I have a backlog of unfinished posts, revealing the distractions of my life since the advent of the Trump administration, but I want to start a new one (you are welcome to read one as a new post or a new administration or both).
In his 2000 review of M. Mitchell Waldrop's book Complexity: the Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos (1992), Robert Dare says:
Complexity, the theory goes, manifests itself in “complex adaptive systems”, which are made up of many independent agents [my emphasis] who interact and adapt to each other and to their environment, producing the phenomenon of emergence -- a system behaving as more than the sum of its parts.
I was disturbed immediately by Dare’s characterization of agents as "independent". To my mind, agents in any complex system are not independent. While they may have some identity and integrity independent of the complex system within which they are interacting, they are also exchanging energy, matter, information, and organization with the other agents within the system, to the point that they can hardly be understood or even exist apart from that enfolding ecosystem. Consider a single neuron in a brain – yours or mine, perhaps. It can be isolated, put in a petri dish, and studied. Eventually, of course, the neuron will die, not having participated in a single coherent thought. What we might learn from such study can be useful and illuminating, but it ends in death of the agent under study. The same with a single human – say, you or me. We can, of course, become a hermit, isolating ourselves totally from other humans, but human society is only one of the many complex systems within which we are embedded, such as the Earth. If we isolate ourselves from the Earth, denying any exchange of energy, matter, information, and organization, then we die almost immediately, depending on how long we can last without breathing. We are not independent, discrete agents, and thinking of ourselves as independent leads to grievous misunderstandings.
Still, I suspect I was over-reading Dare's comment, and my favorite complexity writer Edgar Morin provides the proper correction. Morin says that complex systems function through a paradox of both autonomy and dependence – not either/or, but and/and. Agents in a complex system are both autonomous and dependent, and anyone trying to understand a specific agent must think in these usually antagonistic terms simultaneously. Likewise, one must not assume that the two concepts are in some manner reconciled. They are not. Rather, they stand face to face, at times cooperating, at times conflicting, but it is within the necessary tension between the two that the agent both emerges and gains its agency.
I suspect, then, that Dare's independence refers to agents' autonomy of action and the absence of centralized control, rather than to an existence isolated from the system. In the context of his review of Waldrop’s book, "independent" seems to imply that agents—whether they are quarks, cells, individuals, planets, or galaxies—operate according to their own local rules and adapt to one another without a "single, intelligent, 'executive branch'" dictating their behavior. We can see this sort of tension at work in the murmurations of starlings where each individual bird decides for itself how to move but within the context of the flock. The result are those beautiful swarms that delight the eye and mystify us.
In a murmuration, each starling, as a single agent in this complex adaptive system, acts locally with a certain amount of autonomy and without a ruling starling to guide it – no Abraham Lincoln or Steve Jobs starling. Rather, a starling considers its proximate mates and tries to synchronize its own actions with theirs. It's quite possible that a single starling has little to no sense of its larger swarm. It almost certainly has no sense of the orchestrated movements of the murmuration and the fantastic designs that it is helping to create. Rather, it behaves locally as best it can with its tiny brain and quick reflexes, but with little sense of the larger designs of its flock. It is aware that the movements of the swarm affects its own movements, but it can explain those influences only in terms of its local conditions. At times, a smaller swarm will separate from the larger swarm to form a different sect, political party, or musical or literary genre, but often the separated swarm eventually finds its way back to the larger swarm.
In his attempt to explain this dynamic tension between autonomy and dependence especially in the field of Education, Mark Mason says:
In the simplest terms, [these systems] solve problems by drawing on masses of relatively stupid elements, rather than a single, intelligent, ‘executive branch’. They are bottom-up systems, not top-down ... . [T]hey are complex adaptive systems that display emergent behaviour. In these systems, agents residing on one scale start producing behaviour that lies one scale above them: ants create colonies; urbanites create neighbourhoods; simple pattern-recognition software learns how to recommend new books. The movement from low-level rules to higher-level sophistication is what we call emergence. (Complexity Theory and the Philosophy of Education, 2008)
Agents are not truly independent of their enfolding ecosystems in an existential sense. Rather, they act in a mass "of relatively stupid elements, rather than a single, intelligent, 'executive branch'". I assume that Mason is suggesting that humans, for instance, are not absolutely stupid, but only relatively stupid when compared to their enfolding ecosystems, which are functioning at a higher scale. This is like saying that a flock of starlings has certain intelligence and capabilities that an individual starling lacks. Complexity science conceptualizes this dynamic not as a contradiction, but as a necessary paradox of autonomy versus interdependence.
That agents are deeply embedded in their ecosystem and thus interdependent, or coupled, which is central to complex adaptive systems. While agents such as starlings and humans have some degree of local autonomy, they are formed by a mutual causality. They are "co-creative, co-emergent, [and] co-dependent on each other for their existence" (Lichtenstein, Bringing Complexity into Social Analysis, 2018). The identity of an agent is always co-created by the presence of all the other agents in the system functioning both in their own identities and the identity of the swarm.
