Chaos Theory was developed by exploring dynamical systems in computers. Its worthwhile considering this idea of a system itself in our exploration of deciding better.
Systems theory is an approach to studying a collection of parts by considering them as a whole. Each part has its role to play and some how interacts with other parts of the system. Consideration of systems is vital to understand where uncertainty comes from in our world or in simple clockwork universes like computer programs.
There’s is a much stronger tradition in empirical science of reductionism, understanding the functioning of a system by taking it apart to study its component pieces. The contribution of the part is considered by examining the interaction of that part with other parts of the system. If the functioning of those parts is understood, an overall picture of the system is built up. For example, the biochemical processes of a cell can be understood by analyzing the metabolites and how they are processed by cellular enzymes.
Reductionism has proven an extraordinarily powerful way to understand the world. For the most part, when an enzyme is blocked in a cell, its product disappears and its precursor builds up exactly as expected. You don’t need to know much about the function of the metabolites or the habitat and behavior of the animal. The function of these components is likely to be the same in locust, rat, cat and man.
A powerful reductionist approach is to study simple systems. The study of memory in the brain of humans or even rats remains much too complicated to explain as a system. It was possible to trace the system to particular brain areas like the hippocampus by studying brain injury in man and experimental lesions in rats. But after establishing that a rat without its hippocampal formations can’t remember how to rerun a maze, how can you figure out the circuitry within the hippocampus that stores that memory? And even if you do, how do you trace that function in the full functioning of a rat in a maze with its visual input and motor output?
Eric Kandel took the approach of finding a much simpler system to study memory, choosing the sea slug Aplysia as an experimental model. This classic reductionist approach provided important insights into how connections between neurons are changed by activity and eventually many of the same mechanisms were found to be operating in the rat brain. Eventually manipulation of these mechanisms in rats demonstrated that they were critical for memory formation.
Reductionism often works well in science. It shows that a component or mechanism in one system serves a similar purpose in another system even though these systems may be too complex themselves to understand fully. This can serve as valuable information if it turns out that manipulation of this one particular component has a consistent effect on the functioning of the overall system.
