Part 3-(Social) Complexity Basics: An Intro to Complex Systems

A somewhat different interpretation of (social) complexity — a multi-part introductory series

The second part of this series, which briefly addressed the general problem of defining complexity, ended somewhat abruptly so that we can jump right into this post to highlight some key features of complex systems. That way distinctions like disorganized/organized, mentioned in the previous post, become a bit clearer.

Common features of complexity such as unpredictability, etc. refer to organized complexity in the sense of Warren Weaver’s classic text Science and Complexity, published in 1948. Organized complexity is then just another expression for the formation of an entity that
- is composed of elements (synonyms: parts, components, or agents) and their relations as dynamic interactions
- and also escapes simple causal logic or other scientific approaches (probability theory, statistics, etc.).

Such an entity is usually called a (complex) system (synonyms in certain contexts: network, swarm, etc.). However, this isn’t an essentialist definition of a system (see post 2 of this series), but rather a problem concept. So the question is no longer what a (complex) system really is (its true meaning, nature or essence), but:

• How do we conceptualize a complex system in a specific (physico-chemical, biological, psychological, sociological, etc.) domain?

And this is equivalent to the following two questions:

• Which distinctions are or can be used to conceptualize such a system?
• How is a complex system possible? That is, which are the explanatory mechanisms, esp. regarding the openness / closeness and boundary maintenance of such a system?

This non-essentialist or deontologized perspective refers to three crucial aspects:

Aspect 1– Distinctions

Distinctions are constitutive for creating something as something on an information (but not a material!) level. Examples:

• Foreground / background as a basic distinction for perceptual phenomena. See, for instance, this GliderGun (CC BY-SA 3.0) from Conway´s Game of Life:

• The word father instead of equivalent expressions such as son, daughter, mother, grandfather, etc. that are equally plausible, for example, in family related contexts. Therefore, the meaning of the language form father is not an intrinsic quality, but it depends on what it is not (namely: son, daughter, mother, etc.).
  Or to put it in more general terms following the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure whose insights have later been radicalized by distinction-based approaches such as
  - Deconstruction (Jacques Derrida)
  - Form theory (George Spencer Brown / Niklas Luhmann / Dirk Baecker) or
  - Discourse theory (Ernesto Laclau / Chantal Mouffe).

The sign is determined by the way in which it differs from all the other signs in the system — “in language there are only differences without positive terms”. The sign is a node in a network of relationships.
The relationships are not determined by the sign, rather, the sign is the result of interacting relationships. [in: Cilliers, P./ Preiser, R. (eds.) (2010), Complexity, Difference and Identity. An Ethical Perspective, Dordrecht et al.: Springer, p. 6, referring to Saussure].

Aspect 2 — Observer dependency

The expression observer means here, in a general or abstract sense, every processor of distinctions. Therefore the traditional observer as the processor of sensations is only a special case of a system capable of processing distinctions.
Other possible observers could be:

• Immune systems
• Neural systems
• Brains (cerebral systems)
• Psychic systems as processors of different types of sensations
• Consciousness systems as processors of thoughts or
• Social systems (families, organizations, etc.)

Aspect 3 — (Operative) Constructivism

If every phenomenon depends on media-specific distinctions used by a particular observer in a particular context, these phenomena can be interpreted as
- distinction-based
and
- observer-dependent
(operational) constructions, which leads to the following aspects:

Aspect 3a — Observer relationalism

An operative constructivist position isn‘t equivalent to a position of relativistic indifference. It’s rather equivalent to a position of observer relationalism.
So the crucial question in this context is: Which observing system uses which distinctions in a particular context to construct this and not a different reality?

Aspect 3b — Multiperspectivity (sometimes also synonymous: polycontextuality)

Observer relationalism often involves a multiplicity of possible observers (= multiple constructs) in the observation of a scientific, economic, political, etc. phenomenon. This irreducible plurality of observing systems replaces the traditional main distinction subject/object.

