In this context, one of the main mechanisms for achieving coordinated behavior is the exercise of control by one individual over the behavior of others. Even more specifically, ask how a student from one part of the world can affect another student from another part of the world when both meet in Boston. However, by focusing on an idealized control hierarchy it is possible to understand the nature of this structure. Notable exceptions include water flowing in a stream or boiling in a pot, and the atmospheric dynamics of weather.
There is no universal agreement about what makes us humans so unique, but there is a broad consensus that the difference has something to do with language.
Even constructing a model based upon social interactions is too difficult. Then, many individuals perform the large-scale behaviors coherently. It should be acknowledged that both philosophies were deeper than their caricatures would suggest. The use of new energy sources and automation enabled larger scale behavior in and of itself. Social policy questions must be dealt with by the system, by the people involved, as direct challenges to the system.It is also possible to make a connection to internal structural changes that are taking place in social and economic systems. Instead of progressive simplification from an individual to larger and larger collections of individuals, we have the opposite, an increasing complexity that is tied to an increasing complexity of the demands of the environment. Indeed, the behavior of an individual need not be known to the controller. Humans use words as symbols, which like compressed files on a computer contain huge amounts of information. From military acts to humanitarian aid global response has taken the place of local interactions. To understand this more fully, consider the history of civilization and the complexity of environmental demands upon each civilization and the individuals that comprise it. And collective learning mattered because humans, like all living organisms, use information about the surroundings to generate the energy and resources they need to survive. In this context it is important to recognize that the complexity of a system's behavior is fundamentally related to the complexity of challenges that it can effectively overcome. Markets are a distinct type of system that also results in an emergent collective behavior based upon the independent actions of many individuals. This, in turn, enabled higher complexity behaviors of human systems because the amplification of the behavior to a larger scale can be accomplished by the use of energy rather than by task repetition.Thus, fixing the material composition and the energy of the system, there are various ways the system can be organized. Recognizing the scale of necessary response should be an important contribution to our ability to address both internal and external challenges.From earliest recorded history until the fall of the Roman empire, empires replaced various smaller kingdoms that had developed during a process of consolidation of yet smaller associations of human beings. The system behavior at a small scale requires specifying what each of the parts is doing. Things changed fast from 10,000 years ago, after the last Ice Age, when humans started to farm. Or, watch how I pull termites out of this mound. A military force, a corporation, or a country have behaviors on various scales. These lateral controls are similar to the conceptual networks that are used to model the interactions between neurons in the brain. In its most basic form, this theory simply counts the number of independent behaviors as a measure of the complexity of a system. This energy flow from high to low temperature, combined with physical properties of the earth, enables all of the complex patterns of weather and of biological and social life on earth. This suggests that the probability of successful survival of an organism is a measure of the relative complexity of the environmental demands to the complexity of the organism. It is only because many of them perform this action together that makes them relevant to human health.The interdependence of human civilization on a global scale is manifest in the many ways that local actions in one part of the world affect global behaviors.
The history of civilization can be characterized through the progressive (though non-monotonic) appearance of collective behaviors of larger groups of human beings of greater complexity. Consider the behavior of microorganisms that cause diseases. tags: complexity, human-systems, philosophy. Human Complexity. It was assumed that communism represented an ideology of the collective while democracy represented an ideology of the individual. Therefore, one would be unwise to argue, on the basis of general considerations, matters of social policy. So that a lot of information can be passed from brain to brain. The complexity of collective behaviors does explain the difficulties experienced by control hierarchies, since controlling these behaviors is the role of central control.The central point is: When the independence of the components is reduced, scale of behavior is increased.