Self-Organization is not Utopia

This brief essay was written a few years ago. It pretends to limit the use of Self-Organization as a model for utopia.

Arturo Escobar as other cyberspace theorist make an emphasis on Self-Organization (SO) as the desired and achievable model-dynamic for social order [1], but they doesn’t stress on the phenomenological facts which, under the framework of Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS), represents the limitations to SO –the same could be said on his treatment of decentralized dynamics–.
Although hitherto there is no clear way to distinguish the 'inside' from the 'outside' of a CAS, if one is to apply CAS theories to any system including social communities, the consideration of an influential environment is a starting point. This consideration is important because it exerts a limit on the possibilities of SO and decentralization of the CAS. Moreover, the very fact of SO may be argued by an alternative explanation based on evolution of systems where the environment interacts in a regular way with the system. In fact, the latter argument is much more compatible with the laws of physics where SO is related to information loss and therefore to interaction with a "noisy" environment. This is what's been called Out of Equilibrium Phenomena. So CAS theories and physics laws tell us that SO has its limits imposed by the inevitable effects of the environment. As much as SO phenomena may help to articulate a type of humanist discourse in the context of Complex Systems in the form of human aggregate, self-referenced behavior, the former additional conditions impose limits to these kinds of approaches. For example, it reminds us that cyberspace structural behavior can't be isolated from 'out of cyberspace' phenomena, although as we said in the beginning, differentiating cyberspace from 'out of cyberspace' may be increasingly difficult. The challenge for distinguishing these two realms can be sized when compared with the ideological and the material realms as exposed in the philosophical tradition. To understand this progressive dialectic is a challenging academic enterprise initiated by early modern sociologists and pragmatic linguists up to cyberspace anthropologists.

Related posts: Tras los límites de la descentralización I y II.

[1] Escobar, Arturo, 2005, Other Worlds Are (already) Possible: Cyber-Internationalism and Post-Capitalist Cultures, Revista TEXTOS de la CiberSociedad, 5. Temática Variada. Disponible en http://www.cibersociedad.net

A reading on: democracy and/or constitutionalism

Here I offer a link to an article about the sometimes conflicting relation between democracy and constitutionalism. It is quiet philosophical and it revolves around Habermas' democratic-constitutionalism. You are also invited to look for Habermas' writings on this subject. Nevertheless the former is particularly easy to read, before jumping into the big stone.

"A Bizarre, Even Opaque Practice": Habermas on Constitutionalism and Democracy" by Lasse Thomassen. Website of the American Political Science Association.

It is a good reading for these times of political crisis which is happening in colombia.

Public Policy: from top or from bottom?

A deeper understanding of top-down and bottom-up paradigms as an analytical and/or synthetic tool in human sciences (History, Public Policy, Development Economics, etc.) could be enriched by the view of such paradigms in nano-science and nanotechnology. Nanotechnology proves, for example, that bottom-up approaches are valid for nano-engineering. This lesson may be extrapolated to public policy where there exists the misbelief that bottom-up paradigms has a purely analytical domain of validity (like historical studies), and therefore leading to a dead-end in Public Policy Theory [1]. In the nanotech industry, it is often found that labs pursuing the development of a functionally specified device are betting simultaneously to both, bottom-up and top-down approaches. Many times one of them offers overwhelming benefits in comparison with the other. It may also be the case that both methods attain the main functional goal, but they differ in collateral properties, which eventually will determine their subsequent industrial development (reliability, price, precision, etc.). Public policy may seem far from this picture, but our comparison proves that there is plenty of room for different public policy strategies. What it has to be further adjusted in the latter field is a way of reliable evaluation of functional goals. Nevertheless the last fifty years has seen considerable progress in this field denominated Evaluation Research [2].

[1] see the criticism of the nobel prize economist Amartya Sen, The Man Without a Plan in response to William Easterly's book The White's Man Burden.

[2] see a brief survey of methodologies by the Web Center for Social Research Methods.

Disciplined Minds, a book by Jeff Schmidt.

