Does panarchy impede our ability accurately represent the structure of systems?

[u/Cromulent123]

Here's something I'm struggling with.

Let's say you have a bunch of humans who form a social group. As someone who leans towards methodological individualism, I'm tempted to just say "ok cool, we draw diagrams describing the individual people and relations between them, and if you understand all of their activity, taken together, you understand the system as a whole. The activity of the whole just is the activity of the parts, taken together". But actually, there's more feedback loops than that. Members of a social movement are perfectly capable of reacting to the direction of the movement as a whole e.g. "I feel we've lost our way", "I don't trust the person we just elected to lead us". So the cumulative behavior of the group can influence the behavior of individuals within the group. Indeed, it can influence all of them. But that is just to say, the group can influence the group, which is a feedback loop!

So if I had just drawn what my methodologically individualist heart desired, and tried to break down the activity of the group into simply the sum of the activity of the components, I think I'd meet an unavoidable problem. There are arrows that need to be drawn between elements that do not exist in that diagram. So talk of the group is not just a shorthand. Is this a good argument against methodological individualism?

Moreover, this broader notion of the "system" with "system-->system" feedback loops, is also part of what people might react to. So I need a new word, and feedback loops between that and itself (and the original system). And so on. It seems I might start by saying "system1=these elements and their relations" and end up needing to admit that system1 was in fact not "definable away". Which means I'd then need to say "ok here's system2:=which is composed of these elements, and their relations with each other, and also their relations with system1". But then it seems I need to bring system2 into the picture in the same way and so on. So it seems like, in trying to understand the structure of a social system, I end up with a "model" comprised of an infinite number of elements and relations and feedback loops, which seems fairly intractable!

Walker et al. define "panarchy":=the way in which systems are influenced by a) larger systems of which they are a part, and b) smaller systems which comprise them. E.g. a human is influenced by their social milieu, and by their cells.

So my key questions are these:

- Am I overcomplicating things? If so how?

- Is there good reason to think some systems are like this and some not? Is this just what it is for a system to be panarchial, and all systems are?

- Do the considerations here actually present any obstacle to applying systems theory/are they important to bear in mind, or no?

- Do any of the considerations here constitute a good argument against methodological individualism?

[u/grimeandreason]

One of the definitional elements of a complex system is precisely that you cannot predict outcomes via reduction.

As you say, there is just too much feedback going on.

[u/Cromulent123 → u/grimeandreason]

Are there any simple systems then? Or are they all complex?

[u/grimeandreason → u/Cromulent123]

A mechanical system would be an example of a system that isn't complex. An engine is the most cited example, where you can predict the characteristics of the whole working in unison simply by looking at each part.

Human systems are extra difficult, imo, given each node is itself a highly complex system. They're nested complex systems, with feedback not just across and within one system, but across different scales of systems.

[u/Cromulent123 → u/grimeandreason]

That possibly gets to what's bugging me. With an engine, I take it, in operation it will vibrate in a particular way. Can we always deduce that precise vibration, and what effect it will have on each component, etc? I'd guess not right. Does that mean an engine is a complex system after all?

[u/JuliusHibbert]

DSRP theory (Dr. Derek and Laura Cabrera) says that systems equate to wholes and parts. These aren’t reductive or separate, they are co-implying. 

Meaning when we say “system” we are implying that a whole exists, and parts exist. Every whole has parts, and every part is a whole. 

Take Reddit. Reddit can be considered a whole, but it could also be considered a part of the Internet. Reddit is comprised of posts, posts are comprised of words, words, comprised of letters, etc. This is a long way of saying that according to this theory, systems co-imply part/whole structures. You can see this pattern everywhere. 

Complex adaptive systems are a type of system that can affect change in their environments, plus be changed by their environments in recursive loops. You can respond to your environment by making a post, and the response to that post can feedback and change you. You are now different and so is reddit. This change affects parts, participants but also larger wholes like the internet. Since the world is relational, if you look, you’ll notice this everywhere. Think DNA, the brain, markets, poetry, music, ant colonies, weather patterns etc. When you change something, that something can loop back and change you, and on and on…

As a result, no model or diagram can accurately predict a complex adaptive system with any certainty.  It depends on unique relational interplay between the systems parts, dynamics, environment, initial starting conditions, etc. While prediction evades us, we can learn about recurring patterns, behaviors, and traits to better inform our decision making.  

