Coping with Uncertainty: Insights from the New Sciences of Chaos, Self-Organization, and Complexity

Coping with Uncertainty: Insights from the New Sciences of Chaos, Self-Organization, and Complexity, by Uri Merry.

The ground hypothesis of this book is that the world becomes more complex and therefore more uncertain. Uri Merry takes the perspective of the new sciences of chaos, self-organization, complexity to understand the impact on individuals and social organizations (families, societies, cities, nations, institutions).

Chaos is the time of transition between orders (transition period). It is the irregular, uncertain, discontinuous aspect of change within the confines of a patterned whole. Chaos creates stress in human life; when too many uncertainties engult a person, he or she may become stressed. The uncertain and unpredictable forms of change are in contrast to the regular and predictable ways people expect and believe that most things around them do change. People build organizations as a line of defense against the uncertainty and the chaotic elements of the world. It allows them to define regularity, predictability, routines, norms, rules and roles to reach stability and defense against uncertainty. Nevertheless, a mixture of order and chaos is the natural form of all living things. Indeed, uncertainty, unpredictability, complexity and chaos are a natural legitimate necessary, inescapable aspect of reality and will never go away.

Complex behaviors may emerge from a number of basic rules controlling part of the system. That behaviors is not predictable from knowledge of the individual elements. But it can be discovered by studying how the elements interact and how the system is and changes throughout time. The features distinguishing complext systems (p. 59) are: non-reducibility, emergent behavior, unpredictability and regularity.

The more complex a system becomes, the greater it needs to become aware of and devote communication information resources, and interaction skills to maintain its internal processes. Prigogine and Stengers describe this as a competition between communication and fluctuations. “There is competition between stabilization though communication and instability through fluctuations. The outcome of that competition determines the threshold of stability“. (p. 65) Moreover, increase connectedness leads to complexity. That is increased interdependence intensifies uncertainty if the quality of the relationships does not match the degree of interdependence. Eventually, the more complex, the more likely to break.

P. 81-82 contain a few line on technology as an intensifier of uncertainty in the world. Ironically, we develop technologies to regain control (stability), while technology accelerates changes and therefore feeds the complexity spiral.

Individuals, organizations, and societies react to uncertainty engendered by basic change in a number of ways (p. 123):

• Repeating former behavior over and over again
• Varying behavior slightly and predictably
• Adapting new behaviors
• Transiting through a choatic crisis
• Transforming to a new more complex mode of functioning

Most people will not make a deeper kind of change if they can get by with a lighter change. They will first tend to try out behavior they are user to and create variations if circumstances demand it.

Accepting Uncertainty (p. 143)
The ability to accept uncertainty and tolerate ambiguity might become an essential aspect of a personality that has to deal with an unpredictable environment. Accepting uncertainty includes the ability to be in confusion and to accept that confusion as a necessary element in the process of interacting with a nonlinear world, a world suffused with ambiguity. Ambiguity being uncertainty of meaning.

Boundaries are not clear and objects can be viewd and understood from multiple viewpoints wihtout one canceling the other out. Accepting uncertainty necessitates an ability to live with ambivalence such as having both negative and positive sentiments with regard to the same object. Ambivalence is uncertainty of value.

An uncertain, unpredictable environment is one to which a person must constantly find a fit.

Awareness (p. 151)
An environment of turbulence and discontinuous change may necessitate functioning at a higher level of awareness. Humans may need to accustom themselves to everyday functioning at a level of consciousness that is suited to an uncertain environment. This would necessitate their being able to maintain a state of consciousness of being fully aware of what they are engaged in within the environment together with a hold on their self as the focal point from which to decide in what to engage. Being fully aware entails maintaining consciousness focus awaringly in two directions simultaneously: on what one is engaged in with the environment and on the self that is observing the activity.

P. 173 has a few words on coevolution as well as competition and cooperation.

Designing and Developing Systems (p. 192)
Evolutionary system design attempts to translate the vision into policies and activities that advance human systems closer to their vision. In system design, pieces cannot be broken off to be dealt with separately. The quality of the part is dependent on its relationship to the whole. The design needs to focus on interactions and interrelations of all the components of the system. The system must be designed as a whole. While there will be differences, there may be a number of guidelines that can assist those attempting to create a design and develop it:

• Balancing at the edge of chaos
• Creating and identity of a learning system
• Taking a coherent part in the network of ecological processes. Encouraging variety and diversity
• Learning to manage chaos
• Coevolvement of the outer and the inner world.

Relation to my thesis: ubiquitous computing is about complexity, unpredictability, stability, consistency, robustness, fluctuancy, vulnerability, resilience, irregularity, ambiguity, uncertaitny, ambivalence, and confusion. All these words have been used in this books and are related to the problem I would like to solve. I should probably find a clear definition of each of these terms and link them to my current topology of spatial uncertainty. Ubiquitous computing is also challenged by the nonlinear and interdependent human and social systems. The world has inherent irregularity (nonlinear world). System designer must accept uncertainty in an unpredictable environment. The author mention the necessity of awareness of complexity and explained it as “stability through communication”. It stays very abstract, but I surely could inspire from it. Also inspiring are the categories of reaction to uncertainty engerered by basic change.

On a more philosophical level, I could use the “technology as an intensifier of uncertainty” as introduction to my work. Somehow play with the irony to we develop technology for the opposite purpose. It has some similarities with what Satyanarayanan (2003) was writting in his “Coping with Uncertainty“. That is that digital computing allowed us to eliminate uncertainty with finite state representation and transformation. And now ironic that today’s all-digital world, uncertainty reappears as a major concern at a higher level of representation.