Abstract complex system (Bing Image Creator, Oct 17, 2023)

Part 4-(Social) Complexity Basics: Features of Complexity and the Scalability Problem

The conclusion of part 3 of this series on the basics of (social) complexity was that a deontological view of concepts as unsolved problems for which there are multiple functionally equivalent solutions calls into question the following basic assumption of complexity research:
namely, that an (open) list of general features can be easily applied to concrete and discipline-specific complex systems at all scales.

Why is this assumption problematic?
There are two main problems with this assumption:

Problem 1: The essentialist relationship between the abstract and its concrete manifestations

When we assume that an abstract complex system consisting of some key characteristics such as rich interactions, nonlinearity, unpredictability, etc. forms the basis of discipline-specific realizations of complex systems, we follow an essentialist conceptual strategy. That is:

• Essentialist often refers to the (traditional) attempt to determine stable identities (that is, the truth, the real meaning, or the essence of something).
• But it can also refer to the relationship between the transcendental conditions of possiblity of something (here: the features of an abstract complex system) and its empirical realizations (here: the concrete complex systems in the natural, technical, social, etc. sciences). Underlying the essentialist relationship between the transcendental and the empirical is a deterministic view. And this means that the transcendental conditions of possibility are able to determine all their empirical (concrete) realizations.
• Consequently, new concrete phenomena aren‘t really new, but just controlled variations of what is already known by the transcendental determinations!
• This means further that the concrete realizations don’t affect the transcendental conditions of possibility. In short: The transcendental affects the empirical, but not vice versa — at least in a traditional perspective.

Such essentialist conceptual strategies (for more details see, for instance, Hofstadter, D.R. (1985), Metafont, Metamathematics, and Metaphysics: Comments on Donald Knuth’s Article “The Concept of a Meta-Font”, in: Hofstadter, D.R. (1985), Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern, Basic Books, pp. 260–296.) aren’t plausible any more and have been widely criticized since the 1950s.
Instead, alternate non-essentialist strategies have been proposed. For example:

Ludwig Wittgenstein’s concept of family resemblance

It argues that things which could be thought to be connected by one essential common feature may in fact be connected by a series of overlapping similarities, where no one feature is common to all. [Wikipedia (2023), Family resemblance,]

This could mean in our context:

• First, we have to deal with an open-ended series of complexity features which may be characteristic for some concrete complex systems, but not for others.
• Second, we always compare concrete complex systems with each other, but not some abstract entity (the transcendental) with its concrete actualizations (the empirical phenomena).
• Example:
  Instead of presupposing a proto-form (the essence) of character k, we only compare concrete variations of this character, as illustrated by the following figure from [Hofstadter, D.R. (1985), Metafont, Metamathematics, and Metaphysics: Comments on Donald Knuth’s Article “The Concept of a Meta-Font”, in: Hofstadter, D.R. (1985), Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern, Basic Books, p. 275]:

• As you can see, these variations are similiar in some, but not in other regards. And there isn‘t a single feature that is common to all variations of character k!

Jacques Derrida’s quasi-transcendental infrastructures

• Jacques Derrida’s open-ended series of interrelated quasi-transcendental infrastructures [see Gasché, R. (1986), The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection, Cambridge, Mass. / London: Harvard University Press] such as différance or itérabilité where the relationship between the transcendental and the empirical is intertwined.
• That is, the transcendental underlies the empirical, but is, at the same time, affected by the latter. Therefore, this non-essentialist relationship becomes unstable, complex, and circular.
• This means further that in such an open-ended series of quasi-transcendentalities (différance, itérabilité, etc.), we don’t have to deal with essentialist conditions of possiblity (simple origins, essences, etc.) any more. Rather, each of these non-concepts can play the role of an empirico-transcendental indecidability — in certain contexts.
• This could mean for complexity research: We can deconstruct some texts on complex systems and see if such empirico-transcendental indecidabilities emerge.

The selfreferential twist (“re-entry”) in Niklas Luhmann’s sociological systems theory

• Similar to Derrida‘s deconstructive approach mentioned before, sociological systems theory (Luhmann et al.) would give the traditional guiding distinction transcendental / empirical a selfreferential twist aka re-entry.
• That is, instead of assuming a simple and linear founding principle (here: the transcendental conditions of possibility), the distinction transcendental / empirical is interpreted as re-entering on either side of the distinction: transcendental (transcendental / empirical) or empirical (transcendental / empirical). And this leads to a similar empirico-transcendental indecidability (i.e., a paradoxon for observers using binary logic) as in the deconstructive case.
• In more general terms: Paradoxa are the non-essentialist (non-)beginnings of current universalist approaches.
  And these indecidabilities have to be unfolded by using various strategies of deparadoxation.
  Note: I’ll talk more about this topic in some of the subsequent Medium posts on sociological systems theory.

