I would not want people, however, to take the illustrative timespans and
examples that I give in the Table too seriously. They are meant just to
give the general flavor of the model, and not as any sort of temporal
numerology. The processes in the right hand column are just meant to show
the kind of thing that often does have such a timescale; not to insist that
such processes must have that and only that timescale. In complex systems,
processes of the kind for which we have simple names usually encompass
multiple timescales (except for the microscopic cases, which are simpler
and more technically defined). They also often have rhythms or pulses at
shorter timescale that are NOT an order or two of magnitude different, and
there are other exceptions to the adiabatic boundaries between levels
besides heterochrony (e.g. bifucations, singularities, catastrophes -- in
the mathematical sense, but approximately applying to sudden changes in
social processes).
It is an interesting question of course how a community's culture
'periodizes' its activities, what we regard as natural timespans, for which
we have names, etc. It seems fairly clear that each of these typical time
period 'units' exists because there are some biological or social-economic
processes that are important, salient, and have these typical timescales --
from the heart-rhythm of the second, to the reflex time of the instant, to
seasonal periods in some climate zones and cultural-economic cycles in
others. Probably one could go a long way in doing a sort of ethnography of
time, or study of 'ethno-periodization' and anthropologists did
traditionally regard at least some such matters as very basic to cultures
(e.g. lifespan periodizations and rites de passage, annual and multi-annual
cycles of ceremonies, etc.). There would also be interesting things perhaps
to be learned by studying 'pacing' and 'timing', what expectations people
have about how long some process should take. When do we regard some
process as occuring at about the right pace, too fast, or frustratingly (or
pleasingly?) slow?
Probably the most interesting of Phil's points is about the differing
metaphors available for talking about top-down vs. bottom-up logics of
relations across levels. He is quite right to see that we do talk very
differently depending on whether we are taking the top-down (slower, longer
timescale, more extended socio-semiotic-material networks constraining
which of all possibles at the next timescale level down are actually
emergent) view, or a bottom-up (how still faster, more local processes
provide the constitutive possibilities for emergence of phenomena a level
'up' i.e. slower).
I am certainly saying that we always need BOTH these views, because
focal-level phenomena are always jointly the product of N-1 constitutive
possibilities and N+1 boundary conditions or constraints from the always
already around. I SUSPECT, but have not worked out clearly enough yet, that
you cannot have the same metaphors or ways of talking about things seen
as-if-from-above vs. seen as-if-from-below. There are certainly arguments
of this sort now for the case of systems seen as-if-from-outside vs.
as-if-from-inside (or really from inside!). I would not, however, also
include here the divide Phil makes between 'being' and 'knowing'. Both
being and meaning, which are two aspects of the same processes, are
sandwiched between N+1 and N-1. While we may not be able to, or find it
useful to, unify the discourses of top-down and bottom up, we may want to
unify the discourses of being and meaning, at least some of the time.
Phil may also have meant something a bit different: participating in the
system vs. modelling the system. This entangles us in all the traditional
meta-issues and paradoxes of what happens when, and if, a subsystem can
model the system of which it is a part, and what happens if it then acts
according to its model, etc. There does seem to be an asymmetry in
modelling systems that are a part of us, vs. modelling systems that we are
a part of. Some biologists and physicists today would claim that we have no
real tradition of modelling-from-within; that all our
descriptive-explanatory traditions are as-if-from-outside. There are
efforts going on to imagine what an 'internalist' physics or biology might
be like. The preliminary suggestions are that such discourses do not afford
the reality or illusion of control that 'externalist' discourses do/promise.
Finally, there is a large philosophical literature (which I do not find
very useful, but other may) on 'downward causation' and 'supervenience'
which is essentially a debate among a sort of sophisticated realist
reductionism (the only realities are the tiny things), a radical
emergentism (big composite things have autonomous properties and agency),
and a middle position (big things have autonomous properties but not
autonomous agency). In some sense these debates show what happens when you
try to force a single discourse to cover both the top-down and the
bottom-up cases. To my reading, the results just show that doing so is not
very fruitful. I am a contributor to a volume that discusses some of these
issues from the viewpoints of different disciplines ( I was not
representing philosophy!).
JAY.
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JAY L. LEMKE
PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
<http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
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