Encefalus

Hello there guys! It’s been about 3 months that I haven’t posted anything! You’ve probably thought I am dead Let me tell you guys (and gals). Encefalus ain’t dead! It’s just been that I’ve been so busy, that I literally didn’t have any time to write one of my traditional long posts. I’ve done many things the last few months. Among them, I was writing my final dissertation for my psycology degree, as well. The subject was complexity theory and how it applies to social sciences. SPECIAL NOTE: I am using the latest edition of wordpress, which, for some strange reason, won’t allow me to use my HTML editor plugin. So, I am stuck with the default wordpress editor, which, as everyone who has used wordpress knows, absolutely sucks. So bear with me, if this article has fewer links or images than other articles in the past I will fix this as soon as I can.

You see, complexity theory is a strange beast. But, it’s not complexity to blame. You can blame it all on science. Science works in a way different than we think. Scientists believe the scientific progress to be a completely rational procedure, however, this is not the case. Just think of all the scientific feuds. Think of the publication of researches that happens on a network of subscription journals and peers. Science is governed by the flow of information. The flow of information, however, happens in a way that is far from optimized. You’ll probably be asking yourselves why I am saying all this. Complexity theory is an idea that has started to consolidate in the minds of scientists in the last ten years or so, but has been postulated before. It’s one of this kind of theories that are not tied to a specific domain, but span across many domains and disciplines. Complexity theory, in fact, tries to explain pretty much everything, from physics, biology and chemistry, to social science.

Of course, such a remarkable claim, can garner much criticism. If what complexity theory proposes is true, then we are towards a paradigm shift in the 21st century. However, as I said before, scientific progress is not a simple thing. Scientific progress is a social phenomenon unto itself. I find interesting the fact that acceptance of complexity theory in the scientific world does not depend solely on its success, but on social procedures, which complexity theory claims to explain. I strange cyclical pattern can be surely discerned here. Today, my faith that complexity theory is moving from a set of different theories to a single discipline has been reaffirmed: http://www.springer.com/physics/book/978-0-387-75888-6 . This is the first encyclopedia of complexity, written by nobelists, turing prize winners, field medalists and other reknowned scientists. There are 11 volumes in total, which compromise a massive amount of knowledge. The sad fact is, however, that the price of this work is astronomical, ranging from 3.000 to 5000 $. I have written before how much academia sucks, and why scientific progress has to be free for everyone, so I won’t write anything more right now.

Now, what have I learned about complexity while writing my dissertation? Many things. The most memorable of all is that I managed to compose a history of complexity theories from the past until now. I don’t have the time right now to write the details of this history, but the study of ancestors of complexity theory, like chaos theory, has proved an invaluable lesson towards understanding what we are facing in the science of the 21st century. Like I said, scientific progress is not a simple procedure. Unfortunately, scientifici theories don’t always have solid definitions, methods, practices and fields like mathematics. This is why, when faced with an interdisciplinary field, like complexity, one can be daunted by the amount of knowledge that he has to absorb. Furthermore, it’s not just the amount of knowledge, it’s also the connection between every piece of information and how that relates to one or more domains.

To make complexity simple , complexity theory’s main moto is this: complex phenomena can arise from the simple interactions of autonomous agents. What is this supposed to mean? It’s one thing to give a definition, and a completely different thing to understand it. There is no hard definition of what is complex or simple, so don’t ask about these. What this motto means for our research is this. Until now, we believed that the physical phenomena constitute regularities that can be described with simple mathematical tools. However, we have many times found out that are tool fail us, in all sorts of domains, from the physical, to the social (just look at the last economic crisis). This happens because the regularity observer is something that doesn’t simply happen by universe’s will. It is born out of the interaction of many autonomous interacting agents. The interactions are simple, they can just be binary agents that can take simply one of two states. The agents can have no knowledge of what anyone else is doing. They simply react directly to their environment. However, these interactions provide a complex phenomenon that shows itself as a regularity that we can explain in its coarse form with simple mathematical tools, but these tool fail us in the details. And it’s the details that matter