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As I was researching various definitions of complexity on the web,
I came across something that needs to be addressed by me. The issue in the
excerpt I include below, and the link to the larger document, is that another
person's characterization of my father's work is what is taken to be
representative of the work itself. In this particular case, it is Don
Mikulecky's characterization, which is incorrect and is skewed by his own
definitions of what complexity means. I was afraid this might happen, and it
has.
What does the group suggest I do about this? I can't find a current
email for the writer, who is clearly a very intelligent person and who is also
on the right track in defining complexity. But there needs to be some means to
redress the stupidity ascribed, unfairly, to Robert Rosen, here. It's
infuriating.
The second
definition of complexity, as relative to the observer, is that provided by
Mikulecky (1999: 2), who defines complexity as ‘the property of a real world
system that is manifest in the inability of any one formalism being adequate to
capture all its properties’. This definition requires that we find
distinctly different ways of interacting with systems, in that the formal
systems of successful models are not derivable from each other (Mikulecky
1999). Thus ‘a system is complex to the extent that we have more than one
distinct way of interacting with it’ (Mikulecky 1995: 4). The spirit of this
formalism, although ascribed to the work of Robert Rosen, can
also be found in the writings of George Klir (see 1988: section 5.8). A
system is considered simple if one description is considered sufficient to
describe the interactions of the system, it is complex when this fails to be
true (Mikulecky 1995). Mikulecky (1995: 7) notes that
‘Rosen points out that even a stone, which seems simple to us,
will be a complex system to a geologist, merely because of the myriad of ways
the geologist has of interacting with the stone’. Thus under the Newtonian
paradigm the world appears complex as we discover the aspects of it that the
Newtonian paradigm failed to capture (Mikulecky 1999).
As with Mikulecky (1995 and 1999), the third definition to be described is also based on the work of Robert Rosen, ‘who argues that an observer sees a system as “complex” when he has more then one single description of it, and these descriptions cannot be reduced to one’ (Fioretti 1996: 3). Thus according to Fioretti (1996: 4) ‘a system is seen as “complex” by its observer when, due to the presence of a self-referential loop, the observer can never compile a finite list of the behaviours the system will exhibit’. Fioretti’s definition of complexity is specifically aimed at the social sciences. Under Fioretti’s (1996) view the system does not possess “complexity”, that it is not an intrinsic property of the system, rather it is the adjective that the observer attaches to it. Link: |