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

[Nick Thompson]

Hi, glen, 

Great!  I am learning stuff.  I am happy to learn more about onions.   In fact, now wish I knew more.  It seems like onions develop from the inside out, right?  The outside layer is just the first inside layer grown large.  I think if one examines the whole onion plant, one finds that each layer of the onion proper is connected to its own onion leave.  But mostly my interest is in playing the metaphor game rigorously, which you are doing with admirable precision.  

I stipulate that a bump in one layer of an onion will enforce itself on the layers around it, so the layers are not entirely independent of one another.  Do you stipulate that each layer of an onion is essentially an independent plant wrapped in the earlier layers grown larger?  

At some point, in the metaphor game, we return to the thing we are trying to explain and map the elements of the metaphor (the "analogs") onto the explanandum.  But not yet.  This is too much fun. 

Nick

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: Friday, June 09, 2017 11:01 AM
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?

Heh, you're so rife with premature registration!  You _leap_ to thinking about the strength of the onion analogy without seeming to listen to what I'm saying at all.  8^)  That's OK.  I'm used to it.  But to be clear, my point was about _direction_, not the extent to which layers are coupled.  I also mentioned spray painting and sand blasting.  Those are even better than onions, given Russ' target of urban systems.

But on with the onion!  Surely you don't believe your own statement that an onion's layers have relatively little to do with one another.  That would be akin to rejecting the concept of a population _relaxing_ into a landscape.  Literally, the very shape of the outer layers is determined by the shapes of the inner layers.  And since the onion analog (not metaphor) is about space, the shapes matter a great deal to the structural analogy.

More importantly, the thickness of an onions layer has much to do with the gradients it's being painted by.  So, this analog is actually a pretty good one for making my point that layer is a more generically useful term than level.


On 06/08/2017 09:41 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:
> Late, here, so I will just say a little.  According to the scientific metaphor game I understand, we would now start to cash out the onion metaphor.  Does the relation between the layers in an onion REALLY capture what you are after.  I would guess not, because (I am holding an onion now) the layers in an onion have relatively little to do with one another.  You can slide one with respect to the other.  I am guessing that you are looking for a metaphor in which one layer interacts with another.  (Ugh.  I have to go wash my hands.)  Remember, you can make a metaphor to an abstract onion.  A model has to have its own reality beyond it’s use to represent your notion of layer.  


--
␦glen?

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