Unified Theory

Posted by Michael Agar on Jun 07, 2006; 1:37pm
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/FW-SFI-Seminar-Complexity-Parallel-Computation-and-Statistical-Physics-tp521927p521960.html

Hi Nigel. If I'd known you were out there I'd have been more careful  
about being busted for felonious possession of incompatible  
ontological categories (: We grew up with ideographic vs nomothetic  
as well, though in Berkeley I always assumed it was the result of  
controlled substances. Ward Goodenough encoded it in the old days as  
"language of description" vs. "language of comparison."

It all depends on what theory is taken to mean in the social realm.  
(When faced with a contradiction, make a distinction, advised a  
philosopher friend.) My list was a Rorschach reaction to Jochen's  
email. But there was an unresolved purpose in the madness.

1. A social theory isn't a theory in the old-fashioned sense. It's a  
lens, a conceptual system through which people see how their world  
works in a different way. You can get hypotheses out of there to  
test, and there will be consequences for action aplenty, but the  
theory won't look like Euclid or Newton.

2. Theory is about making sense out of how the social world works. As  
such it requires entities of different types, just as a story  
requires actors, plots, motives, setting, etc, just as a film  
requires lighting, sets, a screenplay, makeup, costume, etc. Social  
theory is a narrative.

3. I'm trying to learn about cultural evolution now, that mysterious  
thing that exploded onto the scene about 50 thousand years ago. It  
changed the co-evolution game with language and consciousness. The  
new parameters and possibilities map out the universal human  
territory that the social theory has to account for.

Enough. Many old issues and known philosophical hazards in that  
tentative list, but it's interesting to think in general of  
"artificial societies" as requiring some clarity on necessary basic  
assumptions about society that must be made to model them at all and  
then asking for a coherent non-computational theory that integrates  
and justifies them. You probably wrote something that answers that  
question years ago. Pointers appreciated.

At any rate, this theory trail requires inclusion of entities of many  
different types and a framework for their integration, with narrative  
a current candidate to do that work.

Mike


On Jun 6, 2006, at 1:04 PM, Nigel Gilbert wrote:

> Incidentally, the possibility of a 'unified' social theory has been  
> the
> subject of many decades of philosophical debate since Kant under  
> the heading
> ideographic vs nomothetic.
>
> One of the problems that early natural scientists had to contend  
> with was
> that no one knew then what the relevant, effective ontology for  
> scientific
> theories is.  Should scientific laws be about 'essences' or  
> 'forces' or only
> observables (there's about 4 centuries of debate encapsulated in that
> sentence!).  I think that social science has the same problem, and  
> it is
> interesting that Mike's candidate 'assumptions for a canonical  
> society' are
> such different types of 'theory': two distributions, one selection  
> principle
> and one attribute ('telic').  Personally, I believe that the most  
> promising
> route is by identifying common processes of interaction,  
> recognising that
> the outcomes of the processes may differ from one society to  
> another, and on
> the initial conditions (e.g. there is some common logic to trading  
> which
> results in markets of very different kinds; there is some common  
> logic to
> belief and opinion diffusion which gives rise to a range of  
> different types
> of network, and so on).  An implication is that just observing  
> distributions
> or gathering ethnographies at single moments in time is an unlikely  
> basis
> for understanding what these generic processes are.
>
> Nigel
>
>
>
>
> On 6/6/06 17:27, "Michael Agar" <magar at anth.umd.edu> wrote:
>
>> Interesting idea. In various and sundry experiments with drug ABM's
>> it seemed like assumptions were being made that were candidate
>> assertions for a "canonical society." For instance, we set up
>> networks on a power law distribution assumption following Barabassi.
>> We assumed that openness to change among agents followed the normal
>> distribution shown by Rogers' work on Diffusion of Innovation. Do
>> these tend to be how "normal" small societies organize themselves? If
>> so, why is that? If so, in what kinds of social ecologies do they
>> depart from it?
>>
>> Then there's an interesting connection between ABMs and the robust
>> trend across many social and psychological theories that a theory has
>> to be "trifocal." Agents are the centerpiece, then a level down to
>> model their knowledge and rules, then a level up to observe the
>> system that they create on the one hand and that effects them in
>> turn. Is that a minimal requirement for a unified social theory?
>>
>> Then there's the natural selection principle. Some sort of co-
>> evolutionary mechanisms would seem to be required, but they'll have
>> to be different from the classic Darwinian. For instance, human
>> agents are telic, they organize around imagined future states. If we
>> consider memes--a problematic concept, I know, but one that brings
>> ideas into the picture--reproduction rates can vary from extremely
>> slow to extremely quick. With memes mutations occur frequently and
>> sometimes dramatically. Memetic crossover occurs in all kinds of
>> interesting ways. A unified social theory will have to take all this
>> into account in addition to natural selection on biological variation
>> if it wants to explain human social conditions.
>>
>> Been out of the FRIAM loop for a bit so hope all that isn't a re-run.
>> A good challenge, Jochen, that phrase. Vielversprechend.
>>
>>
>> Mike
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Jun 6, 2006, at 4:18 AM, Jochen Fromm wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> Where is the difference between steps, "depth" and time,
>>> if "the depth of a system" is simply defined in terms of the
>>> number of parallel computational steps needed to simulate it ?
>>> Depth seems to be just another word for (virtual) time.
>>>
>>> Much more interesting is the question if there is a unified
>>> theory for complex systems in terms of agents and multi-agent
>>> systems. In psychology and sociology we have a patchwork of
>>> theories, which arises from the complexity of the research object.
>>> A complex system is often described by several theories and
>>> multiple models, depending on the particular perspective. We
>>> have the psychology of Sigmund Freud, of C.G. Jung, of Skinner,
>>> of William James, etc. In sociology we have the sociology of
>>> Durkheim, of Weber, of Luhmann, a few smaller theories like role
>>> theory and "rational choice theory" and a lot of vague theories
>>> like Giddens "theory of structuration".
>>>
>>> These theories can be correlated to one another if we
>>> place them in a grid or coordinate system with two axes:
>>> * historical vs. regular behavior (exceptional vs. expected events)
>>> * micro vs. macro behavior (low-level vs high-level patterns)
>>>
>>> The behavior of a complex system depends neither solely on
>>> individual events and accidents nor on universal laws.
>>> Both sites play an important role, historical accidents (see
>>> for example the principles "sensitivity to initial conditions",
>>> butterfly effect, frozen accidents, path dependence) and
>>> regular laws. Likewise, the behavior of complex systems
>>> depends neither solely on individual microscopic actions nor
>>> on macroscopic structures, institutions and organizations.
>>> Both layers are important (see for example the principles emergence,
>>> swarm intelligence, self-organization).
>>>
>>> The most interesting behavior occurs in the center or at the
>>> middle, if microscopic actions have a strong effect on macroscopic
>>> behavior and vice versa, or if historical accidents become global
>>> patterns. An ideal theory would combine both aspects, historical and
>>> regular behavior, micro and macro behavior by defining universal
>>> "laws of history" or "theories of emergence". Do you think it is
>>> possible to discover or formulate such a unified theory? Or at
>>> least a unifying principle, such as evolution in Biology ?
>>> Probably evolution is again the unifying principle here..
>>>
>>> -J.
>>>
>>> -----Original Message-----
>>> From: Stephen Guerin
>>> Sent: Monday, June 05, 2006 9:10 PM
>>> To: friam at redfish.com
>>> Subject: [FRIAM] FW: SFI Seminar: Complexity, Parallel  
>>> Computation,and
>>> Statistical Physics
>>>
>>> Has anyone seen any papers on logical depth in the context of agent-
>>> based
>>> modeling? I know we could talk about n agents * t steps * a rough
>>> description of agent and environment complexity, but I was
>>> wondering if
>>> anyone's done some more formal work...
>>>
>>> -Steve
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> ============================================================
>>> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
>>> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
>>> lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
>>
>>
>>
>
> ________________________________________________________________
> Professor Nigel Gilbert, ScD, FREng, AcSS, Professor of Sociology,
> University of Surrey, Guildford GU2 7XH, UK. [phone]
>
>
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org