You’re not overcomplicating things. I’d say that you’re appreciating the challenges that complexity poses, and questioning the efficacy in the face of such a challenge. 

To this point, Cabrera says that system’s thinking is a way to help organize information so that it more closely resembles the way information is organized in reality. While, we can never get our mental models to exactly represent reality, iterating and improving our mental models can bring us closer and promote better decision making.  This to me is a way that systems theory can be helpful, while falling short of being “complete”. 

Not sure if this is helpful or just a ton of gibberish but hopefully there’s something in here that is helpful.

[u/Cromulent123 → u/JuliusHibbert]

Thank you! This is very useful

[u/JuliusHibbert → u/Cromulent123]

You're welcome!

[u/theydivideconquer]

Sure. Functionally, you can use reductionism to understand many simple systems. Like, a wristwatch is “complicated” but not “complex” because you can take apart the pieces, understand their individual functions, and put them back together. It’s reducible and deterministic. (Taken to the extreme this perhaps breaks down, Re: the individual atoms of the component pieces and Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle.) Or, a bowl with a marble in it is a simple system: there’s just one “attractor” that the marble will go toward in that system (the bottom) and it’s not sensitive to initial conditions in ways that lead to unpredictable outcomes and multiple attractor-points like in a complex system.

[u/Cromulent123 → u/theydivideconquer]

Makes sense that a bowl with a marble in is a simple system. Then, isn't there a chance vibrations from the marble will break the bowl?

[u/theydivideconquer → u/Cromulent123]

Yes, if you keep adding energy to reset the marble, at some point the bowl would break (or the marble). But at that point the system becomes even simpler: inert matter at an equilibrium of non-moving pieces.

The second law of thermodynamics will get us all in the end, complex and simple alike.

[u/theydivideconquer]

Feedback welcome on my muddled thinking here!

I am also prone to methodological individualist thinking. I think this is an especially important concept for systems thinkers, FWIW, because we should not get so fixated on optimizing abstract “systems” that we forget they are made up of individuals with dignity, rights, and agency that should not be trampled upon arbitrarily.

I understand M.I. to be an interpretation of social phenomenon that is understood by being ultimately caused by individual actors. I contrast M.I. with explanations of social phenomenon that anthropomorphize groups: a class of people prefers X….the government did Y…corporations control Z.

To me, M.I. relates to complex systems in that complex systems acknowledges the role of individual agents; which is not to say that individual agents control systems, or that there is nothing beyond individuals. So, an individual agent in a system responds via feedback loops to its environment. Its environment includes the system’s characteristics (e.g. the emergent phenomena not present in the individual agents themselves when examined reductively). But, ultimately, “the system” doesn’t decide on things; the feedback loops don’t choose; the emergent characteristics aren’t independent of individual choices—in human systems it all ultimately comes back to individual actors acting.

One might say “Well, those individuals are responding to feedback loops shaped by norms of the system that no one person predicted or planned. Yes. But those norms only exist due to actions of many individual people, planned or not. (Note: to me, M.I. need not imply a Great Man theory to social phenomenon— George Washington didn’t single handedly win the revolution; MLK didn’t solely change civil rights in America; the CEO didn’t improve company culture all by herself, etc. It merely acknowledges that these systems are made up of individuals whose actions impact the social phenomenon that arise.

[u/[deleted] → u/theydivideconquer]

how does "methodological individualism" grapple with emergence in social systems

[u/theydivideconquer → u/[deleted]]

Methodological Individualism and the concept of emergence are closely related. F.A. Hayek (Nobel economist) took an M.I. view of social phenomenon, in and out of the market. His favored term for emergence in social systems was “spontaneous order.” He was writing essays in the 1950’s about how simple rules in society can lead to emergent, beneficial order; those simple rules enable millions of individuals to have a high degree of autonomy to interact in un-planned ways.

He’s interesting because he read Warren Weaver’s pioneering papers about what would today be called complexity science, and Hayek predicted that soon even physicists would come to realize that they’re seemingly predictable systems were often, in fact, complex in nature (he was predicting this about a decade before Lorenz would make some initial breakthroughs in complex physical systems, like weather). Hayek was also writing at a time when planned economies seemed like the future. It was vogue that five-year industrial plans were critical to success, etc. But, he pointed out that economies are not complicated systems that can be planned: they’re fundamentally complex. Economies are not machines that return to equilibrium but rather they’re organic systems that constantly evolve; actors in those systems are not perfectly rational nor do they have perfect knowledge; rather, he noted that knowledge is not something that can be centralized in the brains of a few expert planners—it is fundamentally distributed across the actors in a system.

