REPOST of previous message

[Nick Thompson]

 Sorry about the long line lengths in the previous message.  I KNOW I put carriage returns in before I posted,
but I will try again.  I will bring my computer with me tomorrow and perhaps somebody can show me how
the cognoscenti post messages with line lengths under a meter long.   Any way, here is the message again.
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 behavior 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 meso
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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