Emergent Time and Simulations: Some Significant Issues
Policy development and implementation is more like a biological
process than it is like a rock. Whereas for Descartes rational thought
as Cartesian space provided the most reliable means of knowing, recalcitrant
public policy problems like economic development and growth (analogues to
the biological problems of generation and development) to say nothing social
justice, precipitated a reaction against this approach from practitioners.
The primacy of practice, of experiences and of action, trumped that of the
corporeal eye of the physical scientist. Properly timed direct action
and participation as continuously experienced process (kronos) also created
a suspicion of early mathematical models that, often lacking the "biological"
like play of politics, produced only imagined results. It was not a question
of making a thing visible that had not been
seen before; survey research and other instruments permitted static slices
of time. It was the question of making a process visible by seeing
continuous change in space-time.
This paper builds on earlier work proposing that public
policy development and implementation is best understood as emergent properties
of a "time-ecology" and that ABM simulations are probably one of the
key methods for investigating it. But, in order for it to be successful,
temporal dynamics˜agent time, nootemporal time, clock time˜must be fully
incorporated in the simulation so that explanations of visualized temporal
processes can be understood and explained. This paper opens this door
a little further by briefly suggesting that current temporal concepts used
in simulations are empoverished. Time is not a background stage upon
which the computer clock ticks out coordinated movements much like the eternal
background space-time of Newton. Time is background independent, meaning
that time is a property of relationship, of processes of flows in space.
Bickhard‚s and Campbell‚s work on process metaphysics, and the concepts of
heterochrony, morphodynamics, chronocomplexity as well as research on time
are drawn upon to hint at an alternative and more complete way of defining
time for ABM simulations. It is suggested that such an approach might
produce a more useful, at least from a practitioners standpoint, simulation
of public policy making and implementation. Kronos reenters the stage
of public policy simulation.
Gus Koehler
University of Southern California
Department of Regional Planning and Public Policy
and
Time Structures
www.timestructures.com
rhythm3@earthlink.net