Part 5-(Social) Complexity Basics: The Distinction “System / Environment”

The problem of the formation and maintenance of complex (social) systems

Table of Contents

How is the formation and maintenance of a complex (social) system possible?
Distinction 1: Systems as “whole / parts”
Distinction 2: Systems as re-entry mechanisms “system (system / environment)“
↳ Question 1: System formation
↳ Question 2: Boundary determination and maintenance
↳ Question 3: Openness and closure of a complex system
↳ Question 4: (Sub-)System differentiation
↳ Question 5: Which are the characteristics of the environment of a complex system?
↳ Question 6: Which types of complexity are relevant in this context?

As we saw in the previous Medium post, there are several non-essentialist approaches that can be used to replace an essentialist conceptual strategy regarding features of complexity.

One non-essentialist approach, which is important in our context, is to couple

• distinction (in this Medium post synonymous with: difference)-based how-questions (How, i.e., by means of which distinction, is something, for example feature XY, created?)

with

• an equivalence functionalist observational schema where various functionally equivalent solutions are related to a problem [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].

As a result, a list of complexity features such as emergence, nonlinearity, etc. — previously interpreted as essential for an abstract complex system and its empirical manifestations — is transformed into an open-ended list of distinction- and problem-based questions — or, in short: into an open list of features-as-problem-concepts!

One crucial feature that I’d like to discuss in this Medium post refers to the formation and maintenance of a (social) complex system. So the question is:

How is the formation and maintenance of a complex (social) system possible?

As I intend to write several Medium posts on

• The idea of systems as distinctions.
• The conceptualization of the social dimension.
• Various types of (social) systems.

etc., I’d like to give here just a few hints.

Distinction 1: Systems as “whole / parts”

Whole/parts is a possible distinction to designate a system. However, it’s a very traditional distinction that can be traced back to Greek antiquity [see σύστημα (sústēma) in Wiktionary] and leads directly to a container perspective that is inappropriate for complex, particularly social, systems.

Why?

Well, human brains and bodies are so hypercomplex that neither our minds nor social systems, e.g. families, organizations or society, can deal directly with such overwhelming cellular and neural complexities.
For more details, see my recent Medium post for WAITS Software- und Prozessberatungsgesellsch. mbH: Complexity Basics — Part III: The Increase in Socioevolutionary Complexity.

This also means that the Western perspective of nested containers, which considers human beings not only as indivisible containers (in-dividuals), but also as parts of other containers such as families, organizations, or societies, is completely obsolete.

Image illustrating the idea of nested containers (individuals as containers as parts of organizations / families which are seen as parts of society) (Bing Image Creator, Oct 17, 2023)

That said, this ancient distinction is still useful in certain, especially technical contexts! However, it’s often replaced by two more modern distinctions in complexity research:

• system / environment

and

• element / relation

Distinction 2: Systems as re-entry mechanisms “system (system / environment)“

The guiding distinction system / environment for conceptualizing complex (social) systems involves a few crucial questions:

Question 1: System formation

• How is a complex (social) system able to differentiate itself from its environment?
• Or to bring in the observer explicitly:
  Which explanatory mechanisms can a language-based observer come up with to account for the formation of a discipline-specific and concrete complex (social) system?

Question 2: Boundary determination and maintenance

• How can a boundary be determined?

Given the abstract concept of boundary, the concept of the difference between system and environment, one cannot decide whether the boundary belongs to the system or to the environment. Viewed logically, the difference itself is something third. If one includes the problem of the difference in degree of complexity as an aid to interpretation, however, then one can relate boundaries to the function of stabilizing this difference in degree, for which only the system, not the environment, can develop strategies. Viewed from the system’s perspective, they are “self-generated boundaries” — membranes, skins, walls and doors, boundary posts and points of contact. [see Luhmann, N. (1995), Social Systems, Stanford, Cal.: Stanford University Press, p. 29]

Note:

A fuzzy boundary or no boundary at all isn’t sufficient, because then there would be no (complex) system at all.
Or if, for example, the immune system of your body is no longer able to distinguish between inside and outside, you will get sick [keyword: (autoimmune) disease] or die.

In addition, the determination of the boundary of a complex system is for Niklas Luhmann an empirical and not simply an analytical question of an external and language-based observer [see Luhmann, N. (1995), Social Systems, Stanford, Cal.: Stanford University Press, p. 30]:

Boundaries count as adequately determined if problems concerning their location or the assignment of events as being inside or outside of them can be solved using the system’s own means — for example, if an immune system can use its own modes of operation to discriminate, in effect, between internal and external, or if the societal system, which is composed of communications, can decide by communication whether something is communication or not. For a (scientific) observer, where the boundaries lie may still remain analytically unclear, but this does not justify viewing the bounding of systems as a purely analytical determination. (The situation is quite different, naturally, if it is a question of bounding research objects!) An observer interested in reality remains dependent here on the system’s operative possibilities of determination.

• How is the boundary dynamically maintained [see Bailey, K. D. (2008), Boundary maintenance in living systems theory and social entropy theory, in: Systems Research and Behavioral Science (2008), vol. 25, issue 5, pp. 587–597.]?
  This means that the boundary of a complex system isn’t set once and for all. Instead, such a system must operate in time. And in doing so, it continuously reproduces the boundary between inside and outside, i.e.: system and environment.