Lately I don't have much time for writing 'humanist' thoughts. No more alternative but to copy-paste about some issues with small personal comments. Here I attached an excerpt from the book 'Disciplined Minds', from Jeff Schmidt. I personally find his position a little 'poisson from an injured animal', but this shouldn't be the end of the story –is not healthy to judge an idea only by presumptions on the motivations of the author–. The reason I bring about this book is due to my sympathy with many of Schmidt observations and feelings, nevertheless I don't want to stress on my sympathy but on a more impersonal opinion. Excerpts where kindly copied from St. Drogo's Books. The first one shows the general aim of the author:

p. 2 - "I argue that the hidden root of much career dissatisfaction is the professional's lack of control over the 'political' component of his or her creative work. Explaining this component is a major focus of this book. Today's disillusioned professionals entered their fields expecting to do work that would 'make a difference' in the world and add meaning to their lives. In this book I show that, in fact, professional education and employment push people to accept a role in which they do not make a significant difference, a politically subordinate role. I describe how the intellectual boot camp known as graduate or professional school, with its cold-blooded expulsions and creeping indoctrination, systematically grinds down the student's spirit and ultimately produces obedient thinkers - highly educated employees who do their assigned work without questioning its goals. I call upon students and professionals to engage in such questioning, not only for their own happiness, but for society's sake as well."

I bring the second excerpt because it brings into discussion the extension of Marxist critics into the so called 'Knowledge Based Society':

p. 40 - "To say that professionals are ideological workers is not to say that they formulate the ideology in the first place, for they do not. Professionals have no more control over the ideology they propagate than nonprofessionals have over the design of the products they produce. Professionals merely have an operational grasp of the ideology inherent in their occupation's actual role in society. Employers trust them to use that ideology to extrapolate policy and handle new problems as they arise, and to do so without constant supervision. Professionals are licensed to think on the job, but they are obedient thinkers."

Finally, the third excerpt illustrates precisely what I'd like to question; schmidt's anthropocentrism where the unit of sense is the human-individual:

p. 4 - "A system that turns potentially independent thinkers into politically subordinate clones is as bad for society as it is for the stunted individuals. It bolsters the power of the corporations and other heirarchical organizations, undermining democracy ... it does this by producing people who are useful to hierarchies, and only to hierarchies: uncritical employees ready and able to extend the reach of their employers' will. At the same time, a system in which individuals do not make a significant difference at their point of deepest involvement in society - that is, at work - undermines efforts to build a culture of real democracy. And in a subordinating system, organizations are more likely to shortchange or even abuse clients, because employees who know their place are not effective at challenging their employers policies, even when those policies adversely affect the quality of their own work on behalf of the clients."

I cannot say wether his position is theoretically hopeless or not, but I'd like to locate the validity of his position in a more general debate which is between the developmentalist and non-developmentalists. Yes, again I talk about modern vs. postmodern approaches; actually I'm tired of taking everything to the same arena because it only oversimplifies problems, but is the only way to make a map of this debates for someone who takes no time to go in depth on these issues. Again let me say one more thing about this general debate: At least from the 'scientific' point of view a good path to reveal the relations between ('scientific') developmentalims and its antithesis are: the works of Illia Prigogine, Furusawa and Kaneko (2000) and Adami, Ofria and Collier (2000). In the other side is the work of Carroll SB (2001) which gives one of the must solid scientific hypothesis to counter-argument developmentalism. A brief review of this subject can be found in Wikipedia reference for Complex Adaptive Systems. Let me oversimplify this to those who are not curious enough as to read the cited references. Developmentalists say that society tends to increase in structural complexity, in other words, humans will hopelessly become functional cells of 'higher' organisms; those structurally more complex than the isolated human. Symbiogenetic Evolution (see the work of the biologist Lynn Margulis) is one example of developmental mechanisms of evolution without having to proclaim teleological approaches. Simbio-genesis emerges under natural selection and it complements many other mechanisms associated to darwinian evolution. On the other hand are those who think that there's no global trend. The work of carroll states it in a precise statistical formulation by saying that complexity growing is just an illusion due to a non-uniform sampling of living organisms. The sampling in this case is mistakenly focused on the right hand tail of a time evolving gaussian distribution describing biomass versus structural complexity -see Carroll SB (2001). Going beyond scientific positions, we should know by now that in one corner we find the modernist and on the other the postmodernist. 

Carroll SB (2001). "Chance and necessity: the evolution of morphological complexity and diversity". Nature 409 (6823): 1102–9.

Furusawa C, Kaneko K (2000). "Origin of complexity in multicellular organisms". Phys. Rev. Lett. 84 (26 Pt 1): 6130–3.

