Sacks, Johnson, and Gould all establish a model and mode of thinking in their respective essays related to logic in a complex system. Johnson’s essay seems to project the best presentation of coherence, as he uses language that can be better understood to individuals across differing disciplines. Similarly, he uses examples that can better be related to society as a whole; whereas the other authors use more scientific jargon and distant examples.
To put this into perspective, Gould reveals the speculative nature of his model, for instance he says, “somehow I prefer the excitement of wondering and cogitation--not to mention the power inherent in acting upon things that can be changed--to the certainty of distant dissolution” (11). Therefore, he is both arguing for his position and attempting to persuade the audience to grasp concepts that are not as easily coherent as Johnson’s. This can be said of the idea of predetermination in complex brain systems that Sacks suggests, as well.Sacks spends much of his time in persuading readers, rather than engaging them in a totally believable thesis.
Many individuals refute the idea of evolution or argue the dominance of nurture vs. nature, making these two articles more argumentative and persuasive. Johnson uses already documented scenarios in nature irrefutable, making his model the most effective, as well as the most easily readable to persons not just in the field of "hard science" as the other two, but social science and other important disciplines. Johnson's creative usage, therefore can create a better dialogue among many members of academia.Johnson’s model suggests scenarios, in which, the relation of complex moving parts in systems can be paralleled with a queen bee and colony and compares this with other systems, such as a busy city or internet system.
He states that “we know now that systems like ant colonies don’t have real leaders, that the very idea of an ant “queen” is misleading. But the desire to find pacemakers in such systems has always been powerful-in both the group behavior of the social insects, and in the collective human behavior that creates a human city” (251).This analysis of the need for humans to find a coherent set of predetermined structure with a leader is most convincing, while the two others attempt to expand on a “leading” idea that governs behavior in animals and humans alike. Sacks, for example, uses the idea of an overall governing system of self-taught reactions to sensory systems. “At this level, one can no longer say of one’s mental landscapes what is visual, what is auditory, what is image, what is language, what is intellectual, what is emotional—they are all fused together and imbued with our own individual perspectives and values” (59).In this way, all senses are said to be governed by the individual and their learned behavior, which seems to be over-simplistic.
Johnson does reveal that intelligence must be a part of self-organizing systems, but does not imply that every individual in the group needs to be in a hierarchal system. Similarly, Gould does not believe in a “supreme” creature, but he stands under the umbrella of evolution that may curtail other explanations for behavior and thought. In Darwin's causal world, an anatomically degenerate parasite, reduced to a formless clump of feeding and reproductive cells within the body of a host, may be just as well adapted to its surroundings, and just as well endowed with prospects for evolutionary persistence, as is the most intricate creature, exquisitely adapted in all parts to a complex and dangerous external environment” (2). Gould does much explaining in his article, but he engages in just as much argumentation for his system of logic.
This confuses the reader and takes away much of the credibility of his ideas.Both Gould and Sacks present interesting arguments, but Johnson seems to have hit the mark of a more believable truth, one that has already been accepted and proven in nature and man while the other two authors are mired in a possibility. Gould and Sacks models rely more on probability and ambiguity. There are many quotes throughout the texts of Gould and Sacks that are quite speculative and confusing to persons outside the disciplines of science and biology.
Though Johnson uses examples that include biology and computer science and ultimately social science, his ideas are coherently formed.For example, Gould writes; “the two Chengjiang genera possess all the defining features of vertebrates: the stiff dorsal supporting rod, or notochord (subsequently lost in adults after the vertebral column evolved); the arrangement of flank musculature in a series of zigzag elements from front to back; the set of paired openings piercing the pharynx (operating primarily as respiratory gills in later fishes but used mostly for filter feeding in ancestral vertebrates)” (9) After first appealing to readers to accept the theory of Evolution, he then inundates his audience to specific areas of Evolution that involve a large amount of jargon.This jargon eventually jars readers from a coherent subject and instead a tale of the life of creatures and the possibility of the explosion of the sun. The latter, then seems a scare tactic to encourage the audience to learn more as to this unnatural and fatal end.
“Stellar evolution will, one day, enjoin a predictable end, at least to life on Earth. Quoting one more time from Britannica: The Sun is destined to perish as a white dwarf. But before that happens, it will evolve into a red giant, engulfing Mercury and Venus in the process.At the same time, it will blow away the earth's atmosphere and boil its oceans, making the planet uninhabitable” (11). Similarly, Sacks uses confusing language, but he does not engage in as much speculation, argumentation, and the instillation of fear, as does Gould, while Johnson is more of an animated and appealing storyteller. He makes sense of quite complex systems and using interesting metaphors in as explanations.
“A hundred and fifty years later, the same techniques translated the language of software…trigger a similar reaction: the eerie sense of something lifelike, something organic on the screen.Even those with sophisticated knowledge about self-organizing systems still find these shapes unnerving-in their mix of stability and change, in their capacity for open-ended learning” (9). In this way, Johnson moves from natural and human systems to the intricate world of the computer. He flows seamlessly and sensibly through the text, helping the audience to better understand his model for coherence. In closing, Johnson’s work is the most appealing and sensible of the three works mentioned previously.
He helps to put the reader at ease, while Gould confounds the audience with a mix of argumentation and alienation from real-world scenarios. Sacks uses interesting examples to further his claim, but his claim is over-simplistic amidst a science that includes a very complex set of neural pathways and brain processing. There cannot be this straightforward a conclusion, as he arrives to with such a great deal of information. Fortunately, Johnson helps to simplify the wording he uses and refrains from overly using jargon to create a sense of understanding of the world in its natural and man-made settings of self-organization.
