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Social Network Analysis is a way of studying agents embedded in contexts. In about 1998, physicists discovered social networks as representations of complex systems. Small-world and scale-free networks are the paradigmatic models of this…
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…
Observational data about human behavior is often heterogeneous, i.e., generated by subgroups within the population under study that vary in size and behavior. Heterogeneity predisposes analysis to Simpson's paradox, whereby the trends…
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…
This is a work of hard physical philosophy, where Quantum Perspectivism is shown to function as both an interpretation of quantum mechanics and a physical model for understanding Nietzsche's perspectivism. This framework combines quantum…
We establish variational principles for the Hausdorff and packing dimensions of a class of statistically self-affine sponges, including in particular fractal percolation sets obtained from Bara\'nski and Gatzouras-Lalley carpets and…
Creativity is perhaps what most differentiates humans from other species. It involves the capacity to shift between divergent and convergent modes of thought in response to task demands. Divergent thought has been characterized as the kind…
A word may contain one or more hidden concepts. While the "animal" word evokes many images in our minds and encapsulates many concepts (birds, dogs, cats, crocodiles, etc.), the `parrot' word evokes a single image (a colored bird with a…
Prigogine and Stengers (1988) have pointed to the centrality of the concepts of "time and eternity" for the cosmology contained in Newtonian physics, but they have not addressed this issue beyond the domain of physics. The construction of…
This is a survey paper about the fractal percolation process, also known as Mandelbrot percolation. It is intended to give a general breadth overview of more recent research in the topic, but also includes some of the more classical…
Natural language is a complex system that exhibits robust statistical regularities. Here, we represent text as a trajectory in a high-dimensional embedding space generated by transformer-based language models, and quantify scale-dependent…
Klaus Hasselmann's revolutionary intuition in climate science was to take advantage of the stochasticity associated with fast weather processes to probe the slow dynamics of the climate system. This has led to fundamentally new ways to…
One of the main claims of the paper is that Dirac's calculus and broader theories of physics can be treated as theories written in the language of Continuous Logic. Establishing its true interpretation (model) is a model theory problem. The…
Throughout life, we might seek a calling, companions, skills, entertainment, truth, self-knowledge, beauty, and edification. The practice of curiosity can be viewed as an extended and open-ended search for valuable information with hidden…
Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit impressive reasoning abilities, yet their reliance on structured step-by-step processing reveals a critical limitation. In contrast, human cognition fluidly adapts between intuitive, heuristic (System 1)…
We introduce the exciting field of complex dynamics at an undergraduate level while reviewing, reinforcing, and extending the ideas learned in an typical first course on complex analysis. Julia sets and the famous Mandelbrot set will be…
The recent discovery that Einstein once attempted - and quickly abandoned - a steady-state model of the expanding universe sheds new light on his philosophical journey from static to dynamic cosmologies.
The modeling of cascade processes in multi-agent systems in the form of complex networks has in recent years become an important topic of study due to its many applications: the adoption of commercial products, spread of disease, the…
Economies are complex man-made systems where organisms and markets interact according to motivations and principles not entirely understood yet. The increasing dissatisfaction with the postulates of traditional economics i.e. perfectly…
This article is a follow-up of a short essay that appeared in Nature 455, 1181 (2008) [arXiv:0810.5306]. It has become increasingly clear that the erratic dynamics of markets is mostly endogenous and not due to the rational processing of…