Aspect 3c — Reality as reality construction

The expression reality is only a short form for the distinction-based and observer-dependent (operational) reality construction at the information level.

Aspect 3d — Deconstruction

Every (realist) description can be deconstructed by asking: Which observing system uses which contextual distinctions in this description?

In sum

We can conceptualize a complex system in more than one way. For example as:

• A complex adaptive system (CAS) or a swarm intelligence system emerging from the dynamic interactions of its elements (agents) (for an introduction to CAS theory, see Miller, J.H. / Page, S.E. (2007), Complex Adaptive Systems. An Introduction to Computational Models of Social Life or the scholarpedia article on Swarm intelligence). Examples: Flocks of birds, swarms of insects, etc.

The traffic in Hanoi as an example of a CAS

Example of a swarm intelligence system

Igor Nikolic — Complex adaptive systems — TED Talk 2010

• An autopoietic (living) system (Humberto Maturana / Francisco Varela).
  Example: A biological cell [3D-SIM-4 Anaphase 3 color (3D representation of two mouse daughter nuclei in a late stage of nuclear division (Telophase)) by Lothar Schermelleh, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0]:

• A self-referential system where the observing system distinguishes between itself and its environment by processing the distinction system / environment dynamically within the system (Bielefeld School of social systems theory: Niklas Luhmann, Dirk Baecker, Peter Fuchs, etc.).
  Examples: Consciousness systems and communication-based social systems such as interactions, organizations, and the function systems (politics, economy, science, etc.) of society.
• A biological, neural, cerebral, psychic, conscious, social, etc. system as the construction or attribution of a language-based observer according to the German sociologist Dirk Baecker.
  It’s then the task of this language-based observer to elaborate on the explanatory mechanisms of such a constructed system (its mode of boundary maintenance, its possible recursivity / self-reference, etc.).
• A discourse with empty signifiers (Essex School of discourse analysis: Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, etc.).
• A distinction- (or rather: différance-) based connectionist network, see Cilliers, P. (2002), Complexity and Postmodernism. Understanding Complex Systems. Cillier’s example, by the way, is: language.

etc.

This deontological view of concepts as unsolved problems for which several functionally equivalent solutions can be conceived has consequences for our (open-ended) list of features of complexity referring to complex systems, too.
As this is an important point which challenges a basic assumption of complexity research
[namely the assumption that such general features can simply be applied to concrete and discipline-specific complex systems on all scales — see, for example:

• Cilliers, P. (2010), Difference, Identity and Complexity, in: / Preiser, R. (eds.) (2010), Complexity, Difference and Identity. An Ethical Perspective, Dordrecht et al.: Springer, 3–18.
• Mitleton-Kelly, E.(2003), Ten principles of complexity and enabling infrastructures, in: id. (ed.) Complex Systems and Evolutionary Perspectives on Organisations: the Application of Complexity Theory to Organisations, Oxford, UK: Elsevier, 3–20.
• Sporns, O. (2007), Complexity, in: Scholarpedia, 2(10):1623.
  URL: http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Complexity.],

… I´d like to dedicate a whole Medium post to this topic (see part 4: Features of Complexity and the Scalability Problem).

While you’re waiting for the next blog post to be published, it’s worth taking a look at Melanie Mitchell’s video Complexity — A Guided Tour on Youtube.
This video gives some nice examples and shows why the new paradigm of (social) complexity is so intriguing:

If you’d like further information on complex systems research, these introductory texts suited for non-specialists are good reads:

• Füllsack, M. (2011), Gleichzeitige Ungleichzeitigkeiten. Eine Einführung in die Komplexitätsforschung, Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften / Springer Fachmedien (an excellent text that is, unfortunately, only available in German).
• Mitchell, M. (2009), Complexity. A Guided Tour, Oxford et al.: Oxford University Press.

Free online courses on the Santa Fe institute’s website complexityexplorer.org:

• Mitchell, M., Introduction to Complexity.
• Feldman, D., Introduction to Dynamical Systems and Chaos.