Morphodynamic models of communication
نویسندگان
چکیده
Morphodynamics means 'the dynamics of form', and the purpose of morphody-namic theories is to describe and explain the birth, evolution, and death of form. The term 'form' is used differently in different sciences, but the notions of discontinuity and organisation seems to recur in most uses. A central question is: how can continuous changes of an amorphous substance, such as increasing the velocity of a water flow, impose discontinuous and organised boundaries onto the spatio-temporal dimensions of the substance? Physics, for example, is interested in describing patterns emerging in turbulent water (e.g. Taylor cells), whereas biology is concerned with the organic forms that are created during ontogenesis (creation of individual organisms) and phylogenesis (creation of species). In economics, business cycles has been treated from this point of view, and semiotics and linguistics study the genesis of the conceptual distinctions inherent in our language. These sciences have of course always described the finished forms, e.g. the morphology of an animal or the semantic fields of a language, but the new research agenda requires the sciences to also account for the process whereby the forms emerge. If, in addition, we do not assume a divine interference in nature, then we can further specify the morphogenetic problem as a problem of self-organisation: how was it possible for matter to arrange itself into molecules, for molecules to aggregate into cells, for cells to form biological systems, for biological systems to create social systems? New advances in mathematics have made this ambition look less hopeless than before. Fractal geometry has demonstrated how extremely simple rules can generate very complex shapes, such as the Mandelbrot set (Fig. 1.1). Similarly, chaos theory has demonstrated how simple processes, which under certain conditions are completely regular, can acquire a complex and unpredictable behaviour under
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