IMPLICATIONS OF THE THEORY OF COMPLEX SYSTEMS

The most obvious implication of the theories we have been discussing is the nearly complete rejection of reductionism as a viable method for exploring the basic meanings of reality. While we must be careful not to belittle the advances in scientific knowledge achieved through the use of reductionist principles, we do need to understand the limitations of the approach. Rosen, in fact, pointed out that it was the success of the reductionist approach to biology that led to its own demise. The challenge of biology which we are discussing has been, if anything, intensified by several decades of explosiveresearch in molecular biology, which represents the most recent attempt to enforce the reductionist-empiricist paradigm on biological systems. We have indeed learned a great deal about molecular constituents of particular organisms, but this knowledge has only served to widen the gap between wúhat we know and what needs to be explained. The molecular biologist has asserted that all problems in biology have been "reduced" to physics and thereby solved; what was in fact happened is quite the reverse of this. Namely, by demonstrating the inability of conventional physical descriptions to deal effectively with the phenomena of that sub-class of physical systems which happens to be organic, we thereby illuminate fundamental and heretofore unrecognized gaps in physics itself. In other words, far from biology losing its autonomyúby disappearing into present day physics, biology will necessarily force the physicist to fundamentally and radically revise the character and scope of his discipline. The theories we have been associating with complex systems then transcend reductionism. There is another important implication that is highlighted primarily by the ideas we have associated wúith heirarchy theory, and that is the unidirection of' time. As you recall Bunge defined an emergent level as one that is later in time and he said that all hierarchical systems are historical, that they have "evolved" Again, this is not a new concept, Norbert wiener made some interesting comments on this. A very interesting astronomical question concerning the direction of time comes up in connection with the time of astrophysics, in which we are observing remote heavenly bodies in a single observation, and in which there seems to be no unidirectionalness in the nature of our experiment. Why then does the unidirectional thermodynamics which is based on terrestrial observations stand us in such good stead in astrophysics? The answer is interesting and not too obvious. Our observations of the stars are through the agency of light, of rays or particles emerging from the observed object and perceived by us. We can perceive incoming light, but cannot perceive outgoing light, or at least the perception of outgoing light is not achieved by an experiment as simple and direct as that of incoming light. In the perception of incoming light, we end up with the eye or a photographic plate. We condition these for the reception of images by putting them in a state of insulation for some time past: We dark-condition the eye to avoid after-images, and we wrap our plates in black paper to prevent halation. It is clear that only such an eye and only such plates are any use to us; if we were given to pre-images, we might as well be blind; and if we had to put our plates in black paper after we use them and develop them before using, photography would be a very difficult art indeed. This being the case, we can see those stars radiating to us and to the whole world; while if there are any stars whose evolution is in the reverse direction, they will attract radiation from the whole heavens, and even this attraction from us will not be perceptible to us in any way, in view of the fact that we already know our own past but not our future, Thus the part of the universe which we see must have its past-future relations, as far as the emission of radiation is concerned, concordant with our own. The very fact that we see a star means that its thermodynamics is like our own. We have seen several not entirely consistent theories concerning hierarchies or hierarchical systems from Simon's Chinese boxes to Oldershaw's self-similar cosmological hierarchies. Time plays a very important role in each of them. In neogenesis the lower order must exist prior to transformation to higher orders. Of equal importance is the notion of frequency which is related to the concept of resolution. One type of higher order system is one whose frequency is lowú enough that, considering the limits of resolution in use at a given time, its parameters give the appearance of being fixed, There is a type of lower level system, on the other hand, that can be described as having a frequency high enough, that given the limits of resolution, only the statistical averages of its dynamic behavior can be detected. Of course the resolution of levels may not depend on time relationships, It is this limit of resolution that Simon sees as partial decomposability. While it is not always obvious from the discussions w~ have shared, levels are seldom discreetly separated, in most cases it is a matter of a level of resolution just sufficient to detect shifts in what is basically an uneven gradiant. The view, then, of a complex system depends to large extent on the level at which the observer interacts with it. . D. F. Bradley provided an example of this in action. An interesting example is the three dimensional structure of proteins. Biochemists working in molecular biology have found that some proteins can be denatured and renatured chemically and offer as an explanation that a native protein exists in its lowest energy state. Molecular physicists in molecular biology say that this is not an explanation but something to be expl&ined in terms of, for example, inter-atom potential functions. The molecular physicist who decides to take a set of potential functions and feed them into a computer to calculate the structure of ribonuclease or myoglobin by minimizing the total potential energy is subject to criticism from his lower-magnification, biochemist neighbor because he cannot immediately come up with an answer (because of the enormous computer capacity and time required to treat such a large number of interaction terms) and from his higher-magnification-level physicist neighbor because the potential functions in current usage are largely guesses (because they have yet to be proved to give good quantitative or even qualitative results with even small numbers of small molecules). Structure in a complex system is simply change, at a level high enough that within the limits of resolution used, appears to be fixed. As Grobstein put it, change occurs in a lower level and is transformed to a higher level. To say that the structure of a higher level is an emergent property of the lower levels is simply to recognize this. One of the earliest to recognize this was the sociologist, Ptirim Sorokin, who with a massive statistical evaluation of western culture showed that cultural change grows out of the properties of the culture itself. Hierarchical control programs, Pattee told us, are unique to living systems. He demonstrated the importance of their role as a feedback mechanism between levels that acts as a constraint on the lower level elements resulting in an apparent increase in the freedom of the system. The examples he gave of such programs, the genetic structure, language, the rule of law, gives us an idea of how prolific they are in nature. The role of natural selection in evolution is widely toutted. The question of where the variety from which that selection will be made has always been played down. Part of the role of hierarchical control programs is to define the structure of that variety. Buckley and Rosen described the role of error and variety as mechanisms of evolutionary change. A key element of these mechanisms in living systems is the freedom created by hierarchical control systems. Buckley's concept of society as an adaptive system helps to delineate the step that separates biological systems from social systems. But, there is something that Rosen , Buckley , and Luhmann fail to take note of in their discussions. That is, that social systems are living systems and as a result include hierarchical control programs, commonly known as political, cultural, and ethnic systems for example, which proscribe the areas that behavior, both creative and adaptive, will be allowed to evolve into. Perhaps it is here, in the study of the kinds of creative varietyú that is allowed, or possibly cultivated by a cultural or social system, where we will find the clues to the directions societies will take in the future. In this overview of complex systems we have barely touched on areas where some of the most interesting questions are being asked. I have avoided any mention of those areas that are normally handled in mathematical terms both because the rigor of mathematical approaches requires assumptions that either are questionable, or at least must be explained in non-mathematical terms, and because I don't yet have the background. Most work in systems theory has been as a branch of operations research or management science. In those cases a goal external to the system is postulated before the study begins. Goals in natural systems are emergent properties and therefore appear later and are subject to adaptive change. My contention and the purpose of this thesis is to show that an understanding of complex systems is a beginning, a jumping-off place, for an understanding of natural phenomena.

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