(2024-02-03) Holme The Holistic Tribes

Petter Holme: The holistic tribes. This blog post is hopefully the beginning of the lecture notes for an upcoming course. Ultimately, I want to rectify the story of the development of ideas around complex systems, which has neither been a steady and well-informed progression nor a succession of Kuhnian paradigm shifts, but rather something messy and disconnected

The tribes

In our academia, divided by reductionist legions into disciplinary dominions, there are nomadic tribes, bound by no borders, roaming the realm of knowledge. These tribes are united by a recognition that reductionism cannot lead to all the answers they seek, but, in general, little else.

One day, a leader may be born to unify the tribes, stake their claimed sanctuary, and secure their long-sought retribution

Tektology 1912

The “universal organization science.” An extinct tribe led by the eccentric Bolshevik Alexander Bogdanov

Gestalt psychology 1912

“The whole is different from the sum of its parts” was the Gestalt school’s version of Aristotle’s description of emergent properties

The Wolfgang Köhler quotation below even forebodes autopoiesis, and similar process-oriented notions of complexity

The noosphere 1922

First theorized by the French Jesuit priest and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, geologist Vladimir Vernadsky further developed the idea

General semantics 1933

Nominally, Alfred Korzybski’s general semantics was a theory of mind and language, but, more importantly, it popularized the notion of levels of abstraction central to systems theories invoking emergence

Rashevsky’s Mathematical Biophysics 1938

Nicolas Rashevsky and collaborators had a very futuristic lab at the University of Chicago, producing several papers close to the core of today’s holistic tribes. Initially influenced by Gestalt theory, JBS Haldane, and D’Arcy Thompson, their “mathematical biophysics” used a phenomenal range of mathematical techniques applied to problems ranging from cell division, chemotaxis, and neuroscience to cognitive and social phenomena.

General systems theory 1945

Once a visitor to Rashevsky, Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s research considered similar topics but sought universal laws and expressions rather than a parade of specific analyses. Similar to cyberneticists, he articulated the need for other ways of explaining phenomena in systems and emphasized that living patterns are self-sustained and in constant change in open systems.

Cybernetics 1948

One of the most influential tribes, cybernetics is built on the eternally new [2] insight that explaining a system with feedback loops must be structurally different from identifying cause-and-effect relations. Cybernetics, especially in its British incarnation, managed to become more applied than most other tribes.

Warren Weaver’s Science and complexity 1948

A contemporary with Wiener and Shannon, Warren Weaver was interested in similar questions about communication, information, and the limitations of mainstream science

Systems science 1958

I identify “systems science” with the congregation venerating Jay Forrester as their patriarch, making liturgical use of his systems dynamics modeling paradigm of coupled ODEs with delays. Briefly stated, systems science is cybernetics that simulates first and thinks later.

Herbert Simon and friends 1962

Simon’s oeuvre (including that of his colleague, computer scientist Allen Newell) feels surprisingly cohesive, echoing his early investigations into organizational decision-making. The publication closest to the other tribes is probably the essay “The architecture of complexity” reprinted in his book The Sciences of the Artificial, where he discusses complex systems in Weaver’s sense as typically “near-decomposable,” meaning they can usually be understood at different levels of abstractions, but not always, sometimes do the connection across levels make a functional difference.

The Austrian school of economics 1964

This tribe lived within the nation of economics rather than roaming the Earth. Still, we need to mention the Austrian school of economics because contemporary tribes revere some of its teachings and regard FA Hayek as an early prophet of the doctrines of emergence and self-organization

Cellular automata 1970

The early study of self-replicating discrete dynamics on a grid started with von Neumann in the 1940s but took off with Conway’s “game of life,” published in a Scientific American column in 1970.

Gaia theory 1972

Similar to the noosphere, the Gaia principle tells us that the Earth is, if not an organism, at least a self-regulatory system, including the bio- and geospheres

Autopoiesis 1972

A tribe worshipping the founding fathers Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela. Pushing ideas of cybernetics and general systems theory further, originally with applications to cognition, consciousness, and what-is-life questions, autopoiesis refers to autonomous systems capable of creating and assembling their components

More is Different 1972

This essay by Nobel prize-winning physicist Phil Anderson was too far ahead of its time and was soon forgotten, despite the fact it was published in Science. Only well after the exodus of statistical physicists to complexity science was “More is Different” rediscovered

Hierarchy theory 1973

The reason reductionist science works so well is that the world is fairly hierarchically organized. This blog post is about tribes who recognize the need to explain the rest, so it might seem somewhat funny that there was an attempt to create a unified theory of hierarchies. This tribe was gathered by biosemiotician extraordinaire Howard Pattee in a series of conferences in the 1970s.

The systems philosophers 1973

There is an entire spectrum from impenetrable social theory to new-age cult material. People like Niklas Luhmann, Edgar Morin, Ervin Laszlo, Henri Altan, etc., don’t form a tribe. They were perhaps more like lone sages roaming the land and occasionally attaching to other groups.

Synergetics 1978

First, note that there are two synergetics, by Buckminster Fuller and Hermann Haken. Here, we discuss the latter.

Prigogian thermodynamics 1979

Traditional thermodynamics mainly discusses processes that are approximately in equilibrium. This is a helpful limit for designing thermal machinery (steam engines, etc.) but not for discussing the non-equilibrium world around us. Thus, Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine concluded that the rest of the world (basically all of it, that is) should be described by non-equilibrium thermodynamics

Chaos & fractals 1982

when Edward Lorenz and coworkers discovered chaotic dynamical systems—simple deterministic systems of equations where almost identical initial conditions could send the solutions off into very different trajectories

Chaotic dynamical systems usually have to share the “chaos theory” umbrella with fractals.

It’s an arbitrary choice whether one should count chaos theorists as a holistic tribe. On the one hand, they fit pretty well in a reductionist worldview. Lorenz considered the complex problem of atmospheric convection and then reduced it to his system of three equations that happened to be chaotic. On the other hand, chaos theory heavily impacted later holistic tribes, including forming the social identity of complexity science.

Benoit Mandelbrot’s 1982 book The Fractal Geometry of Nature had a pivotal role in popularizing chaos theory. Not only the general public but also scientists from other fields caught the fractal bug

Complexity science 1984

This notably large and persistent tribe is defined by their all-embracing, Bahai-like faith that sprung out of a recognition that the ultimate problems of very different disciplines have much in common

For some time, complexity science seemed to converge on emergence as the leitmotif, but, as of late, it has lost a bit of focus on holistic themes.

Artificial life 1987

On the scientific [5] side, the social identity of the ALife tribe was formed at a conference in Los Alamos in 1987. The Santa Fe Institute cosponsored this conference

Self-organized criticality (SOC) 1989

A tribe born out of statistical physicists trying to catch on the chaos-theory boom of the 1980s. At its core is a class of mechanistic models to generate power-law fluctuations (which may still be relevant for some specific systems). In the mid-90s, SOC spiraled out of scientific sanity with ever bolder claims (cf. the name of their holy scripture—How Nature Works) justified by a special plea for uncritical thinking (“details don’t matter”) based on a misapplication of the universality concept of the theory of critical behavior.

Complex networks 1998

The study of systems that can be represented as graphs has a history as rich and disconnected as this blog post in general

around the turn of the millennium, there was a brief boom of network science motivated by a search for general laws in a similar spirit to the early years of SOC

The “new” kind of science 2002

Philosophically, it follows the “But, hey! What if everything actually is computation?!” tradition of Edward Fredkin

Before you go on pondering whether there actually is a grain of truth there, read Cosma Shalizi’s delightfully heretic review.

Data science 2008

With the corporate hype of companies making money from the digital breadcrumbs we drop from our tables came the idea of theory-free science, focusing on prediction alone.