Re: strong thesis

Dear FISers:

Without wishing to embarrass him by doing so and thus spreading responsibility for my own foolishness, it seems that Pedro and I are in basic agreement. I, too, think there is a very real possibility for a homology*rather than an analogy*between the natu
ral and human sciences. I, too, think the Santa Fe work very valuable despite its dependency on computer wizardry. But I am not sure why we need to speak of *info laws* rather than complexity, since the latter seems to me more general and inclusive. Mo
reover, there is in the sciences of complexity a built in evolutionary conception, which should mark the *royal road* Pedro is following.

So my version of the strong thesis depends, for instance, on what Peter Allen , following the Weiszackers, used to call *error-friendliness*. (Santa Fe has picked this up without credit, so far as I know, in the last few years.) The idea is that Kauffma
n*s original fitness landscapes all lead to dead-ends*local optima, once found, cannot be surpassed. But if the species on a local optimum makes replication errors, its very success not only redefines the landscape, the variations are explorers of altern
ative realities. One would expect a sort of degradation as the changing species slides off its peak, but these changes make possible new developments. Errors then become the media by which species evolve. None of this is new it just needs to be stated.

Now, it was in pursuit of this dynamic relationship with an environment that I used the agriculture or raiding examples to show how the self-organization of social systems transforms the world*and, thereby, the fitness criteria on which NATURAL selection
works. If you will, the maxima reached by biological evolution was transcended when societies self-organized, which involved a several costs. The self-organized society is a new kind of system, acted on by forces far broader and qualitatively different
from those operating on individual organisms. But the emergence of the social system, in turn, has created*it you will permit it*an INTERNAL LANDSCAPE on which individuals are tested. This new, internal landscape does not select on the basis of the biol
ogical information stored genetically. Social selection is based on behaviors, which are regularized in social roles. Performance of social roles allows the correlation of individual actions, by which, of course, the SYSTEM !
acts on, transforms, and, eventually through the creation of social information, accesses a new EXTERNAL fitness peak in an altered landscape.

I suspect that the earliest societies were minimally complex, because they could access a few stable states in a limited range of environmental circumstances. They stored information about those landscapes in linguistic or mythic symbols which have, as F
rankfort said, the unique ability to create the actions they describe. Thus, telling the tale of some hero or performing the ritual appropriate to some God reconstituted the system in a landscape. Similarly, other rituals enabled societies to shift soci
al roles configured to map one maxima to roles appropriate to another*societies are never crystals and they are always complex enough to organize in more than one state. Regardless, like organisms whose DNA catalyzes chemical processes generating certain
 cells, social information excites people to see certain realities and to respond to them in ways that sustain the system. But the complexity of a society will depend upon the ability of its information to map multiple landsc!
apes, preserve order as it shifts from one local optimum to another, or even leaps to previously unknown peaks. Storage systems which perfectly map one or a few states but cannot expand the collective repertoire will inhibit social evolution.

If people are dependent on some particular set of roles then their societies are like the original Kauffman rugged landscapes*they quickly lock-in on some local optimum and never evolve again. Info laws might not be able to point the way to escape local
optima, for I do think that the earliest media storing social information tended to moralize certain specific states and place others under taboos. The evolutionary drive discussed by complexity however would favor organizations that avoided fixing themse
lves rigidly on local optima. That is, in accordance with the Second Law, there would be an advantage to any society which could find ways to dissipate energy at higher rates. It seems to be true that the work done to organize internally at a higher lev
el of complexity leads to greater rates of external entropy production. So there is a sort of overarching principle or, perhaps, propensity, from the natural sciences that would account for increasing the complexity of human !
social systems.

The question then becomes how do some societies discover ways to dissipate energy at greater rates. I think the answer is by deviating from established social roles*that is, by making behavioral errors which fluctuate the societies thus transforming thei
r environments so that their (the societies*) landscapes are no longer optimal. The experience of these transitions is, for individuals, often incredibly painful. The Renaissance and Reformation era in western history, I think, exemplifies the entropy b
urst associated with evolutionary change very well. A similarly bloody, but perhaps even more creative era, has been our own twentieth century. In the former, *science* per se was invented. In the latter, science is being *reconceptualized.* The origi
nal *modern* science*Galileo, Descartes, and Newton TO Darwin*was hostile to the humanities. The new science*FROM Darwin through Prigogine to who knows where*permits homologies which enrich our view of nature by reflecting it!
s diversity while respecting our view of humankind by preserving its freedom and creativity. I suspect it is because we can now apply *science* to nonlinear systems that the process by which qualitative change occurs throughout existence can reground hum
ankind in nature.

We need, I think, to use the strong thesis in order to build a new VEM system based on evolutionary systems theory. Then, perhaps, people will have a mental guide through the turbulence of transition providing the spiritual strength necessary to stick wi
th the process rather than rebel against it. The attempts to stop the world, of which Reformation and twentieth century history provide too many painful examples, do not work. The most they could do, I suspect, is arrest the process of social evolution
until peoples in other parts of the world made the creative errors necessary to increase rates of external entropy production. American fundamentalists seem to me part of this self-destructive behavior.

Welcoming variation and diversity*even in how we conceive our science and our VEMs--are essential to evolution, of course, because it is individual creative acts that deviate from established social norms which generate the fluctuations transforming socia
l systems. It is, obviously, very difficult to make creative errors when you are physically held in a social role*e.g., slaves*or when social VEMs equate deviation with evil. Any society replicating its order in these ways will tend to lock-in to its lo
cal optimum and stay there. But societies embracing individual freedom and VEMs rewarding error-making will tend to have a dynamic stability which is always able to transform environments in ways that permit complexity to increase and the Second Law to b
e obeyed as higher levels of internal order do the extra work necessary and increase the rate at which external entropy is released.

These new type VEMs represent created information, I agree. But they do not seem to me to have emerged in violation of basic principles. Rather, they look to me to conform to the basics established by the sciences of complexity. Yet VEMs distinguishing
 and empowering individuals, which represent new criteria for internally selecting members of societies for their relative fitness, will change the criteria for selection of societies by external factors, too. I think this thesis is strong precisely beca
use the applications to human systems are such scientific common places. My hopes rest on the perhaps naive assumption that we, as societies, will be more likely to survive because we are more likely to believe VEMs which are scientifically true.

Bob Artigiani
       
                                                                                                                                                                                                       
Received on Fri Nov 13 10:08:08 1998