"The situation which occurs in a system that may be treated as deterministic at the higher levels (or at the level of the whole itself) but where the lower-order components of the system may not admit to determinacy" (adapted from J SUTHERLAND, 1973, p.42).
SUTHERLAND comments: "… this may mean that the system itself is capable of prediction (or amenable to some sort of finite-state system analysis technique) even though we cannot treat the parts or lower-order components as deterministic". This reminds of Jvon NEUMANN's reliable systems made from unreliable components.
At the time SUTHERLAND offered his definition (1973), research on chaos had just made a start. It is now becoming clear that microlevel relative indeterminacy is the result of the multiplicity of independent local causes within the system. This is the background reason why, as stated by the same author (in relation to human systems): "… when systems under treatment begin to depart from the most simple kind of mechanisms, both our mathematics and our logic (even coupled with a large computer) fail to be able to manage the interactions and componential permutations of behavior potentially availabe" (p.45).
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To cite this page, please use the following information:
Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science (2020). Title of the entry. In Charles François (Ed.), International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics (2). Retrieved from www.systemspedia.org/[full/url]
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