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some ways by which emerging complexity might come to be organized. Indeed,
there is a rapidly developing industry attempting to analyze the dynamics of
such collectivities, and it goes by the name, 'agent based modelling' (ABM).
True, the agents of ABM have rather less agency than I had in mind, but it is
definitely a start, and I am fully persuaded that such models can help us think
about certain features of ecosystems, and even about certain aspects of human
societies. But what it will not help us think about is the emergence of the agency
that appears here simply as posited. Therefore I want to now turn to the question
of where it could have come from.
This question of course brings us back to the problem for which the term
self-organization was originally introduced, namely, how are we to make sense
of such peculiar properties of organisms as agency, function, or purpose - prop-
erties that, even now, continue to mark organisms (even if not machines) apart
from thunderstorms - indeed, from all the emergent phenomena of nonlinear
dynamical systems? For the fact remains that agency, function, and purpose are
all conspicuously absent from the kinds of systems with which physics deals,
and no one has succeeded in offering an account of how they might emerge from
the dynamics of effectively homogeneous systems of simple elements, however,
complex the dynamics of their interaction might be. Rather, they seem to require
an order of complexity that goes beyond that which spontaneously emerges from
complex interactions - a form of complexity that Weaver, Herbert Simon, and
now John Mattick and John Doyle have dubbed organized complexity.
For Weaver, the domain of problems characterized by organized complexity -
ranging from 'What makes an evening primrose open when it does?' to 'On
what does the price of wheat depend?' - lay in sharp contrast to the problems
of statistical mechanics that made up the domain of disorganized complexity.
For Simon, organized complexity was complexity with an architecture, and in
particular the architecture of hierarchical composition (or modularity) whereby
a system 'is composed of interrelated subsystems, each of the latter being in
turn hierarchic in structure until we reach some lowest level of elementary
subsystem' (p. 184). For Mattick, the organization of complexity is mandated
by the meaninglessness of the structures generated by sheer combinatorics of
complex interactions: '[B]oth development and evolution,' he writes, 'have to
navigate a course through these possibilities to find those that are sensible and
competitive.' (2004, p. 317). Yet none of these authors quite grapple with the
question of just what kind of organization would warrant the attribution of the
properties of agency or function, would turn a structure or pattern into a self.
The problem of function seems like a good place to start. Over the last
decade or so, something of a consensus has emerged among philosophers of
science about how to treat this problem. Proper function, as first argued by
Ruth Millikan and as now widely asserted, should be understood solely in the
context of natural selection, i.e., the function of X is that 'which caused the
