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Delegated Causality of Complex Systems | SpringerLink

• Original Paper
• Open Access
• Published: 22 May 2018

Delegated Causality of Complex Systems

• Raimundas Vidunas 

Axiomathes volume 29, pages81–97(2019)Cite this article

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Abstract

A notion of delegated causality is introduced here. This subtle kind of causality is dual to interventional causality. Delegated causality elucidates the causal role of dynamical systems at the “edge of chaos”, explicates evident cases of downward causation, and relates emergent phenomena to Gödel’s incompleteness theorem. Apparently rich implications are noticed in biology and Chinese philosophy. The perspective of delegated causality supports cognitive interpretations of self-organization and evolution.

Introduction

Living organisms, ecosystems, human minds, societies, economic markets are widely recognized as extraordinary complex systems. They are impressively organized and possess properties that are hardly reducible to qualities of physical matter. Thereby they seem to contradict the reductionistic paradigm of fundamental causation from underlying physical processes. As yet, satisfying explanation of emerging coherent organization is a comparable challenge for reductionist and holistic philosophies (Capra and Luisi 2014; Heylighen et al. 2007). Even if the reductionist approach continues to deliver outstanding results in physics, chemistry, molecular biology, neuropsychology, much deeper understanding of living (Schrödinger 1944; Murphy and O’Neil 1995) and conscious (Kim 1998; Varela et al. 1991) agencies may require an uneasy paradigm change, after all.

I introduce a concept that can simplify and unify analysis of intricate causal relations in complex systems to a remarkable extent. This concept of delegated causality should clarify much about emergence of whole new phenomena (Clayton and Davies 2006), spontaneous order (Kauffman 1993), synergy (Corning 2005), functionality (Ariew et al. 2002), purpose and intention (Dennett 1987). If the new conception indeed refines established specialist perspectives, it will be worth revisiting sporadic revivals of Emergentism (Clayton and Davies 2006, pp. 9–26), post-Enlightenment rationalist skepticism (Clayton and Davies 2006, pp. 114), classical Greek teleologies (Ariew et al. 2002, pp. 7–30). The most rigorous contemporary relevance of the new perspective is to physics of emergence (Mainwood 2006), symmetry breaking (Anderson 1972; Moon and LaRock 2017), thermodynamics (Prigogine and Nicolis 1977; England 2013), and to information-theoretic measure of causal influence (Hoel 2017; Tononi and Sporns 2003).

A comprehensive overview of the vast, growing literature on complex systems, self-organization, emergence would not serve the purpose of this article to introduce delegated causality. This simple but subtle, overlooked kind of causality is anticipated or provoked (figuratively speaking) by critical dynamical systems with rich behavior and moderate sensitivity to the environment. The scope of my abstracted terminology will become clear with the introduction of methodology [M1]–[M3] in Sect. 3 of analyzing causal interactions. Evident implications of delegated causality will be demonstrated by a brief account of evolutionary biology (in Sect. 5) and a reference to Chinese philosophy (in Sect. 6).

This spirited article would be presentable to a scientific version of the TV show “The X-Factor” (Hackley et al. 2012). My argumentation is not deep formally, as the chief purpose is to justify the new concept by a few evocative arguments, agreeable examples, and links to existing ideas. This manner of aboutness (Yablo 2014) mirrors the general view of self-organization conveyed here. I start by reassessing contemporary modeling of complex systems in Sect. 2. The fresh kind of causality is introduced formally in Sect. 3. Section 4 examines physical reductionism in the new light, and relates emergence, downward causation to Gödel’s (1931) incompleteness theorem. The later sections deliberate a few compelling (though not entirely comfortable) implications. All together, this article is gradually making a holistic argument for a new comprehensive view by building up the context for the integrating Sect. 7.

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Delegated Causality of Complex Systems | SpringerLink

source (full focument at https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov.sci-hub.se/17955472/)

Causality and complexity: the myth of objectivity in science – PubMed

Chem Biodivers

. 2007 Oct;4(10):2480-91. doi: 10.1002/cbdv.200790202.

