[FRIAM] "self-organization"

Sat Jan 13 11:46:24 EST 2018

Hi, Eric, 

Thanks, a lot, for that!  I won't say a lot more about self-organization, now, because I am hoping that the responses of others will display exactly the diversity you describe.  I think at least someone will argue that the two kinds of self-organization are the same, or, at least, that the biological kind puts the physical kind into service.  Let's see. 

I was fascinated by your last few sentence, which I am going to characterize as displaying an ambivalence about metaphorical thought.   I am starting to fall prey to what amounts to a doctrine (You will  need HTML to get the full effect) : 

1.      All Thought is in Metaphors

2.      All Metaphors Lie

3.      All Metaphors Give sight

4.      Some Metaphors are Better Than Others

5.      Good Scientists Locate the Good Metaphors.  

West Eberhard is very hard on metaphorical thought.  She writes [p. 16]:  

Metaphors are not only potentially misleading, but they are also dull substitutes for reality, because they reduce exquisitely dynamic phenomena to the lifeless images of a computer, a blueprint, or a cake.  Why not describe real mechanisms and thus use development as a metaphor for itself [emphasis nst’s].  

I have always admired MJW-E as a scientist utterly and unreservedly dedicated to the work.  But this passage is just wonderfully muddled.  In the first place, “mechanism” is a metaphor.  And the whole problem, is, of course, to discover a way to figure out which metaphors are realer than their alternatives.  

What she might be talking about here is “inter-level metaphors” [fractality?], in which case, of course, I highly approve.   

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 Eric Smith
Sent: Saturday, January 13, 2018 12:16 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] "self-organization"

Hi Nick,

I will speak only for myself:

This is another of those unfortunate terms, like Emergence, which is used by a variety of people in a variety of contexts to — they intend — refer to any ones among a variety of ideas that certainly are not operationally all the same, even if some of them are operationally defined.  I find it hopeless to start with the terms themselves and try to have a conversation that gets to anyplace definite.

Your quote below is from a particular context in evolutionary/developmental biology, as handled by a certain set of people, and quoting from a certain other set of people.  Whether there is even something I would recognize as an operationally defined concept in this context is not clear to me, though I think Gerhart’s and Kirschner’s descriptions of development with its consequences for evolution are insightful and important (whether or not they ever really formalize to any significant degree).  Maybe one could make model versions that reproduce important parts of the phenomenology, and claim that the models acting as abstractions formalize some sense of the term.

There are other uses that would make no reference to most of what is central in the developmental thinking, such as areas where “self-organization” refers to phenomena related to dynamical versions of phase transitions.  Maybe that usage and the developmental usage share some kind of family resemblance; that may also be in the eye of the beholder.

Why a certain collection of people think that organizing motifs in a diverse collection of phenomena bear enough of a resemblance to be grouped under a common umbrella term has large impacts on who choses to work together, and maybe what they look for and notice empirically.  Sometimes they can also borrow models back and forth.  Whether that perceived similarity reflects a real common dynamic in the world is a question that often lives on the far side of a lot of careful abstraction and modeling hard work within domains, and in many of these communities only a part of that work has been done in a sketchy way, if any at all has been done beyond loose description.

I don’t mind working at this loose and vague level of language, and spend a lot of time at that level.  But if I want to nail something down, I need to start to get a lot more explicit about what I want to describe and what question I have about it.  Often the set of interested readers lowers to a number somewhere between 0 and 1 at that stage.

All best,

Eric

> On Jan 13, 2018, at 3:50 PM, Nick Thompson < <mailto:nickthompson at earthlink.net> nickthompson at earthlink.net> wrote:

> 

> Hi, everybody,

>  

> The term “self-organizing” has always seemed a mis-nomer, almost an 

> oxymoron.  In that connection, I took an interest in the following 

> quote from Mary Jane West-Eberhardt’s enormous, DEVELOPMENTAL 

> PLASTICITY AND EVOLUTION. (p. 59, bottom of column one)

>  

> Extreme modular flexibility is found in the mechanisms sometimes called self-organizing (refs to Kauffman, Gerhart and Kirschner)  In seolf organization, the phenotype does not really organize itself.  Rather, organization is highly flexible and locally responsive because a large number of modular subunits respond individually to local conditions according to simple, shared decision rules.  

>  

> I wonder what you complexity folks think about this as a general and comprehensive characterization of the phenomena you have called “self-organizing”?

>  

> Nick

> Nicholas S. Thompson

> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology Clark University 

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

>  

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