"Complexity" is a word that stands out in the passage. It is reiterated many times in relation to all the examples explored in the essay. Complexity is normally understood as a "sensory overload"- something that completely overwhelms the human nervous system, such as the crowds and noise of a city. The essay, however, leans more towards explanations of other kinds of complexity- like 'organized complexity'.
Organized complexity is first seen in Deborah Gordon's ant colonies- the individual ants each follow a systematic set of actions that leads to a clearly visible 'macrobehavior', such as the placement of the midden and the cemetery. No single ant directed the others to the locations.
A parallel to this is seen in Engels's 'The Condition of the Working Class in England', where he writes about Manchester. The town was built "less according to a plan and less within the limitations of official regulations- and indeed more through accident- than any other town" and yet, it had somehow arranged itself into a clearly defined order, with the working-class community concealed so thoroughly that it would be difficult to find it if one was not deliberately searching for it. The system emerged out of patterns of human behavior, with thousands of individuals each systematically following a set of unspoken rules that led to a largely noticeable outcome in the structure of Manchester ("The bright shop windows attract more bright shop windows and drive the impoverished toward the hidden core"). This follows the same patterns that established the positions of the midden and cemetery in the aforementioned ant colonies. Organized complexities are a behavior that cannot be explained through the use of statistical mechanics and probability theory as disorganized complexities can. They depend on more than the mere number of variables- the variables all interact to form an integrated, organic whole. The posing of problems involving organized complexities led to what Thomas Kuhn termed as "a genuine shift in the paradigm of research".
Organized complexity is first seen in Deborah Gordon's ant colonies- the individual ants each follow a systematic set of actions that leads to a clearly visible 'macrobehavior', such as the placement of the midden and the cemetery. No single ant directed the others to the locations.
A parallel to this is seen in Engels's 'The Condition of the Working Class in England', where he writes about Manchester. The town was built "less according to a plan and less within the limitations of official regulations- and indeed more through accident- than any other town" and yet, it had somehow arranged itself into a clearly defined order, with the working-class community concealed so thoroughly that it would be difficult to find it if one was not deliberately searching for it. The system emerged out of patterns of human behavior, with thousands of individuals each systematically following a set of unspoken rules that led to a largely noticeable outcome in the structure of Manchester ("The bright shop windows attract more bright shop windows and drive the impoverished toward the hidden core"). This follows the same patterns that established the positions of the midden and cemetery in the aforementioned ant colonies. Organized complexities are a behavior that cannot be explained through the use of statistical mechanics and probability theory as disorganized complexities can. They depend on more than the mere number of variables- the variables all interact to form an integrated, organic whole. The posing of problems involving organized complexities led to what Thomas Kuhn termed as "a genuine shift in the paradigm of research".
Johnson, in his essay, also details 'bottom-up learning', used in Selfridge's Pandemonium system. It consisted of multiple levels of "shrieking demons", limited miniprograms that passed information up a hierarchy, rather than having a single smart program pass information down. This reminds me of Cathy Davidson's ideas of a system of learning which does away with the typical hierarchy of top-down command and replacing it instead with a system in which all participants have an equal say. There is a difference, of course, between the two systems- Pandemonium has a reversed hierarchy, so to speak, while Davidson's system has no hierarchy at all- but there are also visible similarities.
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