Re: Complexity, Languaging & Design LO842

Jim Michmerhuizen (jamzen@world.std.com)
Wed, 19 Apr 1995 22:11:47 +0059 (EDT)

On Tue, 18 Apr 1995 jack@his.com wrote:

> Given the direction of my own work, I am deeply concerned about confusion in
> non-scientific circles arising from undisciplined use of "chaos" and
> "complexity". Some dialogue erupted here briefly on this subject, and I was
> sorry to see it vanish without deeper agreement.

Yeah. Especially the first of those terms; it's a misnomer right off the
bat, a good example of what I've been saying about the naming of things.
Hoo boy. Chaos. Thought nobody would ever mention it.

I share your apprehensions about how the stuff is going to get treated.
In fact we might as well resign ourselves right off to the fact that it's
going to be - and already is - more mistreated than treated. Same thing,
I'm sure, happened in the early heyday of Newton. And Darwin. And Freud:
although the latter's pretensions to science, if "science" means
discovering immutable laws, are a joke.

There was a conference last year, and I attended it with a friend, of
people from the soft sciences, talking about chaos and nonlinear systems
and things. Some of it was carefully thought out, a lot was just pie in
the sky, and none was science - if by science you mean discovering
immutable laws. But it was a lot of fun to listen to.

Do I sound lofty? Yeah, I think I do; but without cause. Look, aren't we
all caught somewhere in here? Not a day goes by that I don't have some
reason to see new instances or applications of the principles and concepts
generally understood to stand under the heading of "chaos theory",
"fractals", and "nonlinear systems". Like many of us, I find the
principles powerful, alive, beautiful, simple, challenging, and
inexhaustibly fruitful in application. But is that enough to qualify what
I'm doing as science? I think not. I'm not sure it's even knowledge, for
heaven's sake. It's at least a kind of poetry or mythologizing that is
important for us all to be doing at least part of the time - but I'd like
to think it's more than that. I _want_ it to be knowledge.

This is a genuine dilemma. It's absorbed (or some would say, distracted)
me for quite a while.

Here, on the one side, are facts such as
- "fractal dimension" is a perfectly well-defined term in the mathematical
area that has been developed by Benoit Mandelbrot and others;
- The Mandelbrot set is a perfectly well-defined mathematical entity;
- In many areas of the physical and life sciences, the kind of behaviors
called "chaotic" are perfectly well documented, as is the fact that they
can be more simply and thoroughly expressed in the vocabulary of nonlinear
systems than in any previous theoretic frame of reference.

Now that kind of stuff - the research, the new insights, and so on - has
gotten on very well without any participation from me, thank you, and will
certainly continue to do so for a long time to come.

And here, on the _other_ side, are facts such as
- The Mandelbrot set has become for me an icon; it represents, in the details
of its logical structure, all kinds of things that it shouldn't: human
personality, life, language, this discussion group, ad nearly infinitum.
- I've begun to understand marriage, dialogue, business management, learning
in general, music, and God knows what else, all with a vocabulary borrowed
from the nonlinear systems people. It's a better vocabulary than what I
grew up with.

I think that the people at the soft sciences conference last year were
like that: transfixed, as I have been, by these new images and metaphors
and ideas. And so it turns out that I have no business dismissing them as
faddish and shallow, whatever.

The best understanding of it that I can come up with, so far, is this:
there are areas of mathematics and physics and some of the life sciences
where these ideas express real knowledge. The Mandelbrot set is a
_discovery_; it was always there, but we didn't know it. We discovered it
sometime in the past several decades. And then there are areas of our
experience where these same ideas have only analogical, metaphorical, or
even poetic reference. And in such areas, they cannot and must not be
confused with "science".

(It's not sufficiently appreciated, by the way, that the fundamentals of
"chaos theory" are mathematical, not empirical, and therefore unbounded in
their possible range of application. The physical research has found
plenty of examples of the mathematics "in action"; no doubt more are begin
added every year. The other two "big" revolutions of this century -
relativity and quantum mechanics - were much messier, to my mind.
Certainly not at all mathematical in their inspiration. That's why so
many people set Newton as the opposite pole from chaos: that was the last
time that a fundamental discovery in mathematics fueled a far-reaching
physical theory. And of course in this context neither Darwin nor Freud
are even relevant.)

Now, with all that cleared up, what is all this nonsense about the
Mandelbrot Set?

The boundary of the set is infinitely long, but it fits onto the cover of
a Scientific American. At the boundary, in most computer-produced
representations of it, you can see a lot of little instances of what look
like smaller Mandelbrot sets; and these, when you look close, have still
smaller ones, ad really infinitum. But none of these are really truly
completely identical to each other, at any scale. They just look that
way.

None of the edges you think you see, at any magnification, are solid.
They all, as you zoom in on them, shred and coagulate into other things.

I watched a video once that showed zooming in on parts of the Mandelbrot
image. Theoretically I could have spent my entire life zooming into it.
As many lifetimes as you want.

That is how language is laid on top of reality. Any single general term
has, recursively, an infinity of possible references even within a single
instance. "That was a good book". Every page? Well, no, a couple of
parts were pretty mediocre. One page was smudged with ink. There was a
typo on page 76. Listen to this spectacular paragraph. And so on.

Wheatley's book, I think, steers pretty well through this same dilemma.
In fact very well: she's aware of the science/metaphor spectrum, and uses
the analogical insights without drawing attention to their metaphorical
nature and, equally, without claiming them as scientific discoveries in
"management theory".

Well, there you have it. Since reading Gleick's book, I have given up
believing in
a) fundamental particles - I don't think there is any ultimate constituent
of matter
b) the id, the ego, and the superego
c) cause and effect
d) Bertrand Russell's theory of definite descriptions

In personal interactions, I have given up trying to name things before
they come about. This includes discussion and L-O groups. It's not hard
to know what one _wants_ to happen; it is very hard, on the other hand, to
subordinate one's wants to what _must_ happen, since at the beginning you
don't know what that is.

I'm trying very hard not to say strange attractor. I've just failed.
It's time to stop.

Regards
jamzen@world.std.com
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