complex chaos
I’m reading Mark C. Taylor’s The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture. I’m just through the introduction and first chapter, but I’ve come across the same difficulty as I have in other books on similar topics: nobody can nail down what constitutes a complex system or what it is we should be studying about such systems. If we can say the stock market is a complex system do we study the trouble of modeling it? [See this post about some problems with modeling]
source: http://flickr.com/photos/swisscan/
So far, Taylor has described the movement into and from modernism to postmodernism as a change from a culture of grids to a culture of networks. He accomplishes this (in a rather interesting and successful fashion) by examining the changes in American architecture over the twentieth century, studying Mies, Venturi, and Gehry. With each subsequent architect, complexity gets further woven into design. I found Taylor’s analysis of the transitional figure, Venturi, to be the most interesting because it illustrates the push for change coming against a latent inertia.
Networks have always brought me into flirtation with ideas of collective intelligence, specifically the emergence of a Noosphere. Collections of individual organisms combining into a united, more complex organism. A bacterium is phagocytized by a cell where it then becomes a mitochondrion. A collection of similar cells becomes a tissue. Then an organ; an animal. At each successive step complexity increases, as does the amount of information processing required. Life has several careful definitions, but among them is the requirement that for something to be alive, information, some form of heritable data, has to play a role in its reproduction. Our information is of course DNA, and our current network culture gives us the metaphor of life as essentially computational. We’re processors for our genes; or perhaps the universe is the processor and we’re just threads being executed. The question to toy with then is whether the world’s collection of humans could begin to act as a united, more complex organism. In some ways we could imagine that we already do, and that something like Culture is a form of life that simply lacks a material component (or that arises from the networking of discrete material units).
