Quoting Phil Henshaw <sy at synapse9.com>:
> It's been a couple months and there's still no
> comment on my various suggestions here that growth is an explosive
> process of developing complexity, and that as a process necessarily
> overwhelms its own guidance systems if not checked by anything else. It
> unavoidably would reach a limit when repercussions explode and adaptive
> responses get misdirected or collapse.
One could invent a variety of metrics for tracking growth. For example, is it a
rate of reproduction per time, a change in GDP per time, or a per capita quality
of life indicator?
In economics, there's the view of Adam Smith's `invisible hand' where collective
selfishness leads to the most benefit for all. [1] In this philosophy there is
no `guidance system' by design. Actually most of the examples of growth that
occur to me are guidance-free, and at some point are limited by the environment
of the growth, e.g. the population that gets too big will be forced to reduce
itself as resources are exhausted or adapt to find new kinds of resources. But
I don't see why simple unconstrained reproduction need show `complex' dynamics.
Human/intelligent adaptation may involve a cognitive reflective process and
create complex patterns, or in ecological systems they may evolve or co-evolve.
In an extreme via, as in the Gaia hypothesis. [2]
The growth dynamics you mention seem like they'd could be found in some general
way, but I think more details are needed to check. Perhaps modelling innovation
economic networks would be one situation where these dynamics could be found.
Something along these lines of this agent-based model:
http://ideas.repec.org/p/aug/augsbe/0267.html[1]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_hand[2]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia_theory_(science)
Locked
