Related papers: Complexity and Philosophy
Many large-scale, complex systems consist of interactions between humans, human-made systems and the environment. The approach developed in this paper is to partition the problem space into two fundamental layers and identify, parameterize…
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…
All aspects of our society, including the life sciences, need a mechanism for people working within them to represent the concepts they employ to carry out their research. For the information systems being designed and developed to support…
Quantum theory (QT) has been confirmed by numerous experiments, yet we still cannot fully grasp the meaning of the theory. As a consequence, the quantum world appears to us paradoxical. Here we shed new light on QT by having it follow from…
There is a deeply entrenched view in philosophy and physics, the closed systems view, according to which isolated systems are conceived of as fundamental. On this view, when a system is under the influence of its environment this is…
Dividing the world into subsystems is an important component of the scientific method. The choice of subsystems, however, is not defined a priori. Typically, it is dictated by experimental capabilities, which may be different for different…
In the present study we attempt to incorporate the philosophical dialogue about physical reality into the instructional process of quantum mechanics. Taking into account that both scientific realism and constructivism represent, on the…
Network theory provides tools which are particularly appropriate for assessing the complex interdependencies that characterise our modern connected world. This article presents an introduction to network theory, in a way that doesn't…
This short text summarizes the work in biology proposed in our book, Perspectives on Organisms, where we analyse the unity proper to organisms by looking at it from different viewpoints. We discuss the theoretical roles of biological time,…
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 NASA still uses Newtonian mechanics, though Einstein superseded Newton, and the standard picture of scientific progress cannot explain how.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…
Causal models and methods have great promise, but their progress has been stalled. Proposals using causality get squeezed between two opposing worldviews. Scientific perfectionism--an insistence on only using "correct" models--slows the…
The molecular biology revolution of the last seventy five years has transformed our view of living systems. Scientific explanations of biological phenomena are now synonymous with the identification of the genes, proteins, and signaling…
Psychology has had difficulty accounting for the creative, context-sensitive manner in which concepts are used. We believe this stems from the view of concepts as identifiers rather than bridges between mind and world that participate in…
Dynamics of arbitrary communication system is analysed as unreduced interaction process. The applied generalised, universally nonperturbative method of effective potential reveals the phenomenon of dynamic multivaluedness of competing…
We discuss the problems of consensus and unity in science. The natural sciences seem to contrast with many other areas of endeavor in that a high level of consensus seems to exist in them. However, a careful analysis of the structure of…
Universe structure emerges in the unreduced, complex-dynamical interaction process with the simplest initial configuration (two attracting homogeneous fields). The unreduced interaction analysis avoiding any perturbative model gives…
The view of nature we adopt in the natural attitude is determined by common sense, without which we could not survive. Classical physics is modelled on this common-sense view of nature, and uses mathematics to formalise our natural…
Complexity science, despite its broad scope and potential impact, has not kept pace with fields like artificial intelligence, biotechnology and social sciences in addressing ethical concerns. The field lacks a comprehensive ethical…
The notion of argumentation and the one of belief stand in a problematic relation to one another. On the one hand, argumentation is crucial for belief formation: as the outcome of a process of arguing, an agent might come to (justifiably)…
Quantum Darwinism extends the traditional formalism of decoherence to explain the emergence of classicality in a quantum universe. A classical description emerges when the environment tends to redundantly acquire information about the…