Adami C, Ofria C, Collier TC (2000). "Evolution of biological complexity". Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 97 (9): 4463–8.

Cooperativism from Multi-Agent Systems

How does cooperation builds? What does Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) has to say to this respect? There are certainly cooperative equilibrium states for some MAS or Game scenarios with Markovian behaviour. From a sociosemiotical point of view this could be interpreted as the possibility of Analytical Approaches -modernist approaches- to coopertivism. But under certain conditions, cooperation in MAS only develops out of Non-Markovian resources; this implies that Historical Approaches -traditionalist approaches- are necessary for building cooperative behaviour. MAS approaches to cooperativism has been used mostly as a defence for neoliberal Market Economy and Politics, which is understood as a 'highly' Markovian behaviour. Non-Markovian approaches to cooperativism in this scenario has one thing to say: market is not strictly Markovian given the use of multiple history based behaviour. To neoliberal economicists this means: not everything is 'market', and to anti-neoliberal says: 'market' can also appropiate 'historical' data.

¿Por qué demoró tanto?

Rodolfo Llinas, El cerebro y el mito del yo, traducido por Eugenia Guzmán, Grupo Editorial Norma.

«Por qué un periodo tan exorbitantemente largo para pasar de formas unicelulares a formas celulares? Examinemos lo que le implica a la naturaleza hacer un "animal"; es decir, una sociedad altamente organizada de células, o para el caso, cualquier sociedad exitosa. Debe existir un acuerdo en cuanto a los elementos comunes y a la comunicación entre los participantes, así como un conjunto de reglas globales a las cuales al menos la mayoría de ellos se adhiera. La clave del misterio es la siguiente: la tarea de otorgar a las células individuales la capacidad de intercambiar entre si información biológicamente significativa resulto, evolutivamente, !más complicado que fabricar la primera vida unicelular! 


Sin ser buenos jueces al respecto, nos parece que dos billones de años es mucho, mucho tiempo, para que la evolución inventara la comunicación entre células y solo podemos aventurar algunas especulaciones al respecto. Probablemente, sin algunas especializaciones que vendrían posteriormente, la agregación celular simplemente no ofrecía ninguna ventaja para la supervivencia: un tanto egoísta, pero quizás profundamente cierto. Sin embargo, cuando ocurrió la transición de la vida unicelular a la sociedad multicelular, emergió un nuevo abordaje hacia la vida que nos acompaña desde entonces. Este enfoque enfatiza el compromiso total hacia la sobrevivencia de la sociedad celular (el "grupo") como el sí mismo en contraste con el compromiso total de la célula hacia la sobrevivencia individual ( el "individuo" como el sí mismo). Como ejemplo de lo que hablamos, recordemos que cuando los seres multicelulares evolucionaron, se creo por primera vez la verdadera "muerte colectiva" programada. Recordemos que aunque los organismos unicelulares pueden ser destruidos, también se puede suponer que normalmente tales células no mueren sino simplemente se dividen. Podría decirse que cualquier ameba de hoy en día en realidad nunca ha muerto, sino que, durante milenios, se ha dividido en dos muchas veces -una entidad inmortal hasta que alguien pise la última (o la primera). En cambio, la muerte de ciertos grupos de células de una entidad multicelular puede llevar a la muerte de todas las demás células, independientemente de que tan saludables se encontraran en un comienzo (como cuando una persona muere por un disparo en el corazón o en el cerebro). Lo anterior representa la pérdida de un principio muy importante: la capacidad (y el propósito) de la célula individual de mantener y proteger su propia vida. La esencia de nuestra naturaleza como seres multicelulares es ese compromiso de las sociedades celulares que emerge cuando la célula individual reemplaza sus principios de supervivencia propios por los de la sociedad en que vive. En un organismo multicelular las células individuales no pueden romper sus lazos con el grupo y "alejarse del problema" cuando la cosa se pone color de hormiga; esta capacidad se canjeo por la vida social.

