Stage theories, how organizations change, competition, cooperation Complex adaptive systems Math, physics, economics, Eco-systems, cognition,

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1 Complex Systems Seminar May 29, 2007 Stuart Umpleby A brief report on the conference in Urbana, IL, on Understanding Complex Systems. What the Biological Computer Laboratory at the University of Illinois did, , was similar to what Jared Diamond did in Guns, Germs, and Steel. At BCL people asked big questions and integrated the results of many experiments to answer these questions. The people currently in the Beckman Institute at the U of I in contrast do very fine work on small problems but do not ask big questions, for example, what is the nature of adaptive behavior, or how are we to understand understanding? Field Discipline Interests/Concepts Complex systems Physics, biology, mathematics Math model building, experiments, visual display Evolution of complex systems Biology, sociology, technology studies Stage theories, how organizations change, competition, cooperation Complex adaptive systems Math, physics, economics, Eco-systems, cognition, Cybernetics: regulation of complex systems Neurophysiology, math, philosophy learning, adaptation Circularity, role of the observer, learning, autonomy, adaptation, understanding General systems theory Biology, social science, math Evolution, emergence Lowell Christy Social systems are more complex than 1 brain. Bill Smith Go up to wholeness, not down to control. 1. observation 1 dimension Data 2. correlation 2 dimension, matrix Information 3. perspective Short term and long Knowledge term 4. why What is it for? Wisdom SU Is goal formulation as opposed to goal seeking what you mean? LC Different types of questions Dave Schwandt complex adaptive systems term was coined by Buckley in the 1960s. Sociologists picked up on cybernetics and systems theory. BS Need for wholeness David Apgar What could convince you that you are wrong? DSchwandt One becomes attuned to philosophical questions.

2 SU Elliott Jaques associated cognitive complexity with time frame of decision-making. BS Higher analysis leads to simpler descriptions. SU Yes, one can describe the regulation of the global economy using 4 conceptual levels (left side of table). For the paper, see 5. Gaia 4. change game 3. change rules of game 2. 1-to-1 regulation of disturbances 1. 1 to 1 regulation of variety Structure Emergence Supervenience Non-reductive Convention reduction DA There are 3 ways to think about emergence (right side of table). It is important to find the deep structure find the innate structure. It is wrong to think higher levels reduce to lower levels. DSchwandt What is the interaction between 1 and 2? Interaction between levels. Mehdi Majidi It depends on the political system. Sometimes individuals cannot change. BS The words we use frame the form of thinking. Metaphors are constraining. LC Communism didn t work. The Soviets tried to use cybernetics to operate a centrally planned economy. DS Wiener s book the human use of human beings was stimulated by this attempt. BS What would the world look like if humans were here as beings rather than as resources? Anne Washington Something beyond complexity. There will always be a meta level. BS Holeness goes beyond 4 dimensional thinking. LC Recently there have been critiques of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Few have advanced degrees. Few know foreign languages. Netcentric warfare and control of the info-sphere are current concerns. The training of military officers needs to go beyond what it has been. Bill 109 proposes an academy for peace administrators. DA Semantic holists -- Quine, Davidson. Why would we expect our theory nets to capture everything? The meaning of a term depends on all the sentences of a language.

