CAS and Building Blocks

What are the building blocks of a theory?

Very interesting presentation by John Holland.  John provided a useful model for looking into the real world phenomena, using Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS).  His example of building a facial outlook using building blocks well illustrates the combination of different features of human to come up with different human faces.  He mentioned that language is a CAS and could be built using building blocks.

In Chinese characters as illustrated here in wikipedia, different characters could be built using basic building blocks (characters), based on sound, or shape, or resemblance of certain objects or directions etc.

Research into Complexity Theory and CAS

I have been thinking about the use of Complexity Theory to explain the phenomena, with  metaphors such as those here http://www.slideshare.net/gislio/crowds-clouds-crisis and http://www.slideshare.net/noahraford/collapse-dynamics-phase-transitions-in-complex-social-systems to explain the ecology or Complex Adaptive System (CAS) and narrative research to trace the footprints left with such ecology, within communities and individuals, and scenario planning like http://www.slideshare.net/DadangSolihin/scenario-planningo and http://www.slideshare.net/mkconway/introduction-to-scenario-planning (a bit outdated for this) to develop a digital model that could help in visualising future – the digital ecology (future education, institution, and markets etc.)

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