Causality and complexity: the myth of objectivity in science

Donald C Mikulecky ¹Affiliations expand

• PMID: 17955472
• DOI: 10.1002/cbdv.200790202

Abstract

Two distinctly different worldviews dominate today’s thinking in science and in the world of ideas outside of science. Using the approach advocated by Robert M. Hutchins, it is possible to see a pattern of interaction between ideas in science and in other spheres such as philosophy, religion, and politics. Instead of compartmentalizing these intellectual activities, it is worthwhile to look for common threads of mutual influence. Robert Rosen has created an approach to scientific epistemology that might seem radical to some. However, it has characteristics that resemble ideas in other fields, in particular in the writings of George Lakoff, Leo Strauss, and George Soros. Historically, the atmosphere at the University of Chicago during Hutchins’ presidency gave rise to Rashevsky’s relational biology, which Rosen carried forward. Strauss was writing his political philosophy there at the same time. One idea is paramount in all this, and it is Lakoff who gives us the most insight into how the worldviews differ using this idea. The central difference has to do with causality, the fundamental concept that we use to build a worldview. Causal entailment has two distinct forms in Lakoff ‘s analysis: direct causality and complex causality. Rosen’s writings on complexity create a picture of complex causality that is extremely useful in its detail, grounding in the ideas of Aristotle. Strauss asks for a return to the ancients to put philosophy back on track. Lakoff sees the weaknesses in Western philosophy in a similar way, and Rosen provides tools for dealing with the problem. This introduction to the relationships between the thinking of these authors is meant to stimulate further discourse on the role of complex causal entailment in all areas of thought, and how it brings them together in a holistic worldview. The worldview built on complex causality is clearly distinct from that built around simple, direct causality. One important difference is that the impoverished causal entailment that accompanies the machine metaphor in science is unable to give us a clear way to distinguish living organisms from machines. Complex causality finds a dichotomy between organisms, which are closed to efficient cause, and machines, which require entailment from outside. An argument can be made that confusing living organisms with machines, as is done in the worldview using direct cause, makes religion a necessity to supply the missing causal entailment.

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Causality and complexity: the myth of objectivity in science – PubMed

CICOLAB Provisional Whitepaper 2021-01-24

1. What is CICOLAB?
   The Collective Intelligence Collaboratory — CICOLAB — is a peer-to-peer mutual support community for “exopreneurs”: misfit entrepreneurs who are solving adaptive challenges (which go far beyond “complex problems” that can be solved by technical fixes, to wicked messes that are coupled with a high degree of social complexity) that do not lend themselves to easy solutions. This paper goes into detail about the unique nature of exopreneurs and explains why a network of us working together to bootstrap our efforts could be profoundly transformative, both for ourselves and for the world at large.
   
2. What is an exopreneur, and why do we need different structures of support?
   The following is a chart to show the difference between an entrepreneur and exopreneur. 

Exopreneurs are solution-oriented like entrepreneurs, but far more comprehensive

source: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1IYuYmcQltlx7YqFETFSd8NpwmRbK_wnNUlY7sqSUPPQ/edit

source: (paywalled)

Dances and Affordances: The Relationship between Dance Training and Conceptual Problem-Solving on JSTOR

JOURNAL ARTICLE

Dances and Affordances: The Relationship between Dance Training and Conceptual Problem-Solving

Christian Kronsted and Shaun GallagherThe Journal of Aesthetic EducationVol. 55, No. 1 (Spring 2021), pp. 35-55 (21 pages)Published By: University of Illinois Presshttps://doi.org/10.5406/jaesteduc.55.1.0035https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/jaesteduc.55.1.0035

JOURNAL ARTICLE Dances and Affordances: The Relationship between Dance Training and Conceptual Problem-Solving Christian Kronsted and Shaun Gallagher The Journal of Aesthetic Education Vol. 55, No. 1 (Spring 2021), pp. 35-55 (21 pages) Published By: University of Illinois Press https://doi.org/10.5406/jaesteduc.55.1.0035 https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/jaesteduc.55.1.0035

Dances and Affordances: The Relationship between Dance Training and Conceptual Problem-Solving on JSTOR

Book Review: Seeing Like A State | Slate Star Codex

Slate Star Codex

Book Review: Seeing Like A State

I.

Seeing Like A State is the book G.K. Chesterton would have written if he had gone into economic history instead of literature. Since he didn’t, James Scott had to write it a century later. The wait was worth it.

Scott starts with the story of “scientific forestry” in 18th century Prussia. Enlightenment rationalists noticed that peasants were just cutting down whatever trees happened to grow in the forests, like a chump. They came up with a better idea: clear all the forests and replace them by planting identical copies of Norway spruce (the highest-lumber-yield-per-unit-time tree) in an evenly-spaced rectangular grid. Then you could just walk in with an axe one day and chop down like a zillion trees an hour and have more timber than you could possibly ever want.

