Interactions of Micro and Macro Hierarchies

Abstract

Facing a macro–system, we encounter a fundamental problem: even a hopelessly massive effort to describe a huge amount of detailed data does not lead us to a deep (or universal) understanding of the system. Modern science has inclined toward micro–systems–reducing a macro–system into elements, it seeks universality in the decomposed virtual world. However, it is extremely difficult to connect the elements again, to compose (reconstruct) the macro-system, and to understand the diversity of the system from the fragmented parts. How can a macro–system, the “reality” of our world, become the subject of science? As an observer, a reporter, or an analyst, we have a certain subject (or perspective) when we see the reality. We can choose various subjects. Depending of the subject, the appearance of an event changes. We can say that such diversity of appearance is the essence of “complexity.” Here, we propose the notion of scale hierarchy, ranging from macro to micro scales, which defines our horizon of the vision of an event.What we mean by macro or micro is the “norm” of the observation, description, or analysis; it is not merely the composition or decomposition of the object. A micro image and a macro image are not necessarily independent. The relation among different scale hierarchies is produced by nonlinearity. The aim of this chapter is to analyze the mechanisms of the conjunction of the scale hierarchies.