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The complexity of cultures in the modern world is now beyond human comprehension. Cognitive sciences cast doubts on the traditional explanations based on mental models. The core subjects in humanities may lose their importance. Humanities…
Deterministic chaos, and even maximum computational complexity, have been discovered within Newtonian dynamics. Economists assume that prices and price changes can also obey abstract mathematical laws of motion. Sociologists and other…
This paper examines the processes involved in attempting to capture the subtlest aspects of nature by the scientific method and argues on this basis that nature is fundamentally elusive and may resist grasping by the methods of science. If…
It is argued that correlations and multiplicity distributions constitute one of the most characteristic properties of strong interactions. The progress made in the last years in our understanding of correlations is reviewed.
As Physics did in previous centuries, there is currently a common dream of extracting generic laws of nature in economics, sociology, neuroscience, by focalising the description of phenomena to a minimal set of variables and parameters,…
Biologists and physicists have a rich tradition of modeling living systems with simple models composed of a few interacting components. Despite the remarkable success of this approach, it remains unclear how to use such finely tuned models…
Collective organization in physical, biophysical, and biological systems often emerges from many weak, local interactions, yet the resulting global structures display striking regularities and apparent limits in diversity. Existing…
Neuroscientists often describe neural activity as a representation of something, or claim to have found evidence for a neural representation. But what do these statements mean? The reasons to call some neural activity a representation and…
The ways in which people learn, communicate and engage in discussion have changed profoundly during the past decade. As Jenkins related in her book, The Convergence Crisis: An Impending Paradigm Shift in Advertising, Millenials do not want…
The standard assumptions that underlie many conceptual and quantitative frameworks do not hold for many complex physical, biological, and social systems. Complex systems science clarifies when and why such assumptions fail and provides…
A 21st century view of the nature of science is presented. It attempts to show how a consistent description of science and scientific progress can be given. Science advances through a sequence of models with progressively greater predictive…
As early indicated by Charles Darwin, languages behave and change very much like living species. They display high diversity, differentiate in space and time, emerge and disappear. A large body of literature has explored the role of…
Interaction with others influences our opinions and behaviours. Our activities within various social circles lead to different opinions expressed in various situations, groups, and ways of communication. Earlier studies on agent-based…
Newton set the stage for our view of how science should be done. We remain in what I will call the `Newtonian Paradigm' in all of physics, including Newton, Einstein, and Schrodinger. As I will show shortly, Newton invented and bequeathed…
Una de las presuposiciones de la ciencia desde los tiempos de Galileo, Newton y Laplace ha sido la previsibilidad del mundo. Esta idea ha influido en los modelos cientificos y tecnologicos. Sin embargo, en las ultimas decadas, el caos y la…
The aim of this essay is to propose a conception of mathematics that is fully consonant with naturalism. By that I mean the hypothesis that everything that exists is part of the natural world, which makes up a unitary whole.
Decoherence shows how the openness of quantum systems -- interaction with their environment -- suppresses flagrant manifestations of quantumness. Einselection accounts for the emergence of preferred quasi-classical pointer states. Quantum…
In the scientific literature, the term emergent phenomena is invoked in the context of a collective behavior observed in a complex adaptive system that exhibits no correspondence with the behavior of the system constituents. Although this…
We will argue that a phenomenological analysis of consciousness, similar to that of Husserl, shows that the effects of phenomenal qualities shape our perception of the world. It also shows the way the physical and mathematical sciences…
This is the first of four papers prompted by a recent literature about a doctrine dubbed spacetime functionalism. This paper gives our general framework for discussing functionalism. Following Lewis, we take it as a species of reduction. We…