Related papers: Less is Different: Emergence and Reduction Reconci…
Is reduction always a good scientific strategy? Does it always lead to a gain in information? The very existence of the special sciences above and beyond physics seems to hint no. Previous research has shown that dimension reduction…
The broad concept of emergence is instrumental in various of the most challenging open scientific questions -- yet, few quantitative theories of what constitutes emergent phenomena have been proposed. This article introduces a formal theory…
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 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,…
Modern physics is founded on two mainstays: mathematical modelling and empirical verification. These two assumptions are prerequisite for the objectivity of scientific discourse. Here we show, however, that they are contradictory, leading…
The primordial confrontation underlying the existence of our universe can be conceived as the battle between entropy and complexity. The law of ever-increasing entropy (Boltzmann H-theorem) evokes an irreversible, one-directional evolution…
The concept of emergence, or synergy in its simplest form, is widely used but lacks a rigorous definition. Our work connects information and set theory to uncover the mathematical nature of synergy as the failure of distributivity. It…
"Emergence", the phenomenon where a complex system displays properties, behaviours, or dynamics not trivially reducible to its constituent elements, is one of the defining properties of complex systems. Recently, there has been a concerted…
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…
I distinguish two types of reduction within the context of quantum-classical relations, which I designate "formal" and "empirical". Formal reduction holds or fails to hold solely by virtue of the mathematical relationship between two…
Since its application to systems, emergence has been explained in terms of levels of observation. This approach has led to confusion, contradiction, incoherence and at times mysticism. When the idea of level is replaced by a framework of…
The pros and cons of various forms of atomism and holism that are applicable both in physical science and today's philosophy of nature are evaluated. To this end, Lewis' thesis of Humean supervenience is presented as an important case study…
We identify emergence with the existence of states of potentiality related to relevant physical quantities. We introduce the concept of 'potentiality state' operationally and show how it reduces to 'superposition state' when standard…
The possibility of a fundamental consistency between the basic quantum principles and reduction (so-called wave function reduction) is reexamined. The mathematical description of an organized macroscopic device is constructed explicitly as…
The problem of emergence in physical theories makes necessary to build a general theory of the relationships between the observed system and the observing system. It can be shown that there exists a correspondence between classical systems…
The following three sections and appendices are taken from my thesis "The Foundations of Inference and its Application to Fundamental Physics" from 2021, in which I construct a theory of entropic inference from first principles. The…
A universal framework is proposed, where all laws are regularities of relations between things or agents. Parts of the world at one or all times are modeled as networks called SYSTEMS with a minimum of axiomatic properties. A notion of…
The crisis in the reproducibility of experiments invites a re-evaluation of methods of inquiry and validation procedures. The text challenges current assumptions of knowledge acquisition and introduces G-complexity for defining decidable…
A persistent focus on the concept of emergence as a core element of the scientific method allows a clean separation, insofar as this is possible, of the physical and philosophical aspects of the problem of outcomes in quantum mechanics. The…
A central challenge in the study of complex systems is the quantification of emergence -- understood as the ability of the system to exhibit collective behaviours that cannot be traced down to the individual components. While recent work…