Don Mikulecky replies:
Bruce Edmonds wrote:
> Don:
> > It does?????????Bruce: they were going to substitute me in your place at the
> > upcoming New England Complexity Conference. I told them it would be a bad
> > idea since we so seldom agree.
>
> Yes, I could not go because of the extremely late notice of what kind of
> paper I was to give (which meant I could not get funding until too
> late).
>
> They are still going to use the title of what would have been my paper
> as the title of a session: "Modelling Modelling", which is a topic I am
> very interested in. I was going to suggest some ideas inspired by Rosen
> (that a meaningful classification of complex systems could be made on
> the basis of category theory diagrams of the modelling relations
> involved, in particular that many complex systems do modelling
> themselves, so in modelling them one has to be involved in modelling
> modelling). Of course, I would also have said many un-Rosen like things
> as well (like that it makes sense in this area to model complexity as
> the search cost for a 'suitable' model, of course here complexity in
> your sense would correspond to an infinite cost, i.e. impossibility).
Relational models are NOT impossible and are quite cheap!Well, the whole process
has turned out to be interesting. I was sent an invitation to give a 2 and 1/2
hour pedagogical talk on Sunday, devoted to my interpretation of Rosen and
Kampis. Then I was called by the organizer and he thought your vacant slot
would
be more appropriate. (This reduced my time to 1/2 hour and made a pedagogical
talk both impossible and to look like a research paper, so I adamantly refused.
The comprimise is that I still give a pedagogical talk for 2 and 1/2 hours, but
it
won't be on the program. At least your approach doesn't embarrass them!
>
>
> I don't think you would have liked it, the whole pseudo-field of
> "complex systems" is full of in-all-but-name reductionists and MUCH
> confusion (as you yourself have pointed out).
>
> Regards.
>
> ---------------------------------------------------
> Bruce Edmonds,
> Centre for Policy Modelling,
> Manchester Metropolitan University, Aytoun Bldg.,
> Aytoun St., Manchester, M1 3GH. UK.
> Tel: +44 161 247 6479 Fax: +44 161 247 6802
> http://bruce.edmonds.name
Best regards,
Don Mikulecky
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