3 Evan Faber We can t have a distinction between 2 mental phenomena without 2 phys. phenomena. Look at behavior at different levels. Where is consciousness or intentionality? BS Intentionality and purpose are important. Relative to this purpose I have control. Something is definable relative to a purpose. Appreciation means to accept on faith. It simplifies. EF Purpose exists at the individual level. We also need perception and intuition. DS We are questioning not complexity, but how we think about complexity. SU I find purpose easier to grasp than the whole. Who defines the whole? Different people will conceive the whole differently. Purpose leads more quickly to the question, Whose purpose? BS Elements, relationships, whole. Whole is related to achieving a purpose. Can t go to 5 th dimension without religion, etc. LC If we as purposive beings want to control something, given our short arcs of understanding, we can use force to bring change. Is that the change we want? This question leads to the academy of peace (post conflict) administrators. DS He has written a book on leadership and complexity. We need to accept the possibility that we cannot control. See Practices/dp/ /ref=sr_1_1/ ?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid= &sr=8-1 Organizational Learning From World Class Theories to Global Best Practices (Hardcover) by David Schwandt (Author), Michael J. Marquardt (Author) "As we approach the 21st century, we are entering a new era in the evolution of organizational life and structure..." (more) Key Phrases: goal reference knowledge, environmental interface subsystem, goal referenced knowledge, New York, Organizational Learning Systems Model, Arthur Andersen (more...) LC Lt. Col. Mingling has written that our training of generals results in a lack of generalship. SU In this conversation we have gone far beyond what was discussed at the complexity conf. in Urbana, IL. At that conference a key idea was that by forcing more energy thru a system complexity would emerge. DS We are trying to force more people thru the system. BS Purpose at the interactive level is values. AW What is complexity used for? DA There are useful approaches in complexity theory and lots of BS. How do we understand a cause to be working?

4 LC Cybernetics arose out of failure of efforts during WW II. Rachel Carson described the failure to recognize the consequences of DDT. We are witnessing a failure of counter insurgency strategies. What are the limits of what we know? What new ideas do we need to create? DA Universities are designed to fragment knowledge and perpetuate jobs. A legitimate topic is adaptive systems. An illegitimate topic is complexity in complex adaptive systems. SU I think there are 3 uses of the term complexity 1. some object of study is complex 2. my description is complex 3. oh, dear, I don t understand DA Pleonasm is the flip side of oxymoron. It has redundancy in it. Pleonasm is the use of more words (or even word-parts) than necessary to express an idea clearly. The word comes originally from Greek πλεονασµός ("excess"). A closely related, narrower concept (some would say a subset of pleonasm) is rhetorical tautology, in which essentially the same thing is said more than once in different words (e.g "black darkness", "cold ice", "burning fire"). Regardless, both are a form of redundancy. Pleonasm and tautology each refer to different forms of redundancy in speech and the written word. Wikipedia DA Supervenience A depends on B. This is a way to eliminate confusion. Mind-body dualism, 1 side says 2 different things, mind reduces to body, mind superveniences. Supervenience pulls out the way 2 things are logically structured. Logical richness, but one cannot be reduced to another. Davidson. A murder occurs and a silencer is used. No sound of the gun but what matters is the bullet. Biology and physics are different semantic systems. It may be true that a loud shot may cause a death but not the same death. Intention is given by the problem you are trying to solve. In philosophy, supervenience is a kind of dependency relationship, typically held to obtain between sets of properties. To give a somewhat simplified example, if psychological properties supervene on physical properties, then any two persons who are physically indistinguishable must also be psychologically indistinguishable; or equivalently, any two persons who are psychologically different (e.g., having different thoughts), must be physically different as well. Importantly, the reverse does not follow (supervenience is not symmetric): even if being the same physically implies being the same psychologically, two persons can be the same psychologically yet different physically: that is, psychological properties can be multiply realized in physical properties. Supervenience has traditionally been used to describe relationships between sets of properties in a manner which does not imply a strong reductive relationship. [1] For example, many hold that economic properties supervene on physical properties, in that if two worlds were exactly the same physically, they would also be the same economically. However, this does not entail that

5 economics can be reduced in any straightforward way to physics. Thus, supervenience allows one to hold that "high-level phenonema" (like those of economics, psychology, or aesthetics) depend, ultimately, on physics, without assuming that one can study those high-level phenomena using means appropriate to physics. Wikipedia LC 4 strategies for communication 1. Stories 2. Mapping the invisible stories that have changed us 3. Innovation briefs 4. Animation, serial comic, normative, conceptual