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Book Review: Seeing Like A State | Slate Star Codex

Systems, complexity, and computer sciences (and more)

David Chapman @Meaningness Syllabi for extremely interesting computer science courses taught this spring by Barath Raghavan at USC… They assign some of my essays as readings, which is how I know about them, but that’s not the main thing https://raghavan.usc.edu

(1) David Chapman on Twitter: “Syllabi for 3️⃣ extremely interesting computer science courses taught this spring by Barath Raghavan at USC… They assign some of my essays as readings, which is how I know about them, but that’s not the main thing https://t.co/Si3G1A7NEI” / Twitter

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“Sharks create oxygen”: A scientific perspective | Southern Fried Science

CONSERVATION, ECOLOGY, MARINE SCIENCE, NATURAL SCIENCE, SCIENCE, SHARKS

“Sharks create oxygen”: A scientific perspective

Posted onFebruary 10, 2012 by David Shiffman

I want to apologize to our regular readers for stating something that should be incredibly obvious. Sharks in in no way connected to the global supply of atmospheric oxygen. If every single species of shark went extinct, there would be a variety of negative ecological effects, but a reduction in the global supply of atmospheric oxygen would not be among them. There is not a shred of scientific evidence supporting the idea that the loss of sharks would affect our oxygen supply- not a single scientific paper, not a single technical report. I’ve attended a dozen scientific conferences focusing on marine ecology or shark biology (including three international conferences) and I’ve never seen or heard of anyone presenting or even discussing this. To the best of my knowledge, not a single person who has authored a scientific paper or technical report supports this idea. Despite the complete lack of any kind of credible evidence, and despite many recent blog posts thoroughly debunking it (see here here here here here here and here ), this pseudoscience  just won’t die.

The premise of the sharks and oxygen claim is as follows:

A) Sharks, many of which are apex predators, are important in regulating marine food webs;
B) Phytoplankton, which create oxygen through photosynthesis, are in marine food webs;
C) Therefore, without sharks, phytoplankton populations will crash and we won’t have any more oxygen and we’ll all die.

A and B are reasonable enough- we know that under certain circumstances, apex predators can play important roles in structuring and regulating food webs, and we know that phytoplankton produce oxygen (though how much oxygen phytoplankton produces is another debate entirely). It’s part C of the sharks and oxygen claim that’s the problem.

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“Sharks create oxygen”: A scientific perspective | Southern Fried Science

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Polarity Thinking – Part 1 & Part 2: A Conversation with Barry Johnson – YouTube

Polarity Thinking – Part 1 & Part 2: A Conversation with Barry Johnson

168 views•25 Jan 202170SHARESAVEQuality & Equality652 subscribersSUBSCRIBEDThis is the 38th video produced in the ‘Just in Case…’ mini-series sponsored by Quality and Equality. In this video we are joined by Barry Johnson, the profound thinker and creator of the Polarity Map and its principles Barry has worked with business and industry, government; education; and not-for-profit organizations around the world – some of which he discusses in our video. Barry recently published two new books titled And – Volume One: Foundations and And – Volume Two: Applications, both essential reads for anyone interested in deeply studying the important work on polarities. Barry is also an avid outdoorsman and intrepid traveler, and brings head and heart together in his teaching and consulting. Barry and his wife, Dana, have 5 children and 11 grandchildren. Today, Barry shares with us Parts One and Two of his 4-Part Series on Polarity Thinking. In the first two parts, Barry explores the following questions: • Part One: o Why learn about polarities? o What are polarities? o How do you leverage them? • Part Two: o Paradoxical Change – How to use resistance to change as a resource for Stability And Change o What is the Getting Unstuck Process? Video 39 of this series will contain Parts Three and Four, and can be viewed here (INSERT LINK). Articles, Books, and Resources • www.PolarityPartnerships.com Biography In 1975, Barry created the first Polarity Map® and set of principles. Education: BA in Psychology – University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire; PH D in Organizational Development – International College, Los Angeles. Barry has worked with: Business and Industry; Government; Education; and Not-for-profit organizations around the world. He is an avid outdoorsman and intrepid traveler, and brings head and heart together in his teaching and consulting. Barry and his wife, Dana, have 5 children and 11 grandchildren. Contact Email: barry@polaritypartnerships.com

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Polarity Thinking – Part 1 & Part 2: A Conversation with Barry Johnson – YouTube

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Be Careful Where You Tread | LinkedIn

Be Careful Where You Tread

• Published on January 26, 2021

Edmund O’ShaughnessyLead Delivery Coach at IAG5 articles Following

The year is 1915, passengers are gathering on the Chicago River wharf to board the Great Lakes excursion steamer Eastland. Within a matter of minutes, 844 passengers will have lost their lives. With 2,573 passengers and crew onboard and still tied to the wharf, the Eastland rolled over in 20 feet of water [1]. There was no time to launch the lifeboats, more passengers died than in either the Lusitania or Titanic disasters – no Hollywood movie has ever been made about the Eastland. What caused the Eastland to ‘turn turtle’? The 1912 sinking of the Titanic had given rise to the ‘lifeboats for all’ movement, and the US Congress passed a bill requiring lifeboats to accommodate 75 percent of the vessel’s passengers. The intervention intended to save lives had resulted in the Eastland becoming top heavy and a catastrophe waiting to happen.

