Re:My take on the study from MIT that predicts “societal col...
by chestertn on Friday July 16, 2021 @12:12AM
(#27852985)
I think that statement about "complex systems" being an alternative paradigm to reductionism is a bit unfortunate (articles in Wikipedia have varying quality). I believe they refer to emergence, a concept which they include in "complex systems", because reductionism in its simplest form means that the whole is composed by the parts and emergence says that there are phenomena which emerge from the combination of individual parts and distinct to these. But these two concepts are not orthogonal, see:
https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/4615/whats-th...
The World3 model of the MIT study is just a set of 149 differential-algebraic equations [1]. The output of the model (population, industrial output, etc.) is mathematically a composition of simpler parts. They are saying that the earth is a very complex system but these four or five variables can be explained by these bunch of equations that represent basic processes. To me, that is reductionism.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S147466701...
A systems theory approach is an opposite of a reductionist approach. From Wikipedia ( https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Complex_system ) :
> The study of complex systems regards collective, or system-wide, behaviors as the fundamental object of study; for this reason, complex systems can be understood as an alternative paradigm to reductionism, which attempts to explain systems in terms of their constituent parts and the individual interactions between them.