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augusti 28, 2003
Brian Arthur och Tai Chi Chuan
Apropå Brian Arthur hittade jag följande lilla sak i Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos av Mitchell Waldrop, sid 137.
Inför ett mycket viktigt föredrag som Brian Arthur skulle hålla berättas det:
So, as the day approached for the meeting's opening ... Arhur spent less and less time walking and talking with Stuart Kauffman, and more and more time polishing his presentation. He also remembers doing lots of tai chi. "Tai chi teaches you to absorb attacks and immediately come back with a counter hit," he says. "I thought I might need that. For keeping yourself grounded under fire, there's nothing better than practicing slow-motion martial arts. Because every time you punch you can imagine delivering something to an audience."
Jag sökte efter mer information om Brian Arthur och Tai Chi Chuan, men hittade inget. Däremot fanns en intervju med honom där han pratar om Taoism (som Tai Chi Chuan bygger på): Coming from Your Inner Self Interview with W. Brian Arthur, där han bland följande dialog utspelar sig:
COS: How do Buddhism and Taoism relate to economics?
W. Brian Arthur: Standard economics is very good for being shoehorned into an image of 19th-century physics. It was precise and accurate and static; it concerns itself with equilibrium. I began to realize that what really interested me was to see the economy not as static but as unfolding, and as patterns that were always unfolding.
I began to realize that if patterns were always unfolding it gives you two questions or problems. The economy is always unfolding, and at a more fine level business is always unfolding. John Seely Brown says if you leave your job for a couple of weeks and come back, the whole atmosphere is different. He’s exaggerating, but you know the game has changed. So let me try and contrast that with a different view. The standard way of looking at cognition and decision-making is very different from this other view I stumbled upon.
You were asking how that fits. If you ask Taoists how they see the world, the first thing they’ll tell you is that the world is changing. Everything is always changing, everything is always unfolding, and it is our job as human beings to allow things to unfold. You can give a little nudge here and a nudge there, influencing things at the proper time in your own way, but the world is not seen as a machine. The world is seen organically as a collection of unfolding patterns. When I worked on my economic increasing returns theories, before I studied Taoism, I gave a talk at the University of Hawaii in 1985 and a student from the Chinese mainland came up to me and said, "All that you say has been said before." And I said, "All right, give me a citation." He said, "It was all said by Lao Tzu." I said, "In that case, I’m honored."
Taoists see the world as patterns that are unfolding. I’ve gone back and read Sung-Dynasty Taoism and Neo-Confucianism. Cheng I, and Cheng Ming Tao, and various others writing and teaching in the late 1000s. It’s remarkably contemporary. They taught that all was in flux but that everything structured itself according to inner principles that governed it. Now we’d call those laws. They said principle is one, but its manifestations are many. In other words, things in this world emerge from elements that structure themselves. The mind, they said, is not a vessel to be filled with facts or ideas. It too emerges. The mind is an emergent phenomenon. All this they said a thousand years ago.
Posted by hakank at augusti 28, 2003 01:11 FM Posted to Komplexitet/emergens