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For most of its tenure, the scientific
project was concerned with exploring celestial
space
and atomic matter, along with their laws of linear
cause and effect. This analytical phase led to
a mechanical, particulate, expiring universe. With
the advent of fast computers and graphic displays,
the domain of nature’s nonlinear evolving complexity
could be engaged in its dynamic, interactive relationships.
As this chapter illustrates, scientists and mathematicians
have studied various aspects such as a nested emergence
or cooperative symbiosis. From these studies a ubiquitous
dynamic impetus is being
distilled, often known as a complex adaptive
system, whereby many free elements
or agents communicate and interact, guided by common
rules, from which further complexities organize.
A discovery of a new universe seems to be emerging from this approach as a process
of organic development—a cosmogenesis of life, mind, knowledge, and selfhood.
This chapter will introduce and document its independent properties while the
remainder of the bibliography suggests how this creative system is being found
in evidence from galactic to ecological realms.
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| Topical Name |
Main Proponent(s) |
System Properties |
Artificial Life
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Chris Langton
Chris Adami
|
Computer simulation of evolving,
aggregate “organisms”
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Autopoiesis
|
Humberto Maturana
Francisco Varela
|
Self-referential, bounded,
cognitively viable systems
|
| |
|
|
Cellular Automata
|
Stephen Wolfram
Andrew Ilachinski
|
A computational method exhibiting
repetitive self-assembly and order
|
| |
|
|
Complex Adaptive Systems
|
John Holland
Murray Gell-Mann
|
When many agents interact,
guided by rules, to form a nested emergence
|
| |
|
|
Connectionism
|
David Rumelhart
|
How neurons compute and process
cerebral information
|
| |
|
|
Fractal Geometry |
Benoit Mandelbrot |
Natural, self-similar topologies with
fractional dimensions |
| |
|
|
General Systems Theory
|
L. von Bertalanffy
Ervin Laszlo
|
The pioneer witness of systemic
interconnections
|
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|
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Hierarchy Theory
|
Stan Salthe
Niles Eldredge
|
Evolution and ecosystems consistently
deploy into nested scales
|
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|
|
Living Systems Theory
|
James G. Miller
|
Twenty features repeat in a
scale from cells to global civilization
|
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|
|
Modularity
|
Herbert Simon
Gunter Wagner
|
The tendency to form modular
components in evolving and neural systems
|
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|
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Neural Networks
|
Stephen Grossberg
John Hopfield
|
Complex systems that organize
and operate brain functions
|
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|
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Nonequilibrium
Thermodynamics
|
Ilya Prigogine
|
Open system energy flow, bifurcation,
and dissipation
|
| |
|
|
Self-Organized Criticality
|
Per Bak
|
Complex systems are poised
at the edge of order and chaos
|
| |
|
|
Self-Organization |
Stuart Kauffman |
Multiple, informed agents interrelate to
achieve scalar networks |
| |
|
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Semiotics
|
Terrence Deacon
|
An intrinsic relationship between
evolution and symbolic communication processes
|
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|
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Synergetics
|
Herman Haken
Scott Kelso
|
A more physically based theory
of universal self-organization
|
| |
|
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Synergy
|
Peter Corning
|
Cooperative combinations bring
selective advantages to spawn an increasing complexity
|
| |
|
|
Universality |
Eugene Stanley
Mark Buchanan |
The same critically poised dynamics and structures
are found everywhere |
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|
Altmann, Gabriel, and Walter A. Koch, eds. Systems: New Paradigms for the
Human
Sciences. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter Inc., 1998.
Anderson, Philip, et al., eds. Downward Causation: Mind, Bodies, and Matter. Aarhus,
Denmark: Aarhus University Press, 2000.
Anderson, Philip. “More Is Different: One More Time.” In More
Is
Different: Fifty Years of Condensed Matter Physics, eds. Phuan Ong and
Ravin
Bhatt, 1–8. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001.
Bak, Per. How Nature Works: The Science of Self-Organized Criticality. New York:
Springer-Verlag, 1996.
Bar-Yam, Yaneer. Dynamics of Complex Systems (Studies in Nonlineality). Reading,
Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1997.
Barabasi, Albert-Laszlo. Linked: The New Science of Networks. Cambridge,
Mass.:
Westview Press, 1997.
Brown, James H., and Geoffery B. West, eds. Scaling in Biology (Santa Fe
Institute
Studies on the Science of Complexity). New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Brown, James H., et al. “The Fractal Nature of Nature: Power Laws, Ecological
Complexity and Biodiversity.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal
Society
of London B. vol. 357 (2002): 619–32.
Buchanan, Mark. Ubiquity: The Science of History, or Why the World is Simpler
Than We Think. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2000.
Chandler, Jerry, and Gertrudis Van de Vijver, eds. Closure: Emergent Organizations
and Their Dynamics. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, vol. 901. New
York: New York Academy of Sciences, 2000.
Corning, Peter. Nature’s Magic: Synergy in Evolution and the Fate of Humankind.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Cowan, George, et al., eds. Complexity. Reading, Mass.: Addison Wesley, 1994.
Deacon, Terrence. “Three Levels of Emergent Phenomena. Science and
the
Spiritual Quest.” Berkeley, Calif.: Center
for Theology and the Natural
Sciences, 2001.
de Rosnay, Joel. The Symbiotic
Man: A New Understanding of the Organization of Life
and
a Vision of the Future. New York: McGraw-Hill,
2000.
Flake, Gary. The Computational Beauty of Nature: Computer Explorations of
Fractals,
Chaos, Complex Systems, and Adaptation. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998.
Fontana, Walter, and Leo Buss. “The Arrival of the Fittest.” Bulletin
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Freeman, Walter J. “Foreword.” In The Complex Matters of the
Mind, ed. Franco Orsucci, xi–xvii. River Edge, N.J.: World Scientific,
1998.
Gisiger, Thomas. “Scale Invariance in Biology: Coincidence or Footprint
of a Universal Mechanism?” Biological Reviews. vol. 76, no. 2
(2001): 161–209.
Goldberg, Elkhonon. The Executive Brain: Frontal Lobes and the Civilized
Mind. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Grand, Steve. Creation: Life and How to Make It. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University
Press, 2001.
Hazen, Robert. “Emergence and the Origin of Life.” Astrobiology.
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Helbing, Dirk. “Traffic and Related Self-Driven Many-Particle Systems.” Reviews
of Modern Physics. vol. 73, no. 4 (October, 2001): 1067–1142.
Heylighen, Francis, et al., eds. The Evolution of Complexity: The Violet
Book
of “Einstein Meets Magritte.” Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers,
1999.
Holland, John. Hidden Order: How Adaptation Builds Complexity. Reading,
Mass.:
Addison-Wesley, 1995.
_______. Emergence: From Chaos to Order. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley,
1998.
Ilachinski, Andrew. Cellular Automata: A Discrete Universe. Singapore:
World
Scientific, 2001.
Johnson, Steven. Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities,
and
Software. New York: Scribner, 2001.
Kauffman, Stuart A. The Origins of Order: Self Organization and Selection
in
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_______. Investigations. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
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Lehn, Jean-Marie. “Toward Self-Organization and Complex Matter.” Science. vol.
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Mikhailov, Alexander S. From Cells to Societies: Models of Complex Coherent
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_______. The End of Certainty: Time, Chaos, and the New Laws of Nature. New
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to Collective Dynamics. London: Gordon & Breach, 1996.
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