[humanmarkup-comment] on the Rosen definition of complexity

[paul <beadmaster@ontologystream.com>]

Robert Rosen's definition of complexity is related NOT to linear or
non-linear - but rather to a single thing having more than one reality.  The
land of the middle east, for example.  This land happens to have several
realities - and yet one view of the ownership of this land is imposed by
military force, largely paid for by the American taxpayer.  The issue is not
settled even by this military force - because another view of the reality of
the middle east is the view of several hundred million individual humans.

Knowledge management is needed to bring a multi viewpoint resolution that
must, by the nature of the conflict, NOT have a reduction to a
fundamentalist (absolute) viewpoint.  The military solution must by
displaced by a political solution that recognizes a complex resolution to
the question of cultural reality, and in particular the question of the
ownership of the land in the middle east.


There is nothing linear or non-linear about this.

Reductionism leads to linear theory and non-linear theory; but not to an
understanding of complexity.

What is going on in the KMCI forum is technique that keeps others, and
Firestone himself, from understanding the complexity part of "Complex
Adaptive Systems" (as defined by the Santa Fe Institute) - which are for the
most part computer simulations of models that MIGHT be ABOUT complex
systems.  But the simulations themselves are not complex in the sense that
Rosen defines in his several books.

One may see that a school of thought here is disguised.  Firestone claims
that he has no school because his disguise of reductionism is essential to
the continuance of his form of argumentive debate.

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/kmci-Virtual-Chapter/message/4517

Specifically he wishes to reduce the truth of knowledge to a validation
process - and this might be ok, except the results have to agree with one
viewpoint.  The truth of knowledge is complex and can not be so reduced.
Viewpoint is essential, not inconsequential.


Using the Firestone methods, complexity issues are distorted into a setting
where the issues are first treated linear (rationally) and then becomes
non-linear (as the incompleteness of the rational method is identified) ...
and leading to infinite regresses and the illusion that often accompanies
the "rationalist school".

Whether Rosen defined complexity, as I have represented, is only a side
issue - most do not know of Rosen's work.

I have addressed this issue is several recent communications to KMPro, and
perhaps there might be a call to a discussion about the issue of how
complexity is defined.  How can the KM community address the issues of
"knowledge representation scope" if the Firestone method is taught?

Firestone's makes comments about non-linearity and complexity as if he were
an authority; and that his view is correct.  And to a large degree,
Firestone's comments reflect how complexity is thought about in many
quarters.  But one has a word for non-linear and one does not need another
word to mean the same thing.  He is not only mistaken about how the word
"complexity" should be used; but is spoofing reductionism when he acts as if
non-linear and complex is the same thing.  Much of the literature does
this - but community consensus did not mean that the Earth was flat.  We as
a culture simply have not come to understand how to shake loose of the devil
of reductionism and egocentric behaviors.  (They are related... egocentric
behavior and reductionism to "your" viewpoint.)

Complexity has nothing to do with the notion of linear or non-linear.

In talking about this

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/categoricalAbstraction/message/38

(also reposted to KMPro this morning)

one often finds words that have more than one meaning:

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Knowledge must reflect both the "deep" structure of what is, and thus what
one might claim is often represented in a single set of self-coherent views;
and knowledge must reflect the "surface" structure of viewpoint. Knowledge
is not reducible to something that is globally rational. Maturity of mind
is required to see how the rational context shifts in the experience of
knowledge.

Enter complexity. Complexity is found in the two words "deep" and
"surface", since these two words have multiple correct, and contradictory,
meanings. These two words, in this context; cannot be properly reduced to
one meaning.

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