No agent can exist without the exchange of energy and information with other agents both at its own scale and at scales above and below it. As far as I know, all agents couple, where individual components influence and are influenced by others; if parts are "tightly coupled," a change in one propagates rapidly to others. Inversely, loose coupling tends to slow down propagation through a complex system. In her essay about how complexity works within modern organizations, Glenda H. Eoyang says:
In an organization, coupling affects the speed of information transfer and the effectiveness of efforts to encourage change. For example, if research and development are tightly coupled to the rest of an organization, then the manufacturing processes had better be flexible and adaptable. The factory will be expected to produce new and radically different products frequently and with minimal cycle times. On the other hand, if the organization is uncoupled from research and development, then findings will not be reflected in product designs, and management might see R&D funds as wasted resources. (A Brief Introduction to Complexity in Organizations, 1993).
Starlings, it seems, are a tightly coupled bunch who greatly value flying with their flocks and, hence, their magical murmurations in which, in the familiar expression, the whole becomes more than the sum of the parts.
This degree of coupling, of course, can become too restrictive for some agents, especially humans. This is because the whole is also less than the sum of the parts, as Morin explains:
The whole is not only more than the sum of its parts, but it is also less than the sum of its parts. Why? Because a certain number of qualities and properties present in the parts can be inhibited by the organization of the whole. Even when each of our cells contains the total of our genetic inheritance, only a small part of that heritage is active, and the rest is inhibited. In the relationship between an individual and her society, the liberties (even those extreme liberties that are considered delinquent or criminal) inherent to each individual may be inhibited by the police, laws, and social order. Restricted Complexity, General Complexity (2007)
Thus, while starlings are engaged in their magical murmuring, they are constrained from searching for insects, seeds, and fruits in the grass or from mating in the nests that male starlings have constructed and attracted a female to join.
This downward pressure by the system on the individual agent is too restrictive for some humans who like to brag that they are individuals not coupled to any human group – social, political, religious, philosophical, economic, or otherwise. And while sociopolitical systems can be too oppressive, humans are, in fact, tightly coupled to their material ecosystem, the thin, blue line of atmosphere, land, and water within which they exist. And almost all humans are coupled to their human groups. I suspect that even the hermit on the hilltop owes much of his solitude to the other humans who created him, raised him, and then informed his language and religious practices.
But dependence does not seem to work only one way: from enclosing ecosystem to individual agent. At the same time that a complex ecosystem helps define its enfolded agents, the complex system itself is literally defined by these multiple interactions among its many different agents. The connectivity, or coupling, among agents is often viewed as more important than the agents themselves, as it is the interactions that create and maintain the system's structure. When we watch the murmuration of starlings, we are captivated by the flows and contours and shifting shapes of the swarm, not so much by any individual starling. A single starling does not a murmuration make. (Letts, Complexity Theory and Social Theory, 1992, p 42)
As Edgar Morin has explained to my satisfaction, to understand complexity, we must learn to think in complex ways. This juxtaposition of autonomy and interdependence, of individual and group, of whole and parts, is one of those ways to think differently. Morin uses the term self-eco-organization to express this complex thought. Morin argues that for a system (or agent) to be autonomous, it must be open to its environment to exchange energy and information. In his essay Restricted Complexity, General Complexity (2007), Morin says:
I define self-eco-organization as living organization, according to the idea that self-organization depends on its environment to draw energy and information. … Consequently, we arrive at what I logically call the autonomy/dependence complex. For a living being to be autonomous, it must depend on its environment for matter and energy as well as knowledge and information. The more autonomy develops, the more multiple dependencies develop.For agents and the complex systems that they enclose and in which they are themselves enclosed, both autonomy and dependence are necessary conditions of existence, and agents emerge and express themselves within that near chaotic, irreconcilable space between the two. This complex space is a recursive conversation rather than and either/or argument. An open system must at the same time be closed (independent) enough to maintain its distinct identity, yet open (interdependent) enough to feed its existence. To understand either agent or system, we must consider both and their interactions. Thinking of either the one (reductionism) or the other (wholism) won't do.
Preiser, Cilliers, and Human describe this complex method of thinking this way:
[T]he logic of critical complex thinking proposes a type of thinking that necessitates a double movement similar to what Derrida calls the double bind. It suggests that the concept and its counterpart (the yes and the no) are thought simultaneously. Morin (2007) calls this the ‘logical core of complexity’, which is dialogical and economical in nature. However, the art lies not in thinking one in terms of the other in binary motion, but in terms of how the one is dependent and determined by the other. The knack lies not in describing opposites when making knowledge claims, but in thinking both at the same time. It is described as a ‘dialogic (that) is not the response to these paradoxes, but the means of facing them, by considering the productive play of complementary antagonisms’. (Deconstruction and Complexity: A critical economy, 2011)