Las células de las sociedades multicelulares cambian ciertas libertades por otras: la libertad de interactuar aisladamente y de afrontar los peligros de la vida solitaria se reemplaza por la de "sindicalizarse" y de gestionar en grupo, y al hacerlo, de perder o ganar como grupo. Un segundo requisito para la evolución animal fue el desarrollo del suministro de combustibles de alta energía a células ávidas de ello, atrapadas y empaquetadas en arreglos inmóviles. Para ello es necesario el metabolismo oxidativo y un sistema digestivo que, mediante un sistema circulatorio, aporte nutrientes de alta energía a grupos celulares densamente empaquetados. Las células individuales, carentes de exoesqueleto (al contrario de las plantas), no sobreviven fuera de un medio acuoso con determinados nutrientes y los eucariotas no sobreviven mucho tiempo sin oxigeno. Los animales solucionaron este problema atrapando este vital fluido y llevando con ellos su propio océano interno (sangre y fluido extracelular). La tercera razón por la cual la evolución probablemente tardo tanto en desarrollar animales es la complejidad celular. Piénsese en lo que en realidad implica hacer que una célula se comunique con otra. En un principio, las células de linajes genéticos diferentes desarrollaron un lenguaje biomolecular que dio lugar a una comunalidad de reglas, a un dominio biopolítico de la vida en general. En esencia, las células tuvieron que adquirir la capacidad de recibir, interpretar y enviarse señales claras por ensayo y error. Probablemente, al comienzo lo hicieron como células hijas de una mutua división celular, unidas por "puentes" citoplasmáticos que les impedian separarse completamente, o mediante algún "pegamento" mucopolisacarido en su superficie (como el de la colonia celular primitiva volvox; ver la referencia en Kirk 1998). Mas tarde se unieron en grupos celulares heterogeneos, como parientes distantes pero genéticamente relacionados, después en colonias y finalmente en grupos homogéneos con el mismo código genético, pero en el que cada célula expresa solo una parte de dicho código, lo que permite la especialización celular ya mencionada. Entonces surge la pregunta ¿que se gana evolutivamente con esta nueva filosofía de orden? La respuesta es obvia; los grupos celulares tienen propiedades emergentes ausentes en las células aisladas. Entre tales propiedades se cuenta la capacidad de las células individuales de diferenciarse del grupo, es decir, la especialización para tareas especificas (a expensas de su propia autonomía), en un grado imposible para formas de vida unicelulares en donde todos los requisitos para la sobrevivencia deben hallarse presentes en cada elemento individual.»

Kirk, D. L. (1998). Volvlox: Molecular-Genetic Origins of Multicellularity and Cellular Differentiation. (Development and cell biology series). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Las ideas políticas y su devenir histórico

Si bien Marx realiza el primer paso histórico hacia una teoría materialista de las ideas, la crítica materialista aún tiene mucho por recorrer. Es preciso afianzar y ahondar en la tesis crítica de que la cohesión de un discurso político depende de las circunstancias económicas y políticas de sus usuarios. Esta afirmación revela su complejidad cuando tratamos de interpretar la noción de usuario desde las múltiples perspectivas del sujeto crítico [1]. Al referirnos a usuario, se recurre a calificaciones como clase, partido, grupo, gremio, persona(s), etc. El historiador interesado en estudiar la evolución de las ideas políticas desde el materialismo histórico debe ser cuidadoso a la hora de identificar estas categorias sociales con determinadas ideas políticas. De la misma forma en que las personas en su transcurrir toman un rumbo diferente al de su primera clase social, así mismo las ideas políticas toman rumbos diferentes al de sus usurios circunstanciales. Al interpretar las ideas políticas como herramientas sociales, no solo estamos asumiendo una posición materialista al relativizar el usuario en el espacio social, pero igualmente trascendentalista de la historia en la medida en que nos permite una crítica de las ideas que relativiza al usuario en el tiempo social. Es a una teoría de la crítica que relativiza tanto el espacio como el tiempo social a lo que llamo una Teoría neoObjetiva. Desde esta Teoría neoObjetiva, la relación con las ideas políticas toma una óptica compatible con el fonocentrismo. La Teoría neoObjetiva bien podría ser considerada como una evolución natural de las teorias críticas. Esta no representa ninguna ruptura, pero si una forma de radicalización al relativizar no solo el espacio social sino también el tiempo social, siendo más pescisos, relativiza el espacio-tiempo social lo cual es una noción más compleja que el espacio y el tiempo social por separados. Para finalizar, he de realizar un último movimiento crítico al notar que la relación entre usuario y herramienta esta determinada por criterios puramente dinámicos y no de substrato físico, lo que implica la posibilidad de que una idea política pueda interpretarse como usuario y no como herramienta bajo una óptica histórica.

[1] Espacio-tiempo social.

Painting from Giacomo Balla.