structure & communication

Dear FISers

Some aspects of Gottfried and Soeren's comments on selforganization can be
discussed together with Bob's last message. My private contention with
selforganization and with complexity relates to the lack of consideration
by these two trends (or just only one?) towards the special "fluid"
structural properties of life in its cellular, organismic, social realms.
Central to this fluidity is the coupling between the engines of
self-production (OK, more or less close to selforgan., except the
"sequence" assumption), and the engines of self-degradation (unknown for
self.org. views).

The "fluid" living structure appears as the net result of both types of
processes, adaptively coupled. For instance, protein synthesis / protein
degradation. Cell-cycle / cell-apoptosis. Synapsis growth / synapsis
disappearance. Companies creation / companies destruction.... And the role
of the communicational processes or info phenomena would consist on
governing the mutual coupling of both productive and destructive "engines",
providing their adaptive internal/external control, and an impressive
organizational freedom in every realm.

Why does the US economy create every year 1.000.000 new companies, and of
these only 100.000 or 150.000 will survive more than one year? Why protein
synthesis works more or less the same? Why apoptosis, etc.? And why power
laws emerge in all these fields? This more or less can lead to introduce
some notion of "relevance", as the info impact of an item on the underlying
"fluid" strutures--altering their productive-degradative balance of
processes by way of the infostructures surrounding both...

And here it seeems that Bob«s emphasis on VEMS can (partially) be
reconsidered. For social complexity becomes affected particularly by a FEW
items, of rather heterogenous nature, but RELEVANT to the social fluid
structures, and not generically by any external-internal event or
orverarching social entropy law (perhaps I am wrong here). It is the story
of AGRICULTURE, NUMBERS, WRITING, CLOCKS, PRINTING, STEAM ENGINES,
COMPUTERS... that touch the very "info heart" of societies and build up the
royal road to complexity. Paying attention to the fact that societies can
also go backwards (plenty of historical cases, even nowadays: Russia)

If the above could be articulated into a coherent discourse, implying new
conceptions and background on the nature of information, and far away from
its present intuitive rough and unarticulated form, perhaps a strong thesis
could be discussed. With only the present complexity stuff, I am afraid we
cannot. Complexity is finally unable to make sense of "relevance" --why
books historically lead to Renais-sance, and why computers are producing
the present Chaos-sance...

bests

Pedro

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Pedro C. Marijuan. TEL 34 976 761927, FAX --761861 and -- 762111
Dept. Ingen. Electronica y Comunicaciones, CPS Universidad de Zaragoza,
Maria de Luna 3, Zaragoza 50015, SPAIN
email: marijuan@posta.unizar.es
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Received on Wed Nov 18 09:28:44 1998