Tag Archives: complex systems

600th post and time for a change

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Decorative photograph of a wind-shaped tree on a hillside in fogSimplism is the ideology of simple answers for complex problems and it appears to be gaining popularity as high-level reading skills decline around the world.  People without high-level reading skills also tend to lack high-level thinking skills and their need for simplicity is met by simplism delivered from a range of sources, including politicians. However, complex problems by definition can be viewed from multiple competing perspectives and have multiple possible solutions; so, simple answers are unlikely to be informative or represent reality.  While trying to provide intelligible clear explanations in this blog [see ‘When less is more from describing digital twins to protoplasm‘ on February 22nd, 2023], I have always tried to avoid over-simplification or any drift towards simplism.  I fear that my uncompromising approach to complex issues and the decline in high-level readers globally has led to a steady decline in the readership of this blog over the past twelve months (to about half the number in 2022 and the lowest level since 2015).  Or perhaps I have just run out of interesting original topics to share in posts.  In either case, my decision to stop writing regularly posts announced in September [see ‘Reflecting on the future of RealizeEngineering‘ on September 20th, 2023] seems appropriate.  This is the 600th post and represents 11 years of weekly posting (for those readers working out the mathematics: there were 21 posts before I started weekly posting), which seems an appropriate moment to change the pattern to monthly posts, on the first Wednesday of each month.

Source: Simon Kuper, The end of reading and the rise of simplism, FT Weekend Magazine, October 21/22, 2023.

Work, rest and play in Smallville

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Decorative imageI am comfortable with the lack of certainty about us not being in a simulation [see ‘Are we in a simulation?‘ on September 28, 2022].  However, I know that some of you would prefer not to consider this possibility.  Unfortunately, recently published research has likely increased the probability that we are in a simulation because the researchers set up a simulation of a community of human-like agents called Smallville [Park et al, 2023].  The generative agents fuse large language models used in artificial intelligence with computational, interactive agents who eat, sleep, work and play just like humans and coalesce into social groups.  The simulation was created as a research tool for studying human interactions and emergent social behaviour which completely concurs with the argument for us already being part of a simulation created to study social behaviour.  Smallville only had 25 virtual inhabitants but the speed of advances in artificial intelligence and computational tools perhaps implies that a simulation of billions of agents (people) is not as far in the future as we once thought thus making it more credible that we are in a simulation.  The emergent social behaviour observed in Smallville suggests that our society is essentially a self-organising complex system that cannot be micro-managed from the centre.

Sources:

Oliver Roeder, Keeping up with the ChatGPT neighbours, FT Weekend, August 26/27 2023.

Camilla Cavendish, Charities could lead new age of community spirit, FT Weekend, August 26/27 2023.

Park JS, O’Brien JC, Cai CJ, Morris MR, Liang P, Bernstein MS. Generative agents: Interactive simulacra of human behavior. arXiv preprint arXiv:2304.03442. 2023.

Image: Ceramic tile by Pablo Picasso in museum in Port de Sóller Railway Station, Mallorca.

 

The rest of the planet has been waiting patiently for us to figure it out

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Research in British Columbia has found evidence of nitrogen from fish in tree rings.  The salmon that swim in the local rivers provide food for predators, such as bears and eagles, who leave the remains of the salmon lying around on the floor of the forest where it decomposes allowing the trees to absorb the nitrogen embedded in the bones of the salmon.  In some cases, up to three-quarters of a tree’s nitrogen is from salmon.  This implies that interfering in the life cycle of the salmon, for instance by commercial fishing, will impact on its predators, the forest and everything that is dependent on or interacts with the trees.  The complex nature of these interconnections have been apparent to the aboriginal peoples of the world for a very long time [see ‘Blinded by reductionism‘ on August 24th, 2022].  To quote Suzanne Simard, ‘Mistreatment of one species is mistreatment of all.  The rest of the planet has been waiting patiently for us to figure that out’.

Source: Suzanne Simard, Finding the Mother Tree, Penguin, 2021.

Image: photograph of an original painting bought by the author in Beijing

Blinded by reductionism

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I wrote about the weakness of reductionism about 18 months ago [see ‘Reduction in usefulness of reductionism‘ on February 17th, 2021].  Reductionism is the concept that everything about a complex system can be understood by reducing it to the smallest constituent part.  The concept is flawed because complex systems exhibit emergent properties [see ‘Emergent properties‘ on September 16th, 2015] that appear at a certain level of complexity but do not exist at lower levels.  Life is an emergent property so when you reduce an organism to its constituent parts, for instance by dissection, you kill it and are unable to observe its normal behaviour.  Reductionism is widespread in Western science and has been blinding us to what is often well-known to aboriginal people, i.e., the interconnectedness of nature.  One example is forest ecosystems that Suzanne Simard, amongst others, has shown are complex synergistic, multi-scale organisations of species. Complexity is only hard for those who have not thought about it – it is obvious to many peoples whose lives are integrated in nature’s ecosystem but it is really difficult for those of us educated in the reductionist tradition.

Reference:

Suzanne Simard, Finding the Mother Tree, Penguin, 2021.