Week 6 (emergence)

i've been thinking about the different levels of social science research and how they parallel studying emergent systems. in anthropology, many studies are done through ethnography where the researcher literally goes somewhere, talks to the people there, looks around and writes about what they see. sociological studies, on the other hand, are often more statistical in nature and involve analyzing entire populations and social structures through looking at large data sets that include information from many different communities and places. although a society is made up of communities, the differences among communities make it so that only looking at one community at a time is insufficient to understand the whole system. at the same time, statistics for a whole population are often so abstracted and removed that they indicate little of what's actually happening on the ground.

The techniques available for researchers wishing to study small, local areas differ greatly from the less personal tactics used to study entire populations, and therefore people end up saying different kinds of things about what's going on in the system as a whole based on what level of activity they're looking at. anthropologists doing localized studies are more likely to talk about things like stories and images and culture, which are best studied by actually talking to and observing people. statistical analysis on the other hand lends itself more toward analyzing the overall shape of the economic and political system. so, even if we accept that complex structures emerge as the synthesis of smaller, simpler units, we still may find it useful to analyze such structures on different levels as different attributes of the system may be more evident on certain levels than on others.

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I'll make my post short and sweet, like a chocolate covered oompa loompa:

So we talked about garden of eden patterns in the Game of Life. Some patterns have been found. But we who have found them exist outside of that Game - so my question is whether or not we would have been able to find them from within that system. Okay, so that's worded strangely, but what I'm really getting at here is whether or not we'll ever be able to discover our own Garden of Eden patterns. Is there a difference between something that doesn't exist in nature (plastics, alloys, Cher) and something that cannot exist naturally in our system? What is that difference? Perhaps God falls into the latter category, an outside influence on our system, something that has no form INSIDE this world (just as we do not exist in the Game of Life), but can nonetheless affect outcomes and patterns that form there (again, just as we affect what occurs in the Game of Life)?

[/oompa loompa]

Since there have been some discussion about equations and models during class, I've been thinking about just why it is that I like equations and models so much. I always find it surprising that some people make faces when an equation comes up, because to me, equations seem like the best thing in the world,. They just seem to make everything so much more easier to undertand. I hate it when text books go on and on for pages and then finally give us the equation. I feel like, "Oh, why didn't you just give me the equation in the first place!" It's the same with models. I love seeing things that fit perfectly in models; they appear to be so beautiful. I acutually don't really like the fact that I like equations so much. I wish I was able to be the kind of person that doesn't like equations at all, but in all reality, I find them really useuful. So why is this? One obvious reason (to me) is that they just seem safe. I don't like things that are not predictable, and having an equation that can tell me exacty what the outcome will be is great. And I've been thinking that another major reason might be because I'm just not really fluent in any language, and that during my life I've had to study in languages that I don't really understand too well. So equations seem the clearest to me because I don't have to bother with trying to understand what the words are saying. I don't think that a lot of other people are in the same situation as me in this aspect, but I do think that one reason why people have always created equations and models may be so that people in the world who don't speak the same langague can communicate and learn from their findings in the most fair and efficient way...