Re: Merging WST and complexity science

In a message dated 6/8/2003 8:49:30 PM Eastern Daylight Time, gunarat@mnstate.edu writes:

> Has anyone made a serious attempt to merge the world-system theory with 
> Prigogine's theory of dissipative structures?
>
> Wallerstein has written favorably about Prigogine's affirmation of 
> irreversibility, unpredictability, probability, nonlinearity, etc., which 
> are easily applicable to the far-from-equilibrium world-system and its 
> component nation states.


Yes! Done! But the answer has to be empirical. We can see the 'eonic effect' as 'some kind of self-organization' in the in the long rolling waves such a model tends to predict. The problem is that this process is at a very high level and operates beyond numerical parameters. Such a system emerges in a focussed point and expands. We can't quite catch the source point. The problem is that it looks more teleological than mechanical, a character however that S. Kauffman's models tend to induce as a sense, as he puts it, that 'we are the expected'. 

So it is something much more than 'self-organization'. It has the form of self-organization, but is much more. The reason it can seem like more than one thing is that any process of up hill evolution is going to invovle willy-nilly some form of increased order, however arrived at. 

Prignone's material is at a very basic level, still in the realm of chemistry. So is it really helpful to extend this terms to cultural evolution. 

Current mathematics has no qualitative dimension. There is a domain, we suspect, of undiscovered formalism that operates on qualitative distinctions. 

In any case, it is like twenty questions. Somewhere as you get close to  using up your twenty tries, the answer crosses a threshold into a general category, but you still don't know what it is. You can still try to narrow it done, self-organization, but....

Same with the eonic effect, as 'self-organization', we cross a threshold and it is 'self-organization', by only by a process of elimination. We need to zero in on it some more. 
Whatever the eonic effect is, it sets the demand on theory, not the other way around. The qualitative progression in a series of intervals over time, a long time, involves some fairly scary notions for reductionist science. They have eliminated any possibility of getting an answer by the way they pose the question. 
Still we do see something like 'self-organization' in history. We even see the seemingly space defying coherence effect, witness the Axial synchronism in the dead center of the process. 

Anyway, all that was my starting point. After a while you begin to feel embarrassed, is the appearance of the Iliad and Greek lyric poetry almost on a spooky frequency schedule in Archaic, in tandem with the Hebrew prophets, ditto India/China, self-organization?! Actually it is, but we are getting closer to the type indicated by the guy in the movie, It' a Mad Mad world, who says, "we've got to get organized' . 
So history is about people. The theory has to explain people. Self-organization indeed. 

Whatever the answer, it has to explain the eonic effect, which is hard data, if anyone cares to consider the odds against this non-random pattern that does art in an evolutionary blink. 



 
John Landon
Website for
World History and the Eonic Effect
http://eonix.8m.com
Blogzone
http://www.xanga.com/nemonemini