Message-Id: <v01530508ade1c01e945e@[192.129.1.235]>
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
Date: Mon, 10 Jun 1996 14:08:43 +0200
To: socgrad@csf.colorado.edu
From: Czerlinski@mpipf-muenchen.mpg.de (Jean Czerlinski)
Subject: Re: The Algorithms of Social Life 

>   The most general point I want to make is that the elegant and
>fairly stable structures of social life come about, if Chaos theory
>is correct, from the non-linear interactions of a constant and a
>variable allowed to wander within given limits.  Much work has been
>done in the physical and the natural sciences on non-linear dynamics.
>Little has been done, apart from psychology, in the social sciences.
  ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Check out:

Helbing, Dirk.  1995.  Quantitative Sociodynamics.  Dordrecht, Netherlands:
Kluwer Academic Publishers.

>From the preface:

"This book presents various new and powerful methods for a *quantitative*
and *dynamic* description of *social* phenomena based on models for
behavioral changes due to individual interaction processes.  Because of
the enormous complexity of social systems, models of this kind seemed
to be impossible for a long time.  However, during recent years very 
general strategies have been developed for the modelling of complex
systems that consist of many coupled subsystems.  These mainly stem
from statistical physics (which delineates fluctuation affected processes
by stochastic methods), from synergetics (which describes phase
transitions, i.e. self-organization phenomena of non-linearly interacting
elements), and from chaos theory (which allows an understanding of the
unpredictability and sensitivity of many non-linear systems of
equations)."

Helbing is a physicist from the Institute of Theoretical Physics in
Stuttgart (Germany), where quite a lot of social applications are studied.
Helbing's book not only reviews this work but also unifies it all under
a single framework.  As a physicist he's fairly liberal with supplying
equations to describe what he means, so if you want to understand every 
last detail, you'll need some calculus, linear algebra, and patience.
But you don't need to understand every last detail.  He also describes
in words what he means.

Although I think such work is fruitful, I am not as enthused about it
as much as T.R. Young because it does not bear the most interesting kinds 
of fruit, as far as I'm concerned.  Helbing is able to describe pedestrian
movements, logistic growth, the gravity model for exchange processes,
some diffusion models for the spread of information, Lewin's social
field theory that describes behavioral changes by dynamic force fields,
and game dynamical equations for competition and cooperation.

Valuable as such models are, they don't yet address things I consider
to be more fundamental about social life, such as identity, meaning,
the nature of agency and action, consciousness, and all the 'why'
questions.  Perhaps we must simply wait another 50-100 years until
Helbing's non-linear mathematics can be extended to include such
things.  But my own intuition is that this won't happen, that these
deeper things cannot be described by the laws of non-linear
mathematics but are an altogether different sort of beast.  I am not
even sure they can ever be *fully* described, for they are, in a sense,
descriptions themselves, and I wonder if all this self-referentiality
can be sustained without a breakdown somewhere (e.g. "This sentence 
is false.").


Auf wiedersehen,

Jean