Really great conversation today about Herbert Simon's 1962 paper "The Architecture of Complexity", thanks as always @RuthMalan for keeping us informed and updated! I could have gone on for hours probably.

This paper impressed on me because it talks about complex systems being hierarchical. And that reminds me a lot of Leonard Meyer's musical analysis methods published just six years before in 1956 - Emotion and Meaning in Music - that performs hierarchical analysis on music. Simon even mentions this in the paper, giving music as an example of hierarchical complexity. Coincidence? Maybe not, Meyer's work was well-known and influential at the time. No citation though.

Gestalt psychology is something Meyer was into and it shows a lot in Simon's thinking. The story of the watchmakers feels like a gestalt approach to complexity, one of them working faster by abstracting away the parts. Like Meyer does with his adoption of "iamb" and "trochee" for application to music, continuous abstraction pulls the lens out to the point that an entire symphony can be one large amphibrach pattern of expectation and release.

Anyway, coincidentally this recent $5 purchase arrived today!

#ComplexSystems #LeonardMeyer #HerbertSimon #Hierarchies #NearDecomposable #PapersInSystems