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G. Hanappi:
"Perplexing Complexity. Human Modelling and Primacy of the Group as Essence of Complexity";
Review of Evolutionary Political Economy, 1 (2020), 3; 397 - 417.

This paper describes the emergence of complexity as duplicated evolutionary process.
The first procedural source of complexity is the quantum jump of the evolution of the
human species when it started to maintain certain brain-internal models of its environment. The second-parallel-procedural origin is the evolution of a communication
structure, a language, with which an already existing group of primates could frame
their internal models. In contrast to definitions of complexity which use the concept in
the context of theoretical physics, this approach reveals some perplexing properties of
model building for a special subject of investigation, namely the human species. All
adequate models of political economy (economics is just the sub-discipline that freezes
political dynamics) have to be complex. Since today´s mainstream economic theory
lends its formal apparatus from the mathematics of Newtonian physics, it misses the
most essential features characterizing human social dynamics, i.e. its complexity. On
the other hand, a formal definition of complexity by mathematicians, e.g. the one
provided by Princeton Companion to Mathematics, sometimes falls short of the
inspirations gained by closely observing biological systems. What is needed thus is
transdisciplinary research. The first part of the paper takes Erwin Schrödinger´s book
`What is Life?´ as a starting point for this issue. In this part, several-sometimes highly
speculative-suggestions on how to proceed are presented. The following second part
then identifies two central obstacles that turn out to be overcome: First, scientific
research in this field always has to come up with a synthesis that states what is essential.
A wealth of singular islands of knowledge isolated in their domains is unsatisfactory.
Second, the modelling of political economy dynamics as a complex system has to be
rooted in an understanding of how living systems in their deepest structure work. The daring hypothesis put forward is that such an understanding can be enabled by letting
quantum theoretic reasoning revolutionize the formal language of the social sciences.

Complexity . Modelling . Primacy

http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s43253-020-00028-x