An equivalence functionalist approach

This approach uses the distinction problem / several solutions being functionally equivalent [see Knudsen, M. (2010), Surprised by Method — Functional Method and Systems Theory, in: Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 11(3), Art. 12; Luhmann, N. (1995), Social Systems, Stanford, Cal.: Stanford University Press].

This means:

If one wants to check the fruitfulness of generalizations, one must position the concepts used at the most general level of analysis, not as concepts describing possibilities but as concepts formulating problems. Thus general systems theory does not fix the essential features to be found in all systems. Instead, it is formulated in the language of problems and their solutions and at the same time makes clear that there can be different, functionally equivalent solutions for specific problems. Thus a functional abstraction is built into the abstraction of generic forms that guides comparison of different system types [Luhmann, N. (1995), Social Systems, Stanford, Cal.: Stanford University Press, p. 15, my emphasis].

From What to How questions

The equivalence functionalist approach is the non-essentialist strategy I’d like to follow when discussing the open-ended list of (key) features of complex systems.
Or to be more precise, if we connect the equivalence functionalist schema with a distinction-based way of asking questions (what-questions are replaced by how-questions, that is: how — or by means of which distinctions — is feature XY constituted?), then the list of key features, previously seen as essential, is transformed into a list of distinction- and problem-based questions (see the next post on Medium)!

Problem 2: The narrowing of the solution space

Problem 2 refers in our context to the fact that a specific solution is overgeneralized or represented as the only solution. Examples:

A bottom-up perspective of system formation

This perspective of system formation (that is, a system emerges from the interplay of its elements) seems to dominate in complexity, esp. Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS) research.

However, at least for the emergence of social systems, a top-down perspective is also plausible [see Luhmann, N. (1995), Social Systems, Stanford, Cal.: Stanford University Press].

The openness of complex (adaptive) systems

It is widely held that complex (adaptive) systems should be considered as open systems interacting with their surrounding environments [see, for instance, various authors in Allen, P. / Maguire, S. / McKelvey, B. (eds.) (2011), The SAGE Handbook of Complexity and Management, Los Angeles et al.: SAGE; Cilliers, P. (1998), Complexity and Postmodernism: Understanding Complex Systems, p. 4; Wikipedia (2023), Complex adaptive system].
Now the problem isn’t simply that this perspective belongs to an older tradition of systems theory research. The problem is rather that there could be different solutions to the problem of openness/closure of a (complex) system:

• Within the same scientific domain:
  It depends on the ingenuity of the scientific observers to come up with plausible explanation mechanisms of how disciplin-specific complex systems might regulate their openness and closure.
• Between different scientific domains:
  Different complex systems might have developed different solutions to the problem of openness / closure.
  In short, there might be more than one mode of boundary maintenance for complex (adaptive) systems!

Mechanisms for coordinating behavior and actions

Coordination mechanisms are necessary for evolved complex (adaptive) systems such as collections of cells, biological and artificial swarms, animal and human interactions, human organizations, etc.
However, it’s a mistake to believe that exchange- or transmission-based information models (esp. variations of the sender-receiver-model of communication) are the only relevant approaches in this context:

• These approaches are well suited for modeling technical communication processes (i.e., data and signal exchanges), but they might be less suited for conceptualizing biological communication processes.
• And these technical approaches are probably not at all suited for the conceptualization of human communication [see Baecker, D. (2013), Systemic Theories of Communication, in: Cobley, P. / Schulz, P.J. (eds.) (2013), Theories and Models of Communication (Handbooks of Communication Science, vol. 1), Berlin: de Gruyter Mouton, pp. 85–100; Derrida, J. (1971), Signature, Event, Context, in: Derrida, J. (1971), Margins of Philosophy, Chicago: Chicago University Press, pp. 307–330 ; Luhmann, N. (1992), What is Communication?, in: Communication Theory (1992), 2, pp. 251–259].
• Again: For different types of complex systems, we have to expect various mechanisms that are able to solve the communication problem of behavioral coordination.

Conclusion

With those problems at the back of our minds, we can formulate a(n) (open-ended) list of questions related to complexity features that are based on two perspectives:

• A perspective that focuses on which particular distinctions are used in a specific context to conceptualize a complexity feature XY (How-questions).
• The equivalence functionalist problem-solutions schema mentioned above.

And this list of questions is the subject of the subsequent blog posts.