(highlight:: Jazz as a Complex System
Summary:
In a live improvised jazz performance, you get these beautiful sounds that completely unexpected. In a way, to my mind, it's a prototypical example of emergence. There's incredible capacity for complex systems to do things at the level of the system That you would never expect if you just break it apart into individual components.
Transcript:
Speaker 1
Complex systems have a number of features in common. One is that you often have lots of parts working together, and somehow the whole, the collective is doing something that you'd predict from just looking at what the individual parts Are doing. And I think that is really illustrated perfectly in jazz, right? Where you have all these individual players, different instruments coming together, perhaps with a plan for what they're going to play, perhaps with no plan at all, and you combine Them together and you get, well, I was going to say magic, but it's not magic, right? But sometimes it feels like magic, right? If you're at a live improvised jazz performance, you get these beautiful sounds that completely unexpected. In a way, that's, you know, to my mind, a prototypical example of emergence. There's incredible capacity for complex systems to do things at the level of the system that you would never expect if you just break it apart into the individual components. And the other cool thing about jazz, I think, makes it so, you know, paradigmatic of complex systems research, is this wonderful tension between stability and transformation. So in an improvised jazz performance, in some cases, completely improvised, no score at all, you'll have long periods of stasis, of stability, of a similar sound being explored in The same way that you have, you know, economies that are sort of chugging along, nothing's changing, or a person's religious convictions can be highly stable. And then, in the last episode, you get these tipping points, right? All of a sudden you flip over from a bull market to a complete economic collapse, or from one devout faith to another one, or in jazz from one sound that already feels just magical, and You see in real time this reorganization of how the players are relating to each other, and they start playing something new. And so that capacity for a complex system, on one hand, to be beautifully stable and resilient, and on the other hand, to radically transform itself almost on a dime. I think that's what makes jazz such a great example of a lot of these wonderful themes that we see in complex systems research,)
- Time 0:02:16
-

(highlight:: Balls & Bowls: The Relationsip between a Systems Resilience and its Behavioral Variability
Summary:
A resilient state is akin to a ball in a deep cup, where if the ball is knocked, it quickly rolls back to the bottom.
In contrast, a less resilient state is like a ball on a flat plate, where if the ball is knocked, it rolls back slowly. As a result, a system with lower resilience will exhibit more variability compared to a highly resilient system.
Leading up to critical transitions, a system that used to be highly resilient gradually becomes less so, resulting in increased variability.
Transcript:
Speaker 1
As we talked about in the last episode, we're talking about states and tipping points. One image to have in mind for a state is a ball and a cup. And a really resilient state is one where that cup is really, really deep, so that if you knock the ball, which represents the state of the system, it really, really quickly rolls back To the bottom. But if you go from a deep cup to a flat plate, if you knock that ball, it might roll back if you don't sort of knock it completely off the plate, but it's going to roll back slowly. So one consequence of that is that when a system is lower in resilience, the ball is just going to wiggle around more than in that really, really steep ball. So imagine, you know, a ball in the bottom, maybe you have a little fan, you're blowing on it. It's not really moving far because the ball's keeping it right in the bottom versus a plate. You ever put a marble on a plate and you just knock it a bit, all of a sudden it's wandering all over. So that's variability in the system. And so in a resilient system, you actually have lower variability than in a less resilient system. So our idea is that in the lead up to these critical transitions, what you have is a system that used to be really resilient. These jazz musicians were really locked into a particular sound and gradually that basin, that ball had just become less deep.)
- Time 0:20:35
- snipdpost-queue,

(highlight:: Creativity in Complex Systems: Individual vs Collective
Summary:
In jazz, you do get that right, your players get bored with what's happening. And so on an individual level, they're creatively trying to introduce new components and motifs. But there's something special that happens at the level of the entire system where you put them all together. So for me, I think this really points to the power of complex systems to almost destabilize our received visions of what creativity even is.
Transcript:
Speaker 2
What creativity got to do with all of this?
Speaker 1
Yeah, I mean, that's sort of the mystery that's left for me having juxtaposed ecosystems with jazz musician, because in an ecosystem, say that switches from one state to another, or In an economy that switches from one to another, in the ecosystem, you don't have individual fish swimming around thinking like, kind of bored with this regime. Like, it'd be really fun to like, let's try out that you know that one where all the fish die off and just algae is kind of, yeah, let's go for that. In jazz, you do get that right, your players get bored with what's happening. They want to try something new. And so on an individual level, they're creatively trying to introduce new components, new motifs, new little rhythmic variations. So you have creativity at that level of the individual. But then, of course, there's something special that happens at the level of the entire system where you put them all together and there's some sort of collective hive mind creativity That's happening at the level of the entire ensemble, the entire quartet. And so this, for me, raises the question of, where do we locate creativity within that kind of complex system where you have both individual creative people and this sort of aligns with The romantic myth of the creative, right, of the strong individual mind that sort of goes against society to present a new way of thinking about the world. But then you also have creativity in the collective. So you have this collective creativity of the entire ensemble. So for me, I think this really points to the power of complex systems to almost destabilize our received visions of what creativity even is.)
- Time 0:24:29
-