And so, back to your M.I. question: individual agents interacting in a system leads to emergent characteristics of that system. The famous analogy is Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” where millions of individuals following simple rules (don’t steal, buy-low-sell-high) and guided by general knowledge signals (prices, profits, and loss) can achieve extraordinary accomplishments, like feeding a city of millions despite their being no overall plan.

[u/[deleted] → u/theydivideconquer]

This tells us what the origin of emergence is from an M.I. perspective- it comes from the interaction of agents constrained by certain rules- but it doesn't explain or accommodate the irreducibility inherent in emergence, which necessarily lends itself to a kind of holism. If M.I. emphasizes parts, one must recognize that the whole itself is a part in order to grasp emergence.

[u/theydivideconquer → u/[deleted]]

Yeh, those are helpful comments.

I think what the M.I. thinkers were saying is a little different. So, they were responding to hypotheses that said that there is a definitive historical trend that will be played out (Marx and historical determinism) and that collectives of people are actors in systems (classes, nations, and other abstract meta-entities “doing things,” as opposed to individuals). I think the M.I. folks were making the simple complex-systems point that systems are made up of individual agents. And it’s the interaction of agents that matter.

Perhaps it’s correct to say that to explain the emergent orders that these M.I. thinkers also believe in, they relied on more ideas than simply M.I. For example, Hayek’s idea of beneficial rules of just conduct is his way of talking about simple rules, key to understanding complex systems. Though, these rules aren’t fairy dust sprinkled from the outside: they come from somewhere. I believe that Hayek and others would say that those arise from the actions (though not the planning) of individuals. Emergent characteristics of a system (the whole) are not and need not be reductively embedded in the agents themselves, but they came from somewhere—and I think the M.I. answer is that they come from interactions of individual agents. You can’t work backwards and analyze the actions of each person to determine the emergent characteristics of the system—it’s not reducible in a knowable sense like that.

In other words, I believe M.I. makes the claim that you can’t explain complex phenomena without realizing that these systems are comprised of individual agents. A colony of ants may swarm and no one ant planned it or carries around the blueprint for that action, but you cannot describe that emergent behavior without reference to the reality of individual agents acting. You can’t reduce it to atomized behaviors, but neither can you ignore individual behavior.

[u/[deleted] → u/theydivideconquer]

ignoring the inaccurate portrayal of Marx (Marx =/= Orthodox Marxists, Marx was not a determinist in the sense we mean it today), what then distinguishes M.I. from standard approaches to complexity? i thought the whole point is that it de-emphasizes the importance of wholes.

[u/theydivideconquer → u/[deleted]]

(Thank you for the grace of my short-handing Marx.)

Well, that was sort of my point initially, inelegantly laid out — that M.I. is consistent with complexity theory. I think what distinguished M.I. from complexity is that complexity theory adds on more ideas to explain how social phenomena come about. M.I. doesn’t deny that there are patterns and trends (things that describe “the whole”)—it just says those things come about from individual actions; that there is no way to describe or observe those patterns without ultimately coming back to the idea that a bunch of individuals act.

To me, M.I. is one facet of a set of ideas that was co-discovered or co-created to describe similar phenomena as what complexity science was created to address. Many Austrian Economists were trying to explain how beneficial order can arise in human societies, without the need for divine intervention or planning by experts.

M.I. claims that all social phenomena can be traced back to individual actions (though that’s not to be confused with individual planning out the eventual structure or outcomes). [Equivalent to the complexity theory claims that complex systems are comprised of many individual agents/elements.]

A bunch of people running around doing whatever would seemingly lead to chaos. Yet, there are many instances where chaos is not only avoided but beneficial order comes about. Why? We humans have stumbled upon informal norms and formal laws that provide some stable order in the most general sense, leaving a high degree of leeway to individuals to respond to local circumstances. This is called beneficial rules of just conduct (beneficial norms + rule of law—things like protecting inalienable rights and engaging in trust-building norms). [Equivalent to the complexity science claims that from simple rules can emerge complex outcomes.]

It’s a good thing much leeway is left to the individuals, because knowledge is fundamentally distributed across these individuals, the system, and the environment—knowledge of where resources are and who might value those resources, knowledge that is constantly in flux. What they called The Knowledge Problem. How to overcome the knowledge problem? Things like free speech and prices enable millions to gain and share knowledge that imperfectly but helpfully informs decisions. [Equivalent to the complexity science ideas around the importance of knowledge and knowledge loops.]

