Like the individual mind is somewhat constrained by the biology of the body,
society is constrained by the room of individuals to experience and
phantasize. This is no biological, but a psychological constrain. Thus, it
is not the volume of our brains, but the complexity with which we are able
to process meaning. The dynamics of meaning processing may be very different
from the dynamics of information processing. For example, information is
processed with the arrow of time, while meaning is provided from the
perspective of hindsight. Different meanings can be based on different
codifications (e.g., economic or scientific codifications), while meaning
itself can be considered as a codifying the information.
My main point is that the biological metaphor may be the wrong starting
point for a discussion of social and cultural complexity.
With best wishes,
Loet
________________________________
Loet Leydesdorff
Amsterdam School of Communications Research (ASCoR)
Kloveniersburgwal 48, 1012 CX Amsterdam
Tel.: +31-20- 525 6598; fax: +31-20- 525 3681
[email protected]
; http://www.leydesdorff.net/
> -----Original Message-----
> From: fis-bounces@listas.unizar.es
> [mailto:fis-bounces@listas.unizar.es] On Behalf Of Pedro Marijuan
> Sent: Friday, February 02, 2007 2:39 PM
> To: fis@listas.unizar.es
> Subject: Re: [Fis] Re: Continuing Discussion of Social and
> Cultural Complexity
>
> 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
>
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Received on Fri Feb 2 19:58:47 2007
