Related papers: Emergent complexity: what uphill analysis or downh…

Extreme events gain the attention of researchers due to their utmost importance in various contexts ranging from finance to climatology. This brings such recurrent events to the limelight of attention in interdisciplinary research. A…

The term emergence is increasingly used across scientific disciplines to describe phenomena that arise from interactions among a system's components but cannot be readily inferred by examining those components in isolation. While often…

Contemporary complexity theory has been instrumental in providing novel rigorous definitions for some classic philosophical concepts, including emergence. In an attempt to provide an account of emergence that is consistent with complexity…

Emergence (macro-level effects from micro-level causes) is at the heart of the conflict between reductionism and functionalism. How can there be autonomous higher level laws of nature (the functionalist claim) if everything can be reduced…

Societal complexity may be at a historical peak. Distinct from entropy, complexity tends to rise as systems move away from order, crest at an intermediate state, and decline as entropy continues increasing. The use of a thermodynamic…

Emergence is a phenomenon taken for granted in science but also still not well understood. We have developed a model of artificial genetic evolution intended to allow for emergence on genetic, population and social levels. We present the…

A natural phenomenon occurring in a living system is an outcome of the dynamics of the specific biological network underlying the phenomenon. The collective dynamics have both deterministic and stochastic components. The stochastic nature…

In this essay we elaborate on recent evidence demonstrating the presence of a second order phase transition in human brain dynamics and discuss its consequences for theoretical approaches to brain function. We review early evidence of…

Complex systems have interested researchers across a broad range of fields for many years and as computing has become more accesible and feasible, it is now possible to simulate aspects of these systems. A major point of research is how…

Complex systems are characterized by specific time-dependent interactions among their many constituents. As a consequence they often manifest rich, non-trivial and unexpected behavior. Examples arise both in the physical and non-physical…

This paper attempts to make feasible the evolutionary emergence of novelty in a supposedly deterministic world which behavior is associated with those of the mathematical dynamical systems. The work was motivated by the observation of…

Understanding the functional architecture of complex systems is crucial to illuminate their inner workings and enable effective methods for their prediction and control. Recent advances have introduced tools to characterise emergent…

Herein we consider various concepts of entropy as measures of the complexity of phenomena and in so doing encounter a fundamental problem in physics that affects how we understand the nature of reality. In essence the difficulty has to do…

Even when concepts similar to emergence have been used since antiquity, we lack an agreed definition. However, emergence has been identified as one of the main features of complex systems. Most would agree on the statement ``life is…

The concept of emergence is a powerful concept to explain very complex behaviour by simple underling rules. Existing approaches of producing emergent collective behaviour have many limitations making them unable to account for the…

Random neural networks are dynamical descriptions of randomly interconnected neural units. These show a phase transition to chaos as a disorder parameter is increased. The microscopic mechanisms underlying this phase transition are unknown,…

Emergence is a profound subject that straddles many scientific disciplines, including the formation of galaxies and how consciousness arises from the collective activity of neurons. Despite the broad interest that exists on this concept,…

We all are fascinated by the phenomena of intelligent behavior, as generated both by our own brains and by the brains of other animals. As physicists we would like to understand if there are some general principles that govern the structure…

In complex systems, external parameters often determine the phase in which the system operates, i.e., its macroscopic behavior. For nearly a century, statistical physics has extensively studied systems' transitions across phases,…

The basic laws of physics are simple, so why is the world complex? The theory of self-organized criticality posits that complex behavior in nature emerges from the dynamics of extended, dissipative systems that evolve through a sequence of…