Islets in an Ocean:
towards a philosophy of complexity
Tony Smith
In 15-20 Minutes
- Idiosynchratic personal journies to a Philosophy of Complexity
- just my one here and that to be skipped through at speed
- Talking past each other, politely, at Stellenbosch
- analysing some data confirms that impression
- a distracting reminder of the potency of complexity theory
- It’s still early days in the struggle for attention
- Everything interesting is Complex
- The universals of complexity remain contentious
- How to tackle the intellectual leap
- how disruptive success might me
Primed for Online Seduction
My story, in too much detail, for reasons apparent later
- 1960s undergrad math/stats, computation, formal logic
- aiming for but not getting to philosophy
- absorbed Cantor’s diagonal proof
- but no awareness of Gödel’s incompleteness theorem
- 1970s IBM mainframe analyst programmer to pay my way
- 1978 acquired early microcomputer for the then cost of a new car
- 1979 intrigued by Crowther and Woods’ text-based ‘Adventure’
- 1980 oblivious to Ted Nelson’s Xanadu-defining presentation at the 1980 IFIP World Computer Conference in Melbourne
- 1981 contracted to design back end system for the first Australian online information service
- saw potential for a lot more including what are now MMORPGs, albeit text-based
The Vision goes Graphical
- 1982 realised I lacked the contacts to put together my own business to do ‘Public Information Communications and Access’ (PICA) properly
- took a job writing for Computerworld Australia as a tactic for rectifying that
- within months networked everybody significant in the Australian IT industry except those working for IBM
- opened Public Access Computing (PAC) 15 years before Internet cafes would become viable
- 1983 as a review exercise for a luggable MS-DOS computer and GW Basic, coded the Fredkin cellular automata (CA) described in Scientific American
- presenting at and soon organising professional development events
- 1984 Apple® Macintosh®
- Australian Apple Developer Conference inspired a quest to develop a graphical PICA system
Captured by a Wider World
- 1985 Apple® LaserWriter®
- pioneered PostScript® programming
- organised Sydney Macworld Expo
- failed to attract ‘PICA System’ development funding (but couldn’t give up the dream)
- PICA business shell found itself in on the ground floor to supply the desktop publishing boom
- 1986- reading expanded while overseas to meet suppliers
- my ‘Pattern Breeder’ generalisation of the Fredkin CA described in Scientific American
- Ervin Laszlo’s Evolution: The Grand Synthesis met my need to overturn presumptions as to how the world worked
- Winograd and Flores’s Understanding Computers and Cognition exposed philosophical grounding for IT application development
- 1988- Wolfram Mathematica® distribution
- explored mutual interest in CA during visits
- identified complexity studies as the likely source of a better understanding of the world
Thinking thru the Long Boom
- 1991- Return to academia, thinking in terms of philosophy
- saw most of my book collection on the History and Philosophy of Science shelves
- HPS had started a ‘Science in Society’ Masters program
- evolutionary theory unit with John Collier
- university Internet access account
- actor-network perpective on Philosophy of Science
- Social Theory, postmodernism, relativism, constructivism
- 1992- Education Technology Policy consultancies
- increasingly concerned about the difficulty of inducting young people into a systemic perspective
- Liddy Nevile copied me Marcia Salner’s paper
- First Australia Complex Systems conference in Canberra
- first Internet e-mail to Albert Langer Xmas Day
- 1995- Professional development circuit re the interweb
- 1996 ‘Purposes and Structures of Virtual Organisations’
Trying to do Something
- 1997 ‘Conversation Piece’ for old (in both senses) friends
- 1998- Developed TransForum to address those possibilities
- writing words, analysing systems and developing software for online support of traditional publishing/distribution
- 2002 Wolfram self-publishes A New Kind of Science
- what had long been ‘Mathematical Recreations’ legitimised, at least in my mind
- 2003 Andrew Trevorrow adds tiling to LifeLab facilitating experiments I come to call ‘Life in a Tube’ and ‘Trapper’
Back to the Future
- 2004 Started attending MASCOS events and making contacts
- developed ‘TickTock’ to explore evolving networks.
- presented programming of TickTock at OSDC 2004
- helped organise the first Australian Open Source Developer Conference
- 2006 Bill Hall, an associate from PAC days, noticed our parallel journeys and renewed contact
- Bill studied EvoDevo 20 years early then diversified, via documentation systems, into organisation knowledge management
- He is researching theoretical background for a book, introduced me to ISCE and more
- 2007 I rejoined academic conference circuit at Stellenbosch
- picking up John Collier in Durban en route
A Fresh Journey Begins
- 20 years after I based my own philosophy on complexity theory I was to meet with a workshop full of others similarly qualified.
- Two nights in Durban to adjust to the time zone, staying where John had recommended (and was temporarily staying himself).
- After an interesting look around we were off to an even more comfortable old town in Western Cape.