Note:

If complex systems are characterized by operational and temporal dynamics, it doesn‘t make sense to conceptualize

• media such as language [see, for instance, Cilliers, P. (1998), Complexity and Postmodernism: Understanding Complex Systems, London / New York: Routledge]

or

• technology [Kevin Kelly’s concept of technium comes to mind, see Kelly, K. (2010), What Technology Wants, New York et al.: Penguin]

as such systems because they aren’t able to operate (by) / reproduce themselves!

That said, this might change as soon as truly self-replicating machines are in (widespread) use [see Wikipedia (2023), Self-replicating machine; see also the interesting Replicating Rapid-Prototyper (RepRap) project].

Here is a picture of RepRap version 1.0 named Darwin:

Reprap_Darwin by CharlesC (2007), licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0

• And boundary determination / maintenance refers to the differentiation of a subsystem as well (see below question 4):

Next to systems’ constituting their own elements, boundary determination is the most important requirement of system differentiation [Luhmann, N. (1995), Social Systems, Stanford, Cal.: Stanford University Press, p. 29].

Question 3: Openness and closure of a complex system

How does a complex system regulate the relationship of openness and closure regarding its environment?

• A complex system can‘t be completely open. That is, some kind of boundary being maintained is always necessary.
• However, it can‘’t be completely hermetic either.
• So, is a complex system always open for energy, matter, and information?
  For the generic options being available, see Bailey, K. D. (2008), Boundary maintenance in living systems theory and social entropy theory, in: Systems Research and Behavioral Science (2008), vol. 25, issue 5, pp. 587–597.

Open System Representation by Krauss (2014), licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0

• Or are there complex systems, for example, that are open for energy and matter, but closed for information?
• And if such complex systems create and process information only within the system, which perturbation mechanisms (besides causal relationships) can be conceptualized so that the environment can somehow influence the system?

Question 4: (Sub-)System differentiation

• How can the distinction system / environment be used within the system to form subsystems?
  For example as follows:
  - science as a complex (function) system ->
  - scientific disciplines as subsystems ->
  - scientific subdisciplines ->
  - scientific subsub … disciplines.

Question 5: Which are the characteristics of the environment of a complex system?

In general, the environment of a complex system can‘’t be completely arbitrary or chaotic because such highly unstable conditions would undermine the viability of a complex system.

We can then distinguish (at least) three types of environment of a complex system:

• Environment 1:
  On this very basic operational level, the environment represents what the system is not. This resembles a kind of flat difference where the environment is undefined or unmarked.
• Environment 2:
  On this second observational level, the environment is a construction of the complex system.
  - Example: A complex, especially language-based system such as a consciousness system or a social system (family, organization, etc.) uses the distinction system / environment within itself.
  - To put it differently, the distinction system / environment is used by means of a autoreferential salto within the system. Or, as Bielefeld system theorists would prefer to say:

The distinction “system / environment” re-enters on the side of the system: “system (system / environment)” = a re-entry mechanism.

Note:

We´ll come back to this topic when we discuss another feature-as-problem-concept of complex systems, i.e., recursivity / self-reference / feedback loops.

• Environment 3:
  Other (complex) systems in the environment of a complex system.
  This refers to an external observer able to observe the complex system and the (complex) systems (with their respective environments) in the environment of the first system to be studied.

Question 6: Which types of complexity are relevant in this context?

With the distinction system / environment, it‘s possible to distinguish between two types of complexity:

• One type refers to the environment. Therefore, it’s called environmental complexity.
  This type of complexity has two subtypes:
  - An unspecified or disorganized environmental complexity that resembles an overwhelming world complexity.
  - A specified and organized environmental complexity.

The first subtype is a hypothetical negative correlate of the complex system, while the second subtype is a construct of the system.

• The other (specified and organized) type of complexity is called system complexity and W. Ross Ashby‘s Law of Requisite Variety is applicable to it.

In this context, two other aspects are of interest:

• First, there‘s an asymmetrical relation between environmental and system complexity. In short, there’s a complexity differential. This means that the environment is always more complex than the complex system itself.

In other words, the difference between system and environment stabilizes the difference in relative degrees of complexity. The relation between system and environment is necessarily asymmetrical. The difference in degree of relative complexity goes in one direction and cannot be reversed. Every system must maintain itself against the overwhelming complexity of its environment, and any success, any permanence, any reproduction makes the environment of all other systems more complex. Given many systems, each evolutionary success increases the difference in complexity for other systems in relation to their environments and thus works selectively on what then remains possible. [Luhmann, N. (1995), Social Systems, Stanford, Cal.: Stanford University Press, p. 182].

Second, the internal complexity of a system can be both reduced and increased.

For more details on complexity, see the following Medium post, in which I discuss guiding distinction number 3 relevant to system formation. That is: element/relation.

While you’re waiting for the next post on Medium, why don’t you check out my four-part mini-series on the acronyms VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, Ambiguity) and BANI (Brittle, Anxious, Non-Linear#, Incomprehensible) associated with complexity?