Ob,
Acts of ethical value do not effect one another like grains of sand, nor are their effects always as unpredictable as the sand pile metaphor suggests.
Besides the boldfaced apparent authority with which you state this, the truth is you have absolutely no idea if ethical acts function under similar Self-organized Criticality as do grains of sand. You have no idea if helping an old lady across the street will bring an avalanche of goodness, or not budge a grain, or even produce adverse effects, counter to its ethos, under such a model. The possibility of course does exist that the interpretive meanings behind behaviors may be organized under models of Criticality. Just because you are unaware of such really means very little. The concept behind such a model, and the pervasiveness of such threshold structures, is suggestive that the models we have taken for granted, are simply local models of a much larger process. The point is that such kinds of relating do organize and map things that commonsensically have been understood in other ways, or simply not understood at all.
Acts of ethical value do not effect one another like grains of sand, nor are their effects always as unpredictable as the sand pile metaphor suggests.
The model, if you read it carefully, does not suggest that the falling of a grain of sand is “always” unpredictably in the sense that your criticism implies. In fact if you took an individual grain of sand, calculated its mass and velocity, you could predict locally what its effect would be along the lines of classical physics. It would strike this grain at such and such an angle, impart such and such a force. This aspect of its effect would not be “unpredictable”. What would be unpredictable would be its effect upon the entire system. It is there that the local vs. global metaphor becomes illuminative, if even possibily instructive. That you foreclose the possibility of this illumination or instruction, is the mark of a closed mind.
and that the OP doesnt wish for it to be analysed as to its usefulness, merely its beauty/art/romance.
What is opaque to you is the “usefulness” of beauty/art/romance (and whatever other terms you would like to lump as “un-useful”). They are acts of Homo sapiens to order and confirm the universe, such as it may be conceived. Because these form a polarity for you, instead of understanding that all things fall under “use”, including ethical and ideational acts, you are confused by the application.
As Kauffman notes on the possible globality of such models,
“I suggest in the ensuing chapters how life may have formed as a natural consequence of physics and chemistry, how the molecular complexity of the biosphere burgeoned along a boundary between order and chaos, how the order of ontogeny may be natural, and how general laws about the edge of chaos may govern coevolving communities of species, of technologies, and even ideologies.”
As Noble Prize Economist Kenneth Arrow wrote,
“Stuart Kauffman gives us a rich and compelling picture of the new principle of self-organization in understanding the emergence of order in complex systems, whether life or society or the economy.”
Or as Noble Prize medical researcher Barry Blumberg wrote,
“Stuart Kauffman lucidly argues that, in addition to Darwinian selection, another force, the emergence of self-organized order from apparent chaos, determines the beautiful systems that make up the world and cosmos.”
Or as the Noble Prize physicist Philip Anderson wrote of Kauffman’s work,
“…there are few people in this world who ever ask the right questions of science, and they are the ones who affect its future most profoundly. Stuart Kauffman is one of these.â€
Or as you say, its too simple…and not very “useful”. Odd how Noble Laureates in multiple disciplines see relevance, where you see uselessness.
Dunamis