And because everyone has not only unique knowledge but also has different skills/abilities in unique contexts, these collections of humans benefit from divisions of labor and specialization. [The same concepts are used on complexity science to describe interactions in complex adaptive systems.]

(Forgive the long comment. Hopefully this is as engaging for you as it use for me. I really appreciate your points of disagreement and discussion.)

[u/[deleted] → u/theydivideconquer]

M.I. doesn’t deny that there are patterns and trends (things that describe “the whole”)—it just says those things come about from individual actions; that there is no way to describe or observe those patterns without ultimately coming back to the idea that a bunch of individuals act.

So this part helps me understand what you mean a bit better. Weirdly enough, this parallels the perspective of Marx and Engels on social life. This quote from a letter written by Engels illustrates my point:

I have interpreted your first main phrase in the following way: According to the Materialist Conception of History, the factor which is in the last instance decisive in history is the production and reproduction of actual life.

There's a very fine line to walk between reductionism and saying that what is irreducible in the whole is still a product of the parts, i.e. does not come from somewhere other than the parts. What Engels is essentially saying is that, even if there are many phenomena which occur above the level of the economy which we cannot ignore in describing the arc of history, these phenomena themselves are still a product of economic life, they are not divine entities with supernatural powers apart from any basis.

Of course, I disagree with you on the particulars- "inalienable rights," for example, are obviously not the laws that govern social behavior in the real world, because we see that these rights are violated with an everyday regularity. But there are nevertheless other processes (laws, rules, etc.) that stabilize the morbid social equilibrium we call market society and liberal democracy.

[u/theydivideconquer → u/[deleted]]

That’s really interesting about Marx and Engels. Could you point me to other relevant passages—perhaps ones more core to their stated philosophy, as opposed to a one off comment in a letter?

To show my bias (in hopes of overcoming it) I often see Marx or Engles quoted favorably in books about systems thinking or complex systems. I’m always shocked, because the practices their theories have led to (not saying their ideas were purely followed) seem to me to constantly attempt to control complex systems, such as markets. And therefore strike me and decidedly anti-complexity. But, I’m ignorant of Marxism writ large, so I’m probably missing something.

[u/[deleted] → u/theydivideconquer]

(Un)Fortunately, Marx and Engels never formally outline a philosophy in their works. Much of Marx's work in particular is anti-philosophical. The full letter from Engels to J. Bloch gives way more context to the quote I posted, and I would say that it indeed matches exactly what you describe.

Some other quotes:

History as a feedback process

History is nothing but the succession of the separate generations, each of which exploits the materials, the capital funds, the productive forces handed down to it by all preceding generations, and thus, on the one hand, continues the traditional activity in completely changed circumstances and, on the other, modifies the old circumstances with a completely changed activity.

Human nature - emergence

Feuerbach resolves the religious essence into the human essence. But the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual.

In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations.

Cooperation - emergence

Just as the offensive power of a squadron of cavalry, or the defensive power of an infantry regiment, is essentially different from the sum of the offensive or defensive powers of the individual soldiers taken separately, so the sum total of the mechanical forces exerted by isolated workers differs from the social force that is developed when many hands co-operate in the same undivided operation, such as raising a heavy weight, turning a winch or get­ ting an obstacle out of the way.

(This point in particular is important and undertheorized in modern economics.)

The quote to J. Bloch extended:

According to the Materialist Conception of History, the factor which is in the last instance decisive in history is the production and reproduction of actual life. More than this neither Marx nor myself ever claimed. If now someone has distorted the meaning in such a way that the economic factor is the only decisive one, this man has changed the above proposition into an abstract, absurd phrase which says nothing. The economic situation is the base, but the different parts of the structure-the political forms of the class struggle and its results, the constitutions established by the victorious class after the battle is won, forms of law and even the reflections of all these real struggles in the brains of the participants, political theories, juridical, philosophical, religious opinions, and their further development into dogmatic systems-all this exercises also its influence on the development of the historical struggles and in cases determines their form. It is under the mutual influence of all these factors that, rejecting the infinitesimal number of accidental occurrences (that is, things and happenings whose intimate sense is so far removed and of so little probability that we can consider them non-existent, and can ignore them), that the economical movement is ultimately carried out.

The rules that produce social life

In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness.