Complex & Chaotic System versus Mechanical System
Complexity Science – Thomas Homer-Dixon
(It is) no longer is it appropriate for us to think about the world as equivalent to, or an analogue of, a mechanical clock, which one can dismantle and understand completely and which is, ultimately, no more than the sum of its parts.
We need to shift from seeing the world as composed largely of simple machines to seeing it as composed mainly of complex systems. Seeing the world as composed mainly of simple machines might have been appropriate several decades ago: we commonly thought of our economy, the natural resource systems we were exploiting, and our societies in general as machines that were analogous, essentially, to a windup clock. Each could be analyzed into parts, with the relations between those parts precisely understood, and each was believed to be nothing more than the sum total of its parts. As a result, we believed we could predict and often precisely manage the behaviour of these systems.
But now, increasingly, we live in a world of complex systems, and we have to cope with the vicissitudes of these systems all the time. Earth’s climate is clearly complex. Ecological systems are complex, and we’ve often managed them miserably when we’ve assumed they worked like simple machines – take a look, for example, at what we did to the east-coast fishery.
No longer is it appropriate for us to think about the world as equivalent to, or an analogue of, a mechanical clock, which one can dismantle and understand completely and which is, ultimately, no more than the sum of its parts. Instead we have to think in a new way.
From Thomas Homer-Dixon
The development of chaos theory has contributed to this understanding. A chaotic system has nonlinear and feedback relationships between its variables that amplify small perturbations, thereby rendering accurate prediction of the system's state increasingly difficult the further one tries to project into the future. In chaos (not to be confused with randomness), deterministic causal processes still operate at the micro-level and, although the system's state may not be precisely predictable for a given point in the future, the boundaries within which its variables must operate are often identifiable. See James Crutchfield, J. Doyne Farmer, and Norman Packard, "Chaos,"Scientific American,Vol. 255, No. 6 (December 1986), pp. 46-57; James Gleick,Chaos: Making of a New Science(New York: Viking, 1987).
This means if something changes, we might create a new equilibrium point and never be able to return to our initial equilibrium. Think about global warming, can we simply return things to what they were in 1980? Or has a new “equilibrium” or system been created.