"Narratives and Transdisciplines for a Post-Industrial World", Timothy F. H. Allen, 49th Annual Meeting of the ISSS, Westin Cancun, July 2, 2005, 9:20 a.m.

Timothy F. H. Allen

49th Annual Meeting of the International Society for the Systems Sciences, Westin Cancun, July 2, 2005

These participant's notes were created in real-time during the meeting, based on the speaker's presentation(s) and comments from the audience. These should not be viewed as official transcripts of the meeting, but only as an interpretation by a single individual. Lapses, grammatical errors, and typing mistakes may not have been corrected. Questions about content should be directed to the originator. These notes have been contributed by David Ing (daviding@systemicbusiness.org) of the Systemic Business Community ( http://systemicbusiness.org ).

Introduction by Jennifer Wilby

• 16 to 17 years ago, did a masters degree at San Jose State U.
• Tim Allen was visiting there
• Wonderful teacher
• 35 years as a professor, at U. of Wisconsin at Madison

[Tim]

Have been working with thermodynamics, agricultural economists

• Natural scientist, with problems that I was dealing with
• A scientist: plays by the rules, but not sure the others do
• Can't get others to behave like this

Attended SGSR meeting with Robert Rosen

We live in a time of radical reorganization

• No accident that complexity science emerges at this time
• Don't agree with all, hate what Santa Fe is doing
• Uncertainty prevails
• Science is definitely at its limits, and it can't deliver what society needs

The hard part in science is working out the narratives

Technology changes the scale

• Was taking a final exam in Britain
• Was a botanist, although don't do much of this, nowadays
• 1964
• How have plastic bags changed plant systematics?
• That's technology: plastic bags make a big difference
• They rescale human beings
• Things modest can make a big change

e.g. computers: do things so much faster that you'll do them better

• No, what happens is you do it differently

Remote sensing

The hard part is not doing computation

• Have nerds to do this
• The hard part is working out what you want to compute about, the qualitative differences

Scaling differences

• Love grand schemes
• They think we have scale change, biosphere ...
• No, they're types -- don't confuse these with scales

e.g. community, look into organism (tree), which decays into an ecosystem (a log), which becomes a landscape (the upper surface of log), and population (of mosses on logs)

• This is scale: ecosystem is under organism
• Aggregating you and your mites makes you a landscape
• Don't confuse scale with type
• Type identifies what's in the foreground

Type

Look at ecology, as a transdiscipline, under a big scale change

• All transdisciplines emerge under the failure of scale

Clements 1871-1945, biologist, was a Lamarckian (with Roscoe Pound)

• Wantred to link biogeography with physiological adaptation
• When Darwin discovered evolution, the British dropped the ball
• The Germans had the idea of adaptation
• United States was one vote away from making German a national language
• Technology was the quadrat data, and new rescaling tool
• They tried, but failed: the problem is biogeography is too large, and quadrat is too small
• They found the Plant Community, which is association between species
• The communities does not have adaptation as its explanation, with ecological explanations
• Transdiscipline pushed on them

Draves & Coates (2004) say in Nine Shift

• From 1890 to 1920, 75% of lives changed unrecognizably
• In the middle of Kansas, Frankfort had a department store, a banker millionaire, and an opera house (just 10 miles down the road).
• Every town had a opera house
• Solar energy, materials coming in diffuse way
• Then: farm became industry, rural became suburban, boys were 1% inferior to girls in 1890, but then 6% by 1920 as boys became interested in motorcars
• Driving all of the change, was automobile
• At first the automobile helped Frankfort, but then past

1990 to 2020: the Internet is displacing the automobile

• Many people work at home
• School didn't used to be about learning things, don't owe much to high school training, although college training learned a lot
• Thus, school was like going to work
• Now, people are going back to cottage industries
• Intranets replace offices
• Pyramids collapse: no bosses, or foremen
• Trains replace motorcars
• Dense neighbourhoods replace suburbs
• Society will have flattened $
• Term paper, cheating submitted as collaboration: not reading the manual? Collaboration will drive things along
• 50% of learning is online
• Education will become web-based, tenure may not last

Clements and Cowles attempted to get an account of nature, before it went mechanistics

• At this time, we can expect great scale challenges
• Narratives will come to the rescue

Rosen (2000): a system is complex when it can't be modelled

• A system cannot be modeled when ...
• ... the part has multiple identities (e.g. terrorists)
• ... units of measurements are incommensurate (e.g. how much do people eat? including what they throw out? including what goes to China)?
• ... scale changes becomes so large as to have qualitative implications, e.g. gas liquifaction
• ... means that the system, for adequate description, needs multiple levels of analysis

Rosen (2000) says can use narratives

• Economists have the same problem as ecologists: physics envy, Newtonian precision

e.g. Hamilton wrote a dictionary for Newtonian particles into Optical Geometry (c.f. voltage ~ water pressure)

• Did reduction, and got wave mechanics in optical geometry
• If had done the same thing in physics, would have discovered quantum mechanics

Complexity

• Hierarchical, many levels of constraint, links (large/small, fast/slow, different types)

Narrative:

• What is an earthquake?
• A series of events: e.g. earthquake, medflies
• A small scale event links to a large scale event, which creates a story
• But then need invent the nothingness

The point of science is to improve narratives

• Novices get is roughly right
• Apprentice can do it to become craftsman, they do well if they focus hard
• The master breaks the framework, but gives structural quality, and dynamical qualities

Models give dynamic and structural qualitiy

• Structural: gives precision, unequivocal ..
• Dynamical:

True narratives:

• Narratives for science must be compatible with what we know or suspect happened
• But it doesn't make the story true

Worster: the savages were noble, the world was pristine, and the white guys screwed it up

• Bonnifield: the white guys got it wrong, but they jump higher, and learned
• Plenty Coups: when the buffalo went away, our hearts fell, and we couldn't get up again

A piano falls on your head isn't a tragedy, isn't only unfortunate

• Sleeping with his mother is a tragedy

Narratives feel ...

Predictions

Ken Boulding: all prediction is, that nothing happens

• Pool player, black ball, corner pockets
• Nothing happens in physics, lots happens in biology
• Can have a wrong model that predicts well in the short term
• Concerned with linking what people have

Different semantic identities

• If you try to model without a narrative, it's dangerous
• Bladerunner: they have no narrative

Reductionism is dangerous

• I'm going to find this in other places
• Ecological economics: a lot of what ought to be, values are in your face
• Will say GNP increase is a good thing, try this in Grenada, get an infrastructure they don't want
• They get replicant knowledge, stories that they can't use

Physical system processes, with an actual external gradient

• Heat, but then works with cold
• Can't reverse thermodynamics
• United States: money is cold
• Meaning is not thermodynamic

Aristotelian causality:

• Material cause: N, the works thermodynamic
• Efficient: N+1
• Formal cause:
• Final cause

Final cause usually involves planning

• Thermodynamics gives material cause

(See animation!)

Problem: different causes come out of the fog

• Past and present
• Unplanned adjustments to dissipation, which isn't what takes you the way you thought
• Also have experience

But it gets worse

Represent, Act, Transduce

• Need a d-tau, not dt
• Which become first, spring or Tuesday?

Underlying essence, which is the essence

Simple planning, we can do that

• Becoming, d-tau
• Narrative d-theta
• Then have a meta-observer, e.g. Plenty Coups

Isn't all of this just a model

• No, it's a different narrative

Narratives develop a commensurate experience, not of an external observer, but of a unifying observer-observation complexes

• They link incommensurate situations
• Modeling without a narrative is dangerous
• Systems thinking links narratives to models, so that we can find the transdiscplines to address a complex, post-modern world