POST HOC, ERGO PROPTER HOC

POST HOC, ERGO PROPTER HOC

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© February 25, 2010

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Before you become exercised about the title of this piece, please allow me to explain. To my request for input as to how I could engage people in considering THE FISHER PARADAIGM©™®, a writer responded:

The only problem with the Fisher Paradigm is its name:

1. 80% of people don't have a clue what paradigm means so it seems inaccessible.

2. To those who know what it means, don't have a clue who you are and may wonder why you are proclaiming something you present as a paradigm. They may think you are putting yourself in the same category as Einstein or Darwin, Kepler or pick your famous theorist.

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I appreciated his response, and new only too well he was correct, as he was the only one that responded.

Before I go on, having somewhat of a weakness for Latin expressions, perhaps a holdover from my days as a Roman Catholic altar boy, the Latin expression has to do with the fallacy argument that insists that something is the effect of a certain cause whereas no such connection may actually exist.

It is the footprint of our explanatory society that always understands why something happens after the fact. “Post hoc, ergo propter hoc” translates as “after this, therefore, because of it.” But that is not necessarily so.

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COMPLEXITY AND COLLAPSE

Niall Ferguson of Harvard has a thoughtful piece in the current issue of Foreign Affairs (March/April 2010) that deals with “Decline and Fall: When the American Empire Goes, It Is Likely To Go Quickly.”

Now Ferguson is an economist not a polemicist. He is not waving a red flag, but pointing out the flaw in explanatory models that have been penciled through our history suggesting that decline is a life cycle phenomenon and not an unforeseen abrupt change.

I've mentioned the works of William L. Livingston before on these pages with regard to complexity. Check him out and his books on www.amazon.com.

Ferguson, after briefly covering all of the best known cyclic theories, suggests that history is not cyclical and slow moving but arrhythmic, at times almost stationary, but also capable of accelerating suddenly. He asks the question: “What if collapse does not arrive over a number of centuries but comes suddenly like a thief in the night?”

Read the article, which should be available at your public library if you do not subscribe to the periodical.

COMPLEXITY AND THE FISHER PARADIGM©™®

Ferguson sees the world, as does Livingston in terms of complex systems with a large number of interacting components that are asymmetrically organized. He uses the analogy of the termite hill, which operates somewhere between order and disorder and on the edge of chaos. To the observer, the termite hill seems to be operating quite stably and even seems to be in equilibrium, but it is in fact constantly adapting, that is, until the complex system “goes critical,” and collapses. A single grain of sand could be the trigger to set off the transition from a benign equilibrium to a crisis.

Now, what this has to do with my paradigm is this:

The story line on all our models is deterministic our minds are not. These models do not represent unanticipated perturbations, and therefore are unlikely to respond appropriately to the breakdown of complex systems.

Our minds are complex systems with a capacity for spontaneous organization. One neuroscientist calls our brains “an enchanted loom.”

When confronted with conflict, challenge, danger, or unanticipated discord, the interaction of dispersed agents of the brain come into play. There is no central control, no cause and effect analysis, no linear interpretation of the situation, but multiple levels of activity gearing up for a spontaneous response.

Virtually all research in social and economic endeavors is with trend analysis, sampling and general deterministic theories from these data.

Yet complex systems, either created by man, or man as a complex system, are wholly nondeterministic, meaning it is impossible to predict how a system or a person will respond when the assumed stability is confronted with a maladaptive challenge.

This was the case I describe in my paradigm when I was walking in Washington, D.C. at 2 o’clock in the morning and was confronted by three black youths.

When a complex system is disrupted from its routine, it is nearly impossible to anticipate what the response will be, or what the correct response should be. Intuition in the personal sense takes over.

There is another term taken out of physics that applies here. It is “self-organized criticality.” We are always teetering on the verge of breakdown, no matter if it is a physical or personal system, but we have this survival mechanism in our brain that allows course corrections and adaptation when disruptions occur.

A FINAL NOTE

Ferguson points out, after carefully outlining his thesis that economic collapse is still unlikely to occur no matter how much the data suggest it is impossible to avoid if people maintain their confidence in the system.

It is panic that kills, that destroys and reduces the complex system to ash. It is why civilizations have disappeared, empires have been extinguished and people have experienced nervous collapse.

We are complex self-organized self-adaptive systems that have life and health challenges every day. And no, I am not comparing myself to Darwin, Einstein or Kepler with my paradigm, but celebrating the incredible capacity of the human mind to heal itself as well as thwart danger.

If we believe, if we have faith, if we remain positive, if we wear a smile on our face no matter what, and can say and mean it:

“What a beautiful day. Today is the first day of the rest of my life,” the fractal geometry of all those molecules and neurons will produce “annus mirabilis,” a Latin expression that means "an astonishing year."

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