Vladimyr Ivan Burachynsky wrote circa 10-04-11 05:20 PM: > But Complexity seems to be the focus > not AL so did complexity reduce its scope of interest and did AL just die > out? Did Complexity inherit a dead language and try and make it work in a > new environment? I suspect that if a pattern is easily recognized it > probably is just another bumper sticker. Perhaps everybody is just hunting > for the next wowy factor? Back in 87 Complexity waas only one of three > components necessary to define emergemce. Now emergence seems to be a > feature of complexity. > > [...] > > I tink I have stumbled upon a semiotic swap, the original hierarchy has > flipped as more nd more focus is broughtto Computation and Simulaton. I can > see how the unrecognizable unknown forms of emergence were problematic and > it ws very easy to change te focus to nice stable patterns which used to be > called frozen accidents.
I don't think this is a semiotic swap... or, at least to me, it's not. AL and pretty pictures are part of the general attempt to model what _could_ be in order to understand what _is_. That's what AL is all about and, to a large extent, what every modeling effort is about. One tries to circumscribe and sample the space of possibilities in order to understand the context in which some process obtains. The reason we need these _impoverished_ approaches is because we can't do experiments over the actual systems. We can't recreate N>33 solar systems to experiment on the origins and evolution of the biosphere. [grin] So, we have to do it all virtually and define validation touch points. But, without the validation, it's largely useless. (I know everyone knows this... but it sometimes helps to repeat it.) Complexity studies encompass both artificial systems (what could be) and real systems (what is). > The lack of biologists has allowed a cultural realignment to center on the > skills of te remaining participants namely programmers. So the semiotic swap > must have happened some while ago and the language frustration is still and > echo of an older revolution. It seems that the focus on simulations and > frozen accidents is exactly what Pattee warned about, the real emergence > which was very difficult to conceptualize was replaced by easily > recognizable frozen accidents. So did the search for the essence of true > emergence, characteristc of Living systems, simply fizzle out? As a former > biologist and unofficial code geek I got to see both sides of the quandry > and it makes perfect sense that the old ideal was simply unmanageable and a > semiotic swap was the only way to save face and keep funding in place. Yes, this list is certainly dominated by computer people, to its great loss and gain. But I think most of the people on the list sporadically (or usually) realize this and appreciate input from the other domains. The trouble is that the languages and styles used by math/computer people is forceful and precise, leading to a form of intimidation. It doesn't allow so much for "fluffy" stuff (like the offal I often foist onto the list), though a few people would say that the list is dominated by fluffy stuff. [grin] However, we do find some compensation for that intimidation in the form of overt welcoming of ill-formed rhetoric. But I doubt many of the people on the list, even the ones guilty of taking incredible license with various words and concepts, are totally ignorant of the multiple meanings (ambiguity) behind words like emergence. That's why we keep coming back to these concepts, seemingly to no avail, because we're trying to anneal into a stable, interdisciplinary, semantics. That we do flip around from one to another aspect of things like emergence, ontology, epistemology, the meaning of math, etc. is evidence of that attempt to anneal. That's what I think, anyway. -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-222-9095, http://tempusdictum.com -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-222-9095, http://agent-based-modeling.com ============================================================ 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
