Conference-Bound

I just received notice that my proposed paper "Interdisciplinarity and the Language of Emergent Phenomena" has been accepted by the Fund for Spontaneous Orders' conference "Orders and Borders" in new Hampshire. It's very exciting. Below is the abstract that got me in:

Interdisciplinarity and the Language of Emergent Phenomena

The discovery of emergent phenomena by and in various disciplines, from chemistry and physics to biology to psychology, sociology, and economics makes it clear that interdisciplinary scholars who are conversant in various fields, from the hard to the soft sciences and the humanities, are needed. How is the chemical reaction between a sodium and chlorine atom similar to economic interactions among people? What can animal social behaviors tell us about human social behaviors? Are there paradigms that can help us develop an interdisciplinary vocabulary to understand self-organizing emergent systems and their interactions in any discipline as well as across disciplines?

In my paper I will explore these issues with the goal of laying the groundwork to develop a common interdisciplinary language that will allow those studying self-organizing emergent systems in different disciplines to be able to communicate with each other. I will discuss the differences between bottom-up self-organization versus top-down design, selection versus contingency, complexification versus simplification, cybernetics versus control, rules versus laws, as well as information, feedback loops, dynamic tension, connections (as emphasized by sociology) , agents, and creativity. Further, I will show that the world consists of a series of nested and interacting emergent agents, which will help tie the disciplines together by showing their relations to each other. Finally, I will show that interdisciplinary studies is itself an emergent order with the disciplines as its instrumental organizations.

This may seem a great deal to cover; however, these issues are in fact so deeply interconnected that, if we are to understand emergent orders, they must not be too disentangled. Bottom-up self-organization results from information communication, which gives rise to rules and, thus, to internal cybernetic steering of the system through the world. Information becomes communicated in bipolar feedback loops as different entities in the system conflict and cooperate to create an increasingly complex system. All of these terms will be more fully defined and applied to the specific example of the relations among an emergent economic order, corporations, and individuals – whose power law distribution is conducive to self-organization.


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