Related papers: Emergence Explained
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…
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…
The claim that life is an emergent phenomenon exhibiting novel properties and principles is often criticized for being in conflict with causal closure at the microscopic level. I argue that advances in cosmological theory suggesting an…
The physics of matter in the condensed state is concerned with problems in which the number of constituent particles is vastly greater than can be easily comprehended. The inherent physical limitations of the human mind are fundamental and…
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…
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…
Emergence, the phenomena where a system's micro-scale dynamics facilitate the development of non-trivial, informative higher scales, has become a foundational concept in modern sciences, tying together fields as diverse as physics, biology,…
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…
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…
Complex systems can be described at myriad different scales, and their causal workings often have multiscale structure (e.g., a computer can be described at the microscale of its hardware circuitry, the mesoscale of its machine code, and…
Emergence is a concept in complexity science that describes how many-body systems manifest novel higher-level properties, properties that can be described by replacing high-dimensional mechanisms with lower-dimensional effective variables…
The analogy of classical repulsive interactions emerging from the exchange of mediating particles is revisited with a quantitative approach. Simulations are presented for a particular toy model which are accessible to undergraduate students…
The causal closure of physics is usually discussed in a context free way. Here I discuss it in the context of engineering systems and biology, where strong emergence takes place due to a combination of upwards emergence and downwards…
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,…
Human and artificial organizations may be described as networks of interacting parts. Those parts exchange data and control information and, as a result of these interactions, organizations produce emergent behaviors and purposes -- traits…
In physics, there is the prevailing intuition that we are part of a unique external world, and that the goal of physics is to understand and describe this world. This assumption of the fundamentality of objective reality is often seen as a…
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,…
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…
When we look at the world around us, we see complex physical systems and emergent phenomena. Emergence occurs when a system is observed to have properties that its parts do not have on their own. These properties or behaviors emerge only…
Digital computers carry out algorithms coded in high level programs. These abstract entities determine what happens at the physical level: they control whether electrons flow through specific transistors at specific times or not, entailing…