In large-scale, sociotechnical systems where we have a desire to bring about improvements or a need to mitigate problems, rather than jumping to conclusions about what to do, it is best to start with the question, what is going on here? Stepping back and looking at the whole helps to situate ourselves and consider more clearly what we think we know, what we don’t know, and what we can know. We start by drawing a boundary around the problem space and considering what we can measure at that boundary. As we get a better sense of the situation we can move, extend or contract that boundary to understand the whole at different scales and levels – recognising always that our boundary is arbitrary and subject to change.

If we take the current pandemic as a case study, we could choose to draw the boundary at the level of a country; ideally, one with clear sovereignty and delineated geography as this reduces the number of variables to control for. We can treat what lies within the boundary as a ‘black box’ to reduce the level of complexity we have to reason about while not becoming simplistic (excessively simple or simplified: treating a problem or subject with false simplicity by omitting or ignoring complicating factors or details).

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Be Careful Where You Tread | LinkedIn

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Using complexity science to understand social problems

Using complexity science to understand social problems

26/01/2021 10:00

On 1 January 2021, Statistics Netherlands (CBS) senior methodologist Frank Pijpers was appointed Professor of Complexity for Official Statistics at the University of Amsterdam (UvA). In this position he will seek to build a bridge between CBS and science in the area of complexity theory.

The economy, the climate and social networks are all examples of complex systems made up of many components that interact with one another and are connected in networks. Complexity theory examines the collective behaviour that characterises such a system, which may be the spread of infections or the dissemination of opinions. Pijpers: ‘This can lead to a better understanding of important phenomena in society and the economy. This theory is interesting for CBS as it allows complex phenomena to be more effectively described from a statistical perspective. This is why the topic of complexity has been part of the CBS research programme since 2016.’ Pijpers is the manager of this research programme.

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Using complexity science to understand social problems

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APM Systems Thinking SIG virtual meet up

The next #systemsthinking SIG workshop is on the 4th of Feb at 7pm.
Book at https://lnkd.in/dfiiTtH
Themes, as highlighted last session, are:
1. Stakeholder engagement to avoid “rushing to fail”
2. Blending Systems Thinking and Agile

book at source:

APM Systems Thinking SIG virtual meet up

Pig on the tracks – Pig on the Tracks

Pig on the tracks

A newsletter about systems, complexity and how things can be done differently.

Welcome to Pig on the Tracks, a newsletter about systems, complexity and how things can be done differently.

This newsletter is an attempt to form a weekly writing habit, capturing momentum from the articles I have been sharing on LinkedIn over the past eighteen months.

It will dive deeper into how systems thinking and complexity to drive real, transformative change in the public sector and beyond. I hope to share my own thinking and reflection, those of others, war stories, case studies, and other glimmers of hope and possibility.

You are probably—deservedly—curious about the unconventional choice of name. It is undeniably niche and I will be impressed if anyone knew the reference off the bat.

Those that are more familiar with my work will know that I believe deeply in the power of speculative fiction in illuminating how things can be done differently. Ursula Le Guin, arguably one of the greatest speculative authors—and one of my favourites—was also a prolific writer of nonfiction work, often deeply critical but strangely hopeful assessments of the world around her.

In her essay, A Non-Euclidean View of California as a Cold Place to Be she took aim at environmental discourses of green growth that promise the impossible goal of perpetuating economic growth without harming the environment, noting:

My intent is not reactionary, nor even conservative, but simply subversive. It seems that the utopian imagination is trapped, like capitalism and industrialism and the human population, in a one-way future consisting only of growth. All I’m trying to do is figure out how to put a pig on the tracks.

Her broader point is well made. So much of what we might consider utopian or transformational in the world of systems change is too blinkered in its focus, too shallow in its attack, or unwilling to expand its imagination to truly transformational frontiers.

