Brent Joseph - Self-organizing complexity in psychological systems

John P. Muller, Ph.D.

Some of us represented in this monograph met in seminars on complexity theory organized by the Forum on Psychiatry and the Humanities at the Washington School of Psychiatry. The forum provided an opportunity to examine a wide range of developments in a new paradigm of inquiry: chaos and catastrophe theory, self-organizing complexity, closure, and emergenceall examples of the broad discipline dealing with nonlinear dynamic systems. This emerging discipline shows many points of convergence with psychological theory and practice, emphasizing that history is irreversible and discontinuous, that small early interventions can have large and unexpected later effects, that each life trajectory is unique yet patterned, that measurement error is not random and cannot be justifiably distributed equally across experimental conditions, and that change is more likely to emerge under conditions of optimal turbulence. For these and other reasons, this volume will, we hope, be of interest to those looking for a contemporary perspective on the mind and the making of meaning.

Making meaningful links in experience is crucial to the development of closure, that process whereby a living organism as a center of movement achieves self-maintenance through recursive self-referential acts. Closure does not mean closing a system, but rather establishing a reliably variable internal context from which ones environment can be interpreted. Such interpretive activity is based on the development of syntactic autonomy, the ability to sustain an internal vehicle for classification of environmental conditions grounded in feedback from actions based on the classification (Rocha 2000, 210). In this way, a distinction between within and without and a boundary between self and other can be maintained.

In his overview of pertinent studies, Guastello (2001) provides a useful surveyof how nonlinear mical systems theory has impacted psychology in three broad areas: cognitive science, social organization, and clinical studies. He calls attention to the work of Hardy (1998) on semantic networks as promising, for their continual elaboration may be the most pervasive dimension of self-organizing complexity. I find the work of Charles Sanders Peirce (1992) especially relevant here. By proposing a triadic model for the generation of signs and meaning, Peirce establishes a cogent foundation for the spontaneous, unpredictable, and self-organizing aspects of interpretive action. Signs not only stand for their objects in some respect, but they also generate their meanings, which Peirce called their interpretants. Such interpretants are the effects produced by the sign on the receivers feelings, actions, and ideas. These effects, largely unconscious, become new signs, in turn producing their effects on both oneself and others. In this way, Peirce provides a useful and perhaps even testable model for the unconscious clustering of associations as well as for the emergent properties of therapeutic speech.

At the end of this monograph, readers will find a useful glossary of terms that bridges distinctions drawn by this evolving perspective and joins them to some terms we now take for granted as part of an evolutionary framework. This framework properly emphasizes that nothing evolves in isolation but rather in coevolution with the complexifying entities and their energy fields that constitute the nested systems of the universe. In this coevolutionary landscape, we can say, joining Julian Huxley, that in us evolution was at last becoming conscious of itself (1959, 20). This mutation is primarily an effect of language, for language has altered the development of the human brain (Deacon, 1997) and thereby the landscape of the Earth itself. Language has become the dominant systematizing force on our planet, and perhaps eventually in our solar system, and maybe beyond. The web of human culture not only differentiates and consolidates us but it also extends our sphere of influence. The Internet, exemplifying a self-organizing, complexifying system, signals the emergence of what Teilhard de Chardin (1955) called the noosphere, with its worldwide webbing and hyperpersonal organization. This is to say that many of the ideas favored by nonlinear dynamical systems theorists have their own history of emergence. For example, Julian Huxley writes of Teilhard de Chardins work as follows: