Steven's criticisms of of Joseph's text are good ones. I would like to address one question he raises:
>I feel a clear definition of complexity is missing from Tainter's >discussion and I see distinct concepts being >confused. I find myself, for >example, wanting a clear specification of complexity versus scale and >diversity. -snip- >In my view scale and complexity are not necessarily correlated and problem >solving efforts, in fact, do not >increase in complexity - they change and >get smarter. I have (Development ad Evolution, 1993, MIT Press) characterized the kind of complexity found in the kind of hierarchical structure referred to in Joe's text as 'extensional complexity'. This is characterized as resulting from the dynamical nesting of systems with very different rates of change (large scale/slow versus smaller scale/fast), whereby systems at the different levels cannot directly interact dynamically, and instead provide contextual constraints on each other's dynamics -- constraints that may change episodically because the different levels cannot synchronize. As viewed from any given level, such systems are subject to unantissipatable changes, resulting in what I now call 'perplex complexity'. This perplexity characterizes systems which, even though we have good models of many of their aspects, are not reliaby predictable using these models. So, operational scale differences within one system are associated with one kind of complexity (but not, of course, necessarily with other kinds of complexity). It is not clear to me that any of the kinds of complexity alluded to in Joe's text are of the kind I point to here, but, since he is discussing hierarchcally organized systems, it must be involved. STAN _______________________________________________ fis mailing list fis@listas.unizar.es http://webmail.unizar.es/mailman/listinfo/fis