Complexity & the Philippine society (Part II)

The way people interact within a social system also affects other socio-economic systems such as financial and economic institutions, transport and telecommunication systems, urban systems, and even the social media. Socio-economic phenomena such as traffic jams, bullish and bearish markets, financial crashes, even poverty and corruption are all influenced by the way we interact, whether we are aware of it or not. Therefore, it is believed that understanding network connectivity and how system entities interact with one another takes us a step closer to addressing real-world socio-economic issues more effectively.

Unmistakably, Complexity Science is a very rich and exciting field; and it is fast growing. The spur in its development has also been largely due to the advancement of technology that has allowed us to extract rich data sets from real-world systems. With these terabytes upon terabytes of data within our reach, the real challenge is to restructure them in more manageable and tractable forms to unveil patterns, and then to describe the possible dynamics behind the patterns to eventually shed light on how these phenomena came about. These undertakings are non-trivial. As physicist and Nobel Prize winner Philip Anderson said in his 1972 Science paper titled “More is Different”: “… the whole becomes not merely more, but very different from the sum of its parts.” The very traditional science that we are all familiar with that uses a purely reductionist approach no longer suffices. New methods need to be developed by formulating new theories, and/or by integrating existing theories into each other. This is why understanding complexity in the most objective sense has become one of the holy grails of modern science.

With the complex system examples outlined in the first part of this article, it is not difficult to realize how important it is for experts from diverse fields to team up and work together, e.g. physicists and/or mathematicians working with anthropologists and/or sociologists. In fact, the founders of the Santa Fe Institute (SFI) whose shoulders we are now standing on have already imagined as early as 1984 that a single field of research cannot simply solve real-world issues on its own. The SFI is one of the pioneering institutions in Complexity; it has been described as “a sort of Justice League of renegade geeks, where teams of scientists from disparate fields study the Big Questions: Why financial markets crash. How terrorist cells form. Why viruses spread. How life ends.”

What I hope to achieve here is share with you this rich and exciting field where I currently belong. In all honesty, Complexity is still a topic that bemuses and overwhelms me every now and then; nevertheless, it sure does make for good conversations over coffee. On a more serious note, even though this short article is just the very tip of the tip of the humongous iceberg that is Complexity, I hope that somehow a part of you was sparked to read and learn more about Complexity Science. Complexity is a very open and engaging field. This is why I am quite hopeful that in the near future, the scientists and social scientists of our nation would collaborate and reduce the gap between the so-called “hard” and “soft” sciences. This is necessary for us to be able to tackle, in a more quantitative, objective, and effectual manner, the more urgent socio-economic issues that plague our nation; so we could push for more grounded and well thought out policies, taking advantage of what we know about Complexity.

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Erika Fille Legara, Ph.D. is currently doing a post-doctoral stint at the Institute of High Performance Computing under the Cross-Disciplinary Data-Intensive Analytics group in Singapore. She finished her Ph.D. in Physics at the National Institute of Physics in UP Diliman under the mentorship of UPD Chancellor Caesar Saloma and Associate Prof. Christopher Monterola. She graduated as the 2011 Most Outstanding Graduate Student of the UPD College of Science; at the same time, she was presented with the Edgardo Gomez Excellence in Dissertation Award. In June 2010, she was admitted to Santa Fe Institute’s highly competitive Complex Systems Summer School as a scholar. Prior to her post-doctoral stint, she was an assistant professor at the NIP-UPD. She may be contacted via her Gmail account etlegara.