[FRIAM] IS: Does Complexity have a circularity problem WAS: Any non-biological complex systems?

[Nick Thompson]

Dear All, 

 

Here is Glen's thoughtful post of January 20, reborn. To be honest, I don’t understand it.  Not a bit.  I am hoping that perhaps one or more of the rest of you can help me get it.  Let’s start with one baby step.  What is meant by LAYER in this text? The possible meanings open to me are, (1) a kind of hen; (2) a stratum in a substance; or (3) a level in a hierarchical descriptive scheme.  So, “genus” is a level as is “battalion”. Are any of these meanings relevant to Glen’s post?  

 

Please help me out here.  Intuition tells me that there is gold, here, but I just don’t have the tools to mine it out. 

 

Nick 

 

Excellent!  Thanks, Eric (and everyone -- I'm enjoying this).  So, here's my, in class, answer to Nick's quiz:

 

nick> What is the difference between a circular explanation and a recursive one.  What is the key dimension that determines whether an explanation is viciously circular?   Is the virtuus dormitiva viciously circular? Why?  Why not?

 

Recursive explanations contain layers of reasoning (e.g. mechanism vs phenomenon) whereas circular ones are flat. [bolding by NST]  Vicious circularity simply means "has only 1 layer".  (I disagree with this idea.[*])  The virtus dormitiva has multiple (abstraction of language) layers and, by the single-layer defn of "vicious" is not vicious.

 

Now, on to N[arcissitic]P[ersonality]D[isorder], I think we have 2 types of recursion: 1) communicative, as Frank (probably) tried to point out to me before, and 2) phenomenological.  When we land in an attractor like "something is wrong with Trump", we're still within a single layer of reasoning (intuition, emotion, systemic gestalt, whatever).  If we have a tacit feeling for NPD, we can stay within that single layer and simply assign a token to it: NPD.  But if we're at all reductionist, we'll look for ways to break that layer into parts.  Parts don't necessarily imply crossing layers.  E.g. a meaningful picture can be cut into curvy pieces without claiming the images on the pieces also have meaning.  So 1) we can simply name various (same layer) phenomena that hook together like jigsaw pieces to comprise NPD. Or 2) we can assert that personality traits are layered so that the lower/inner turtles _construct_ the higher/outer turtles.

 

What Frank says below is of type (1).  What Jochen (and others) have talked about before (childhood experiences, etc.) is more like type (2).  The question arises of whether the layering of symbolic compression (renaming sets of same-layer attributes) is merely type (1) or does it become type (2).  To me, mere _renaming_ doesn't cut it.  There must be a somewhat objectively defined difference, a name-independent difference.  So, if we changed all the words we use (don't use "narcissism", "personality", "disorder", "emptiness", etc. ... use booga1, booga2, booga3, etc.), would we _still_ see a cross-trophic effect?  Note that mathematics has elicited lots of such demonstrations of irreducible layering ... e.g. various no-go theorems.  But those are syntactic _demonstrations_ ... without the vagaries introduced by natural language and scientific grounding.  To assert that problems like natural selection vs. adaptation or the diagnosis of NPD also demonstrate such cross-trophic properties would _require_ complete formalization into math.  Wolpert did this (I think) to some extent.  But I doubt it's been done in evolutionary theory and I'm fairly confident it hasn't been done in psychiatry.  (I admit my ignorance, of course... doubt is a good mistress but a bad master.)

 

More importantly, though, I personally don't believe a recursive cycle is _any_ different from a flat cycle.  Who was it that said all deductive inference is tautology?  I have it in a book somewhere, cited by John Woods.  Unless there is some significantly different chunk of reasoning somewhere in one of the layers, all the layers perfectly _reduce_ to a single layer.

 

Hence, my answer to Nick's quiz (at the pub after class) is that _all_ cycles are "vicious" (if vicious means single layer), but if we take my concept of "vicious", then only those cycles that _hide_ behind (false) layers are vicious.

 

 

[*] I think a cycle is vicious iff it causes problems.  Tautologies don't cause problems.  They don't solve them.  But they don't cause them either.  So a vicious cycle must have more than 1 layer.

 

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

 

 

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam [mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com] On Behalf Of glen ?
Sent: Wednesday, June 07, 2017 4:57 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] IS: Does Complexity have a circularity problem WAS: Any non-biological complex systems?

 

+1

 

Having been called a "troll" for most of my adult life, I'd love to hear why Owen lobs the insult.

 

 

On 06/07/2017 01:54 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:

> Owen,

> 

>  

> 

> I don’t understand this comment.  Who’s a troll?  Are you trolling, here?  Is this irony?  I don’t follow.  

> 

> [...]

> 

> From: Friam [ <mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com> mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com] On Behalf Of Owen 

> Densmore

> Sent: Wednesday, June 07, 2017 4:40 PM

> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group 

> < <mailto:friam at redfish.com> friam at redfish.com>

> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] IS: Does Complexity have a circularity problem WAS: Any non-biological complex systems?

> 

>  

> 

> Troll

 

--

☣ glen

 

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