Bottom-up vs. Top-down

[John Kineman <***>]

This post seemes to have gotten lost, so I'm reposting it. Apologies if
it shows up in another form somehow.

Let's be honest. Physics has a handle on one aspect of reality - the
easier part to study in its early years, because only those things that
could be precisely specified were considered worthy of study. With QM it
has encountered the most rudimentary kind of complexity - nothing
approaching the complexity of life. Maybe some giants like von Neumann
have develop ways of bridging to the life sciences from this bottom-up
science. Many physicists balance out their lives with other activities.
The life and social sciences involve much more than physics; and they
are important in they're own right. The applications of our "bottom-up"
physically-based thought patterns to ecological, psychological, and
social phenomena have been destructive and sometimes even criminal.
Simplicity has been a plague. Complexity_made_simple may be just another
variant of the disease -- and I'm not trying to exaggerate or be
pejorative, I mean this literally. In my world, which is shrinking by
11,000 species a year, currently the largest extinction event in
geologic history; and which has seen a 50% conversion of natural
ecosystems to human domination, technology has not been an altogether
happy thing. I risked my life to study mountain gorillas in the wild
because I love nature and was fascinated with gorillas. There are now
400 wild mountain gorillas on Earth (283 without the Bwindi population,
which may not be the same sub-species). At these levels each one can
have a name and its own web page. The technology that has destroyed
nature came from good phyiscs - which isn't to say it is bad; but
something is missing from it. It hasn't applied well to whole systems,
only to parts. The answer that we'll get there in another several
centuries by continuing to build up from the parts isn't satisfying. In
50 years more than half the known species on Earth will be extinct.
Millions of years are required to replace the higher species with
functional equivalents. What's the functional equivalent of a mountain
gorilla? Maybe Microsoft will make one. We desperately need "top-down"
ways of understanding nature - yes, to complement the "bottom-up" ways
as Howard suggested, but that complementation is not as important as
getting at the whole problem from the beginning, and in our scientific
culture, just being allowed to even think top-down. I believe RR's
perspective provides a rigorous way to develop and defend top-down
models for ecosystem management.

JJK