I’ve been thinking about Principalities, Powers, and Invisible Hands for a good decade or so, not every day but often. My academic background is in mathematics and I’ve read fairly broadly in ‘chaos theory’ and related specialities. I’ve even read some of the works of John Casti and Stuart Kaufmann, two experts in self-organizing systems. Along with the other pieces of my eclectic knowledge, this is feeding into something of an understanding of the issues involved. In this entry. My main interest is in human societies but there are general principles and phenomena which are common to human societies, ant-hills, and physical systems.
Human beings are dependent, rational animals — dependencies of this sort can be more generally labeled as ‘social’. Our very dependencies upon each other make us very aware of each other’s actions. We tend to imitate very readily. We even tend to move towards unusual inflections or unusual use of words and often very quickly. Schooling fish act as one unit and it’s somewhat surprising to learn from scientists that such coordinated action comes as each fish reacts only to its neighbor. There is no global control and yet there’s global coordination.
We human beings also can form large-scale coordinated units just by imitative responses to our immediate neighbors. I don’t have any problems imagining this, in analogy to schools of fish. Obviously, there will be some delay for more complicated individual behaviors and also some great uncertainty or confusion in the large-scale coordination if there are competing behaviors.
So far as I know, even mathematicians and other scientists who’ve studied this phenomenon, a type of self-organization, haven’t come up with a good vocabulary for their quantitative purposes. And they may not. The coined terms of modern physics indicate that even the best of our scientists are nowadays technicians rather than well-educated human beings who’ve developed specialized knowledge and techniques in a field of science. In any case, I would hope that someone can come up with more focused metaphors and analogies now that we are coming to a better perception of this sort of phenomenon.
The development of modern science has been well-documented and it tells us that understanding comes only with the development of the vocabulary and concepts which can be generated by metaphors and analogies. That’s another issue I’ll be addressing soon on my other blog: To See a World in a Grain of Sand. Why do we need to speak as-if? Shouldn’t it be possible to develop words and concepts that correspond directly to real-word entities and actions and relationships? Human experience to-date would indicate the answer to this latter question is, “No,” a rather emphatic negative at that.