Simon’s ant: complexity reflects environment, not subject—but…
We watch an ant make his [sic] laborious way across a wind- and wave-molded beach. He moves ahead, angles to the right to ease his climb up a steep dunelet, detours around a pebble, stops for a moment to exchange information with a compatriot. Thus he makes his weaving, halting way back to his home. … Viewed as a geometric figure, the ant’s path is irregular, complex, hard to describe. But its complexity is really a complexity in the surface of the beach, not a complexity in the ant. (1969/81, 63–64)
An ant [A man] viewed as a behaving system, is quite simple. The apparent complexity of its [his] behavior over time is largely a reflection of the complexity of the environment in which it [he] finds itself [himself]. (64-65)
This lesson can be taken in two rather different ways. On the one hand, one might heave a sigh of scientific relief: understanding people as behaving systems is going to be easier than we thought, because so much of the apparent complexity in their behavior is due to factors external to them, and hence external to our problem. On the other hand, one might see the problem itself as transformed: since the relevant complexity in the observed behavior depends on so much more than the behaving system itself, the investigation cannot be restricted to that system alone, but must extend to some larger structure of which it is only a fraction.
—Haugeland, J., 2000: Mind Embodied and Embedded, pp. 3-4. Chapter 9 in Haugeland, J., 2000: Having Thought: Essays in the Metaphysics of Mind. Harvard University Press. (Citing Simon, H., 1969/81: Embedding Artifice in Nature. Chapter in The Sciences of the Artificial, pp. 63-65.)
author:simon-herbert book:simon-sciences-of-the-artificial author:haugeland-john book:haugeland-having-thought paper:haugeland-mind-embodied-and-embedded snip:simon’s-ant complexity environment context communication simplicity system list:mind-body-world