ISCE Stellenbosch Workshop
- 3rd International Workshop on Complexity and Philosophy
- 20 presentations
- largely talked past each other
- albeit politely
- To add substance to my informal observation I compared the accepted papers’ references and technical vocabulary
ISCE’s February 2007 (ISBN: 0-9791688-1-3)
Comparing References
First objective to identify commonality between independently authored chapters by tracking common referenced authors.
- Excluding 139 self-citations out of 815 chapter author citations made negligible difference.
- 38 authors referenced by more than one of 20 chapters, led by:
- Prigogine 7
- Kauffman 5
- Stacey 5
then:
- 2 with 4
- 8 with 3
- 25 with 2
- (and lots more data needing presentation)
Comparative References
Ch. total other multi chapter
cites auths cites auths links auth(s)
1 22 14 19 13 3 Baskin.K
2 8 8 8 8 4 Bloch.D, Nordstrom.T
3 42 37 39 36 0 Peroff.N
4 106 73 86 70 2 Bondarenko.D
5 64 54 63 53 13 Muhonen.T
6 81 65 80 64 6 Schliebs.G
7 50 27 27 23 2 Collier.J
8 35 34 34 33 11 Van der Merwe.J
9 30 28 27 27 4 Baets.W
10 18 14 15 13 0 Pareschi.R
11 19 13 13 12 2 Turner.J
12 91 54 40 40 5 Sabelli.H
13 19 12 9 8 2 Zelger.J
14 36 31 35 30 6 Smith.T
15 11 10 9 9 1 Richardson.K
16 34 30 34 30 5 Roodt.J
17 64 52 60 49 8 Nicolaides.A, Yorks.L
18 30 19 29 18 9 Nilsson.F
19 10 8 10 8 3 Vesterby.V
20 45 38 39 35 13 Allen.P, Boulton.J
815 558 676 518 99
Representing the Comparisons
- Two chapters referenced 13 of the multiply-cited authors. Two others referenced none of them.
- So the challenge was to represent 20 papers, 38 multiply-cited authors and 99 links on a single network diagram.
- substituted colour coding for the seven Prigogine links.
- this left (design) space to separately colour-code the entirely separate Kauffman and Stacey clusters.
- and to highlight two two-author connections
The PDF might be clearer
Comparing Tech Vocab
- I’ve been developing word counting software for some years
- How to identify which words might be significant?
- used an unpublished fiction manuscript as a crude comparator
- excluded author names found in the references, et al, etc.
- But that still left hard to separate categories
- words in common use in academic papers
- Only one statistical measure was undisputably significant
- terms specific to each individual chapter’s problem area
- terms used commonly in more than one chapter
- The former included proposed general descriptors of complexity
Tabulating Word Counts
- Produced large tabulation of words unique to and connecting chapters (PDF or handout).
- The cross chapter word connection measure appears to have no significance
- Of the top ranked pair, one chapter had zero reference links
- Of the top ranked three-way, no two shared reference links
- Analysing connectivity of random networks as a comparator
- then a random discovery outranked futher word count analysis
- as a self-funded researcher, I tend to stop when I know, not when I can show
Distinctive Word Usage
Within chapter Between chapters
ch strength chs strength
17 116.371 learning 10 15 22.508 networks
11 72.000 mound 7 15 18.873 information
11 54.000 nest 19 20 13.579 complexity
7 51.000 entrainment 12 18 13.500 processes
13 49.424 text 8 19 12.947 complexity
19 47.368 complexity 4 19 12.947 complexity
12 47.000 processes 1 7 12.780 power
9 45.430 quantum 12 17 11.750 action
13 40.000 earthquake 9 12 10.484 quantum
3 38.000 Gaia 10 15 10.168 network
2 37.441 ethical 18 19 9.789 complexity
15 37.098 loops 12 20 9.645 evolution
2 36.000 interns 12 19 9.474 complexity
10 35.070 networks 17 19 8.526 complexity
7 34.225 symmetries 8 11 8.522 design
5 33.495 language 7 19 8.365 systems
7 33.018 symmetry 5 11 8.328 agents
11 33.000 soil 7 16 8.160 system
11 33.000 termites 7 12 7.679 symmetry
15 32.274 network 1 4 7.540 society
12 32.000 biotic 7 12 7.500 processes
6 32.000 Nagarjuna 9 13 7.273 concepts
13 31.243 linguistic 5 8 7.052 language
A Long Way from Reality
- At least half the participants had strong hard science backgrounds
- but arguments from hard science were largely neglected
- in seemingly politically correct deferral to the social constructivist minority
- It might have been nice if we could have found a stream running through the workshop the way the old Mill Stream runs through Stellenbosch itself.
Complexity is Everywhere
- Getting from guest house to workshop or downtown meant following the old Mill Stream through Stellenbosch.
- Leaving behind Stellenbosch, we return briefly to that discovery/reminder of the potency of complexity theory which had distracted me during the shared reference analysis
- Wanting to know whether the common reference links should be seen as anything more significant than random network connectivity
- Remembered that my 2004 TickTock experiment inherently highlighted the highest connectivity within an evolving simple graph
- Testing refinements on a ten node network, the very first random test produced an evolutionary history worthy of further investigation
- Which finished up justifying a new page that still needs to be properly integrated into the TickTock website
Embryology?
Selected rotations of the first six wireframe images on that new TickTock page.
Still Early Days
- It’s still early days in the struggle for attention (to complexity)
- 1980s general principles of complex systems (Prigogine, Kauffman)
- 1990s the flux of money dissipated by derivatives traders (Out of Control)
- 2000s the erosion of organisation knowledge institutionalised (Stacey)
- Any Philosophy of Complexity must cross the physical, biological and social
- Wolfram’s key speculation wrong, but that does not diminish his contribution
- For now the generalised quest is still for mavericks who have each followed their own peculiar journeys to their particular philosophy of complexity.
Bolognesi, Tommaso, ‘Behavioral complexity indicators for process algebra: The NKS approach’ in Journal of Logic and Algebraic Programming, Volume 72, Issue 1, May-June 2007, http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/15678326 Pages 50-77.
Towards Contextual Thinking
Prospective complex thinkers need to have conquered mind changing challenges.
Epistemologically, this third stage is dialectical and interactive in that it does not look for truth either in the world (as the dualistic thinker does) or in the self (as the multiplistic thinker does), but in the interaction between self and world that results from committed, or we might even say existential, action in the world.
(...) structural reorganization of epistemic assumptions in the direction of increasing complexity. This organization takes place on an individual time table as a result of confrontation with social and intellectual challenges which must be resolved. These challenges may be confronted accidentally as a person's social life unfolds, or they may be confronted as part of a planned instructional program. There is no evidence to support the idea that epistemic development occurs 'naturally' as a result of genetic processes.
—Marcia Salner, 1986
Twenty years on, we are all complicit in the consequences of listening to loud ‘advocates’ insist that young people not be challenged on their life’s journies.
Salner, Marcia (1986). ‘Adult Cognitive and Epistemological Development in Systems Education’ in Systems Research Volume 3, No. 4: Pages 225-232.
Reflections
A Philosophy of Complexity demands reflection on our understanding of the oft unexpected dynamics of complex systems.
So, What is Complex?
- Everything interesting is Complex
- more complex than we can know
- Life Itself as archetypical model
- Social complexity as the great experiment
- megacities
- language, lies and other stories
- Fundamental physics remains contentious
- ‘The Discrete Challenge to Theories of the Continuum’
- justified my trip to Stellenbosch
- Philosophy of Complexity is one more story
Salner, Marcia (1986). ‘Adult Cognitive and Epistemological Development in Systems Education’ in Systems Research Volume 3, No. 4: Pages 225-232.
Physical and Biological
Social and Computational
Universals Remain Contentious
- If there is a number one result of complexity studies, it must be Prigogine’s Nobel prize-winning account of self organisation as emergent dissipation of some far from equilibrium flux.
- Yet even this has not caught on sufficiently to produce any broad academic awareness as to how widely it can be usefully applied.
- Emergent criticality and scale-free phenomena are increasingly identified, but there remains deep contention about the hypothesis that self-organised behaviour emerges much more freely at some oft elusive boundary between order and chaos.
- Those with a psychological need to place themselves, via humanity, at centre stage, against all evidence, will not let go of the notion that the complexity we find in the life world should be irreducible.
Dissipative Examples
Aspects of Complex Systems
Tackling the Intellectual Leap
- There is as yet no sign of a tenure track for Philosophy of Complexity.
- There are ‘interdisciplinary’ institutions which target complexity studies to the still formative minds of postgrads and postdocs.
- Have they become more like obstacles to developing a broader appreciation of the philosophical implications?
- Complexity is beyond interdisciplinary. It is core!
- What can/should we do for the challenge-challenged generation?
School is in
School is where many young learn the most important things they will need to swim with life’s opportunities.
Living the Edge of Chaos
- How disruptive might it be for current dualistic v multiplistic Politics if we succeeded in promoting understanding of complexity theory’s implications?
- Could Anglo-capitalist triumphalism survive the rise of a proper intellectual appreciation of complex dynamics and its broad philosophical implications?
- Pushing component efficiency too far is cancer to larger systems.
- Resilience demands redundant capacity.
- Limitless chatter is dissipated in ritualised stories and legalistic imperialism.
- Devolution. Pluralism. Tacking across the flow.
- Money’s value is in circulation. It can’t be saved.
- Most every new badness emerges from a flux of bored/frustrated young men, for some unbounded notion of ‘young’.
