Thanks to Keith for clarifying the substantial agreement on big matters and
identifying some other issues where there may be differences.
I know that Keith's articles were drawing on earlier work, and I do very
much like GH Mead, read him as an undergrad. It was more the use of the
-ism's that I felt uncomfortable with, sorting subtle theoretical positions
out into Pokemon families (my current favorite example of a multi-criterial
classification scheme! :) And to some extent we do disagree about the value
of supervenience notions of emergent phenomena and the value of a
causal-powers and general-laws approach. At least we do agree on the much
more important point: that you do need both top-down and bottom-up.
I agree with Keith that even within complex system theory, and it is itself
a very diverse set of people and methods -- allied together by some common
assumptions and by a common need to fight against the older paradigms --
there is too much emphasis on bottom-up, and the biologists are by and
large doing a better job of getting this right. I think the reason is that
the bottom-up bits are the ones that seem magical to former reductionists,
and impressive as arguments against older views. And there is a certain
scientific methodological conservatism to trying to see how much you can
get from the bottom up without having to also do top down. Physicists in
particular are used to not having to worry about higher level constraints
("imagine a collection of particles in an empty universe ..."), whereas
biologists have never had this luxury (you can't imagine a collection of
living organisms in an empty universe -- at least not for long! :). But
complex systems tend to have multi-scale, multi-level organization, and the
phenomena of interest tend to be happening somewhere in the middle, at
least if they are real phenomena and the systems are really complex. There
are a lot of linked issues here: evolved systems, developmental systems,
systems where history matters ... that also tend to differ from the typical
sorts of systems that physics likes to deal with. There is an unfortunate
tendency for physics to always want to define the paradigm of science.
Physics makes complex systems approaches look bottom-up, and it is this
version that too many philosophers and others pay too much attention to.
Physics is neither typical nor general as a scientific method anymore. One
of the major claims of complexity theory is that its principles are
domain-independent. This is only true if the principles are derived from
the study of the most realistically complex systems, as in biology, not if
they are derived from the most simplified, idealized, abstracted systems as
in physics. It is a hard pill for physics to swallow after so long, but I
think there is no doubt that today and in the future biology is and will be
the paradigm science. Or complexity science itself will be, with biology
recognized as the most typical and general instance among the classical
sciences.
I'd be interested to see Keith's paper on artificial societies, because
this is an important test case. Building them too much as a physicist would
could be a big mistake. Building them as a ecologist might would be closer
to the mark. But unless the models allow for semiotic and artifact
mediation across organizational and time-scales, no model will get us to
what CHAT people and all of us are really interested in.
JAY.
---------------------------
JAY L. LEMKE
PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
<http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
---------------------------
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Jun 27 2002 - 08:02:50 PDT