As I’ve previously argued, in the excitement of pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in the public sector, the addition of “systems” tends to be applied as a loose metaphor—a systems gloss—that adopts the language but not the fundamental logic or principles of systems thinking. The risk of this trend is similar to the one Le Guin identified: the transformational imagination of systems work remains trapped inside an environment that, ultimately, does not want to see it succeed.

This newsletter is my humble contribution to how we might imagine a different outcome—one where things can be done differently. All I’m trying to do is figure out how to put a pig on the tracks.

subscribe at:

Pig on the tracks – Pig on the Tracks

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Understanding Society: A rapid tour of actor-centered social ontology

Understanding Society

Innovative thinking about a global world

Monday, January 25, 2021

A rapid tour of actor-centered social ontology

Ontological individualism holds the fairly humdrum view that the social world is entirely constituted by the activities, thoughts, and social relationships of individual actors. This short presentation provides one way of thinking about how to think about higher-level social entities from an actor-centered point of view. It provides a “mental map” for social entities such as organizations, institutions, ideologies, cultures, power, and social structures, within the overall framework of an actor-centered social ontology. The video spells out some of the implications of the idea of “methodological localism” developed elsewhere in the blog (link, link, link, link).
Here is a brief summary of the idea of methodological localism:

I offer a social ontology that I refer to as methodological localism (ML). This theory of social entities affirms that there are large social structures and facts that influence social outcomes. But it insists that these structures are only possible insofar as they are embodied in the actions and states of socially constructed individuals. The “molecule” of all social life is the socially constructed and socially situated individual, who lives, acts, and develops within a set of local social relationships, institutions, norms, and rules. (link)

The presentation sketches a view of how to think about higher-level features of social life — institutions, organizations, ideologies, normative frameworks, systems of power, and large-scale social structures. Each of these aspects of the social world is recognized as “real”; but it is emphasized that we need to understand the workings of these “higher-level” social entities in terms of the beliefs, ideas, and situations of the individual actors who play roles within them. Institutions are indeed a kind of mutually supporting “house of cards” (in James Coleman’s phrase; link), in which the causal power of institutions to shape and motivate future individuals depends upon the corresponding features of agency and motivation possessed by current individuals.

This simple ontology implies a broad orientation for research in sociology: to uncover the concrete and specific characteristics of social arrangements at all levels. This includes such things as the specifics of the arrangements through which individuals acquire their ways of thinking and acting in the world, and the arrangements that constitute the fields of incentives, opportunities, rules, and resources through which they live their lives. Turning attention to the higher-level “assemblages” of actors (organizations, institutions, ideologies, normative frameworks, systems of power), the actor-centered approach requires that we pay attention to the ways in which high-level causal powers disaggregate across networks and systems of socially related individual actors.

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Understanding Society: A rapid tour of actor-centered social ontology

This is a very nice obituary

Mary Catherine Bateson: Systems Thinker | Edge.org

Mary Catherine Bateson: Systems Thinker

Mary Catherine Bateson [1.18.21]

Mary Catherine Bateson
1939–2021 

Introduction
by John Brockman

From the early days of Edge, Catherine Bateson was the gift that kept giving. Beginning in 1998, with her response to “What Questions Are You Asking Yourself?” through “The Last Question” in 2018, she exemplified the role of the Third Culture intellectual: “those scientists and other thinkers in the empirical world who, through their work and expository writing, are taking the place of the traditional intellectual in rendering visible the deeper meanings of our lives, redefining who and what we are.”

Her Edge essays over the years focused on subjects as varied as “ecology and culture,” systems thinking, cybernetics, metaphor, gender, climate, schismogenesis (i.e., positive feedback), the nature of side-effects, among others, and are evidence of a keen and fearless intellect determined to advance science-based thinking as well as her own controversial ideas.

She once told me that “It turns out that the Greek religious system is a way of translating what you know about your sisters, and your cousins, and your aunts into knowledge about what’s happening to the weather, the climate, the crops, and international relations, all sorts of things. A metaphor is always a framework for thinking, using knowledge of this to think about that. Religion is an adaptive tool, among other things. It is a form of analogic thinking.”

“We carry an analog machine around with us all the time called our body,” she said. “It’s got all these different organs that interact; they’re interdependent. If one of them goes out of kilter, the others go out of kilter, eventually. This is true in society. This is how disease spreads through a community, because everything is connected.”

She used methods from systems theory to explore “how people think about complex wholes like the ecology of the planet, or the climate, or large populations of human beings that have evolved for many years in separate locations and are now re-integrating.” 

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Mary Catherine Bateson: Systems Thinker | Edge.org