/fis
Received on Fri Feb 2 14:27:09 2007
