Complex systems include patterns, randomness does not
Among the people I talk to about complex systems, a common point made is that the future is inherently uncertain or “unknowable”…it results from the concept of emergence “breaking” determinism (as well as from quantum uncertainty)…
…it’s important to distinguish between randomness and complex systems because the latter includes patterns whereas the former does not; and…it is patterns that determine our ability to anticipate and / or influence the future…
…let me define “patterns” as systematic relationships between the component parts of some complex system that are expected to persist for a period of time. My colleague Hank Sohota offered an alternative definition: “patterning” is a population wide tendency to think and / or behave in a particular way.
It is informative to distinguish between patterns and laws. The latter involve universality in time and space i.e. they are eternal and they are expected to operate in all circumstances and contexts (consider, for example, natural laws). By contrast, patterns are ultimately ephemeral and context always matters. In fact, we could think of laws as a special type of pattern: eternal and context independent
There is also the important question of identifiability. Many patterns in human systems are tacit or implicit to varying degrees, rendering them difficult or impossible to identify and – even if identification were possible – to quantify. As an aside, many traditional economists try to identify the eternal laws of economic behaviour because they think of a whole economic system as both unchanging and, implicitly, quantifiable.
Let’s look at randomness for a moment. If everything around us in our universe were random…There would be no natural laws…and there would be no forms of self-organisation (such as energy existing as mass and sub-atomic particles combining to make up atoms). But consider a thought experiment: suppose we take a less extreme version of randomness, say one in which we do exist but nothing around us were predictable, what then? Well, to be frank, there wouldn’t be much point in getting up in the morning. We wouldn’t know (for example) if people still spoke English, obeyed laws such as prohibition concerning murder, used the currency in their pocket…
We don’t live in a random world because patterns have emerged. They have created all of the order around us and by and large we expect most of this order – these patterns – to continue.
There is a relationship between patterns and prediction. In fact, I would note that not only do patterns exist and persist, we must rely on them in every day life. We make decisions in the present assuming the persistence of some patterns e.g. I will withdraw £50 from a cash machine today for spending over the next few days…
- Greg Fisher
Related
Whilst agreeing about “the importance of instabilities and the high degree of sensitivity to small changes in the contexts of stimuli”, it is, at the same time, essential that the brain functions in a way that tends to create ‘stable patterns’. Although the “instabilities” provide the capacity for pattern shifting and novelty to emerge, ‘stable patterns’ (or, more accurately, a tendency for patterns to be self-reinforcing and self-replicating) are essential if we are to function in our day-to-day lives.
For example, we can only readily use a cup to drink because of the patterning process that relates cup-like objects to drinking. Otherwise we’d need to learn this afresh each time. The “sensitivity to small changes” would come into play if, say, what we had perceived to be a cup turned out to be something different altogether. Our surprise (an emergent response) would then trigger a different pattern of thought and emergent sense making of a different kind. De Bono makes the crucial point that if the mind did not use patterns we would be unable to use language, since words indicate whole patterns of meaning.
…the brain provides an environment for incoming sensory signals to organize themselves into patterns and to trigger responses, based on what has gone before
NOTES
Greg says : “it is patterns that determine our ability to anticipate and / or influence the future…”
Chris says: “a tendency for patterns to be self-reinforcing and self-replicating) are essential if we are to function in our day-to-day lives.”
I think this crosses over into intuition and prediction…which Monica Anderson has a lot to say about…
Intuition is a process that uses this kind of correlation data to make short-term predictions that are correct often enough to improve our survival. Note that Intuition makes no attempt to model causality, or create any kind of high level models or theories. That would be using Logic. Intuition simply tracks events.
You cannot avoid using intuition in everyday situations. The alternative would be to use logic and other methods of Reductionist Science. But we don’t use science in everyday life, not even if we are scientists. As you come to a stoplight, you do not compute a differential equation in order to determine how hard to push the brake pedal – you use your intuition, which is a simple algorithm allowing you to jump to decent conclusions that are correct most of the time, based on your database of experience.
We have yet to build a robot that can outrun a human on a rocky beach, where the human uses intuition to predict where to place each foot and how to keep their balance on *every step*. Almost every decision we make in everyday life, from taking a step to formulating a sentence with the correct semantics (which computers can’t do either) is 100% intuition based.
The purpose of Intelligence is Prediction. Evolution of the ability to predict agents and phenomena in the environment improved survival rates and created a strong evolutionary pressure to develop better and longer term predictions. This is the reason Intelligence evolved.
COMMENT
John – intuition is a really interesting point to raise in the context of complexity because – you are right – it plays a crucial role in helping us make predictions in a complex and uncertain environment. It saves us from devoting disproportionate effort to thinking about things that probably aren’t worth worrying about, a point that Herbert Simon encapsulated in his concept of bounded rationality.
There’s a parallel, I think, in the way societies develop institutions (in the North-ian sense – http://bit.ly/wzTBoJ). Without rules of thumb and semi-automatic patterns of behaviour, the transactional costs of most interactions would be prohibitively high.
The problem comes when those institutions create patterns of behaviour that are out of kilter with the prevailing environment. Unpicking institutions to adapt to that change is an expensive process, and can feel extremely uncomfortable if that unpicking has to happen quickly.
You could argue that we are experiencing this kind of rapid reconfiguration of the institutional framework in the current set of financial/political/social upheavals, and this would explain why many things feel rather painful at the moment.
