You guys all seem to be missing the difference between the value of reducing your solution and the error of ignoring the complexities of your problem. I find it's often going out of my way to trace the complexities of the problem to see where they lead that leads me out of my blinders and gives me the simpler solution in the end.
I mean, like if you can't hear the radio a solution is to keep absent mindedly turning up the volume, but if the complication is someone else with another radio in the room and you're both turning up the volume. it would be simpler to solve the problem some very different way. Phil From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Steve Smith Sent: Monday, September 08, 2008 11:17 AM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Reductionism - was: Young but distant gallaxies Ken - Reductionism has its place in the analytical phase at equilibrium. Analysis is normally a study of integrable, often linear systems, but it can be accomplished on non-linear, feed-forward systems as well. Well said... The synthesis phase puts information re: complex behavior and emergence back into the integrated mix and may be "analyzed" in non-linear, recurrent networks. It is the synthesis/analysis duality that always (often) gets lost in arguments about Reductionism. There are very many useful things (e.g. linear and near-equilibrium systems) to be studied analytically, but there are many *more* interesting and often useful things (non linear, far-from-equilibrium, complex systems with emergent behaviour) which also beg for synthesis. This is actually a probabilistic inversion of analysis as described in Inverse Theory. I'll have to look this up. Bayesian refinement cycles (forward <-> inverse) are applied to new information as one progresses through the DANSR cycle. This refines the effect of new information on prior information - which I hope folks see is not simply additive - and which may be entirely disruptive (see evolution of science itself) . Do find this applies as well in non-probabalistic models? The fact this seems to work for complex systems is philosophically uninteresting, and may ignored - so the discussion can continue. "seems to work" sends up red flags, as does "philosophically uninteresting". I could use some refinement on what you mean here. Final point: Descartes ultimately rejected the concept of zero because of historical religious orthodoxy - so he personally never applied it to the continuum extension of negative numbers. All his original Cartesian coordinates started with 1 on a finite bottom, left-hand boundary - according to Zero, The Biography of a Dangerous Idea, by Charles Seife. And didn't Shakespeare dramatize this in his famous work "Much Ado about Nothing"? (bad literary pun, sorry). _____ ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
