[PCE and Social Science] - A New Kind of Science: The NKS Forum

A New Kind of Science: The NKS Forum

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PCE and Social Science

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Posted by: Kevin Rocci


I am a politics and film major at UCSC and thus am a layperson concerning most of Wolfram's book and science in general.

But, I have a fascination with science and have tried to recommend the book to as many science students as I can come in contact with. I have talked to those who have read it at great length, and I find the NKS book an incredible work.

The NKS book has caught a lot of people's attention, and upset a fair amount of them. They find it hard to accept everything that it says, especially concerning mathematics. Their is a buzz around the book and it is a great thing to watch. A lot of people are eating it up and some are spitting it out.

Ultimately, I agree with Wolfram concerning the principle of computational equivalence. I have incorporated it into a political theory essay that I just finished concerning the evolution of science and human progress as inherently connected.

I do not know if it was appropriate, but I applied the idea to social systems. Can this be done? Can we talk about rules dictating social systems? Can we extend it to explain human actions? And if so, how would we account for the process of learning and its effects on the laws? Finally, is it possible ever to transcend those laws?


Posted by: Enexseenge

It would be interesting to see something like that...

But when I consider the level of detail which NKS applications work at now in comparison to an attempt to relate those applications in modeling a social system ( and a the system of a human individual as it appears you are implying ), then I see that the input from the actual system would have to be identified with constructs which might not contain all the necessary components which would give rise to an actual description of a "law" of how the system works, within the NKS approach.

I think that in order to use NKS approach to model such a system like you speak of you would need a very complex structure that contained what we could now consider unthinkable relations, you are trying to relate a human social construct as well as the functionality of an individuals learning process at the same time, and their actions to boot...

I don’t think we are at the level of detail where we can make "whole systems" descriptions which relate such new fields of discovery, like the learning process, and human actions..
I mean, how would you know you have identified something when your already not sure what that something is except within a method of definition that is not the system it self, but a intellectual comparison weaved into object relation systems... When you begin to try to relate things in new ways you must be quick!

NKS is an exciting thing.. Emergent patterns in information transfer functions in nature.. And then trying to replicate that pattern within some rules of a simple program…

Are we going to make a computer program that grows a flower, from nothing more then a set of initial conditions, and from that growing flower we can look into any part we care to observe and find more relations, moving from the shape of the plant, to the functioning of the cells, to the interactions of the molecules, all in relation...

Would that be the end result of all these fruitings? to make a computer that could describe an actual physical system by replicating that system within it's hardware?


Posted by: Jesse Nochella

Kevin,

Firstly, I think it's fair to say that NKS already claims that it's all NKS, from the start. So any new areas of application are a good thing, because it's a pretty big claim to try and support.

That said, consider this: we're some people all trying to get along or what not and we want to have some system to facilitate us in doing some of these things e.g. politics or whatever.

The Big Claim, that is, the PCE, says that whatever system we can *possibly* come up with has got to be no more complex than any other system we could come up with for a number of things, or any system in nature, or any system at all.

We could be using some of the same organizing principles as are encoded in our DNA somewhere for something, or part of the same program that grows some plant, or makes some slug slug across the ground, or some bacteria multiply (yikes!), or some cellular automaton or some other simple program evolve what it evolves. The crucial insight being that each of these must be in some way like each other for the simple reason that the appear complex, and that any one of them are just as easy to understand as any other.

So as we may view the evolution of a political or simply social system, our ways of talking about it are going to be the same ones as with the simple programs, and especially the ones that behave in more or less the same way. At least that's what the claim implies.

I wonder if it would look like anything familiar.


Posted by: Richard J. Gaylord

social science is an oxymoron. see lyrics to tom lehrer's "sociology song"




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