Ah Sahib, Turtles All The Way Down.

[Nick Thompson]

All,

Pasted in below is a Mull or a Maunder .... I cant tell which.  

Love to know anybody's thoughts.

Nick

Wednesday’s talk at SFI was by a young economist from Australia, who wanted us to know that the best way of thinking about change in economies (which he called evolutionary economics) was in terms not of the behavior  of agents (microeconomics) nor in the of systems, macro economics, but in the substitution over time of rules that characterized the behavior of agents and systems, a field of study he called meson economics.  New rules can enter the system at any level of organization and spread disease like through system and/or from individual to individual until they come to characterize the system  as a whole.  Is is theirs process of substitution of one rule by another that he proposes that evolutionary economists study.  
 
This provoked in my life another round of discussions about levels or organization in which I learned some things that quite surprised me.   The problem is this.  Let’s say we believe in the ontological version of levels of organization theory.  “Viewpoint scheiewpoint:  the world actually IS organized in levels of organization and that agent is actually composed of agents and with other agents forms itself into larger agents.”  Now many of you are experts in designing demonstrations that agents == turtles, you call them? – whose behavior arises from very simple rules can appear to behavior as complex agents.  I assume that you have gone on and developed agents that consist of agents.  I know you have developed agents that are selected to be “good” agents.  Have you developed agents that are good agents that are composed of agents that are good at being agents that are part of good agents?
 
I ask because this is, after all, the central problem of group selection (spelled out in “shifting the natural selection metaphor to the group level” which awaits you on my website home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/  , if you should happen to be curious).  How do you select at one level and see effects not only at the same level but also at the next level down, when the rules at the next level down are in competition with one another.  It is also the developmental question in reverse: what are the rules of relation between … read slowly here…the rules of relation between agents at a lower level that produce success at THAT LEVEL and the rules of relation between agents at the higher level that produce success at THAT LEVEL.  In other words, what are the mediating rules between levels of organization.  Or where do grandsons come from.    
 
Now I had always thought that you guys would be WAY AHEAD on this one.  After reading some cellular automata stuff a hundred years ago, and thought about standing waves in such phenomena as lens clouds (remember, I am also a weather nut) it seemed to me that since complexity people had quickly developed emergent phenomena of various sorts they would ALSO have developed RESPONSIVE emergents or FUNCTIONAL emergents.  I think about Kaufmann’s intermediate degrees of connected ness where effects can be passed through the medium or “gliders”.  Has anybody made aerodynamically competent “gliders”?  As I look through closed eyes at all the noise my visual system generates, I can press on one surface of my eye gently and a circle appears at the opposite outer margin in that same eye (but not in the other).  Has anybody fooled with binocular phosphenes?  I imagine pressing on the sides of a computer screen and having the gliders  flee my touch, or something.  I can also imagine making lens clouds respond by altering upper air wind flows or moving mountain ranges.  
 
 But at least one person has told me that this question has proved to be difficult, that while I have been sleeping, complexity science has not produced legions of models of  interrelations between levels of organization.  
 
Does ANY of this make sense?  Or am I posing the question in such an incompetent  way that you complexity folks don't recognize it as one that Turing answered in an aircraft hanger in forty one.  
 
 
 
 


Nicholas S. Thompson
Professor of Psychology and Ethology
Clark University
[hidden email]
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/
[hidden email]
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