Related papers: Emergence, Reduction and Supervenience: a Varied L…
We present several philosophical ideas emerging from the studies of complex systems. We make a brief introduction to the basic concepts of complex systems, for then defining "abstraction levels". These are useful for representing…
The development of logic has largely been through the 'deductive' paradigm: conclusions are inferred from established premisses. However, the use of logic in the context of both human and machine reasoning is typically through the dual…
A defining property of complex systems is that they have multiscale structure. How does this multiscale structure come about? We argue that within systems there emerges a hierarchy of scales that contribute to a system's causal workings. An…
Any representational enterprise must omit variation in order to function. NASA still uses Newtonian mechanics, though Einstein superseded Newton, and the standard picture of scientific progress cannot explain how. A description that omitted…
We suggest a quantitative and objective notion of emergence. Our proposal uses algorithmic information theory as a basis for an objective framework in which a bit string encodes observational data. A plurality of drops in the Kolmogorov…
This paper is based on four assumptions: 1. Physical reality is made of linearly behaving components combined in non-linear ways. 2. Higher level behaviour emerges from this lower level structure. 3. The way the lower level elements behaves…
Microbial ecosystems exhibit a surprising amount of functionally relevant diversity at all levels of taxonomic resolution, presenting a significant challenge for most modeling frameworks. A long-standing hope of theoretical ecology is that…
Biological neural networks can perform complex computations to predict their environment, far above the limited predictive capabilities of individual neurons. While conventional approaches to understanding these computations often focus on…
Inspired by a recent work by Berger, we introduce the concept of pointwise emergence. This concept provides with a new quantitative perspective into the study of non-existence of averages for dynamical systems. We show that high pointwise…
The problem of comparing concepts of dependence in general rough sets with those in probability theory had been initiated by the present author in some of her recent papers. This problem relates to the identification of the limitations of…
The theory of regularity is a philosophical perspective in which laws of nature are just descriptions, that is to say, laws of nature do not govern the world. Moreover, according to the theory of regularity, the number of laws of nature…
In this work, we discuss what we refer to as reduction techniques for survival analysis, that is, techniques that "reduce" a survival task to a more common regression or classification task, without ignoring the specifics of survival data.…
Mental events are considered to supervene on physical events. A supervenient event does not change without a corresponding change in the underlying subvenient physical events. Since wholes and their parts exhibit the same…
Events and entities are closely related; entities are often actors or participants in events and events without entities are uncommon. The interpretation of events and entities is highly contextually dependent. Existing work in information…
Predictions of emergent phenomena, appearing on the macroscopic layer of a complex system, can fail if they are made by a microscopic model. This study demonstrates and analyses this claim on a well-known complex system, Conway's Game of…
Can scientific discovery be made arbitrarily easy by choosing the right representation, collecting enough data, and deploying sufficiently powerful algorithms? This paper argues that the answer is fundamentally negative. We introduce the…
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…
It is shown that the ability of the interval probability representation to capture epistemological independence is severely limited. Two events are epistemologically independent if knowledge of the first event does not alter belief (i.e.,…
We introduce a criterion, resilience, which allows properties of a dataset (such as its mean or best low rank approximation) to be robustly computed, even in the presence of a large fraction of arbitrary additional data. Resilience is a…
Just like power, water, and transportation systems, wireless networks are a crucial societal infrastructure. As natural and human-induced disruptions continue to grow, wireless networks must be resilient. This requires them to withstand and…