Seminal Papers in Complexity

Posted by Michael Agar on Jun 16, 2007; 8:42pm
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/Seminal-Papers-in-Complexity-tp524047p524055.html

Last fall at the NECSI conference I was talking to an editor of a  
complexity encyclopedia now in process by Springer http://
refworks.springer.com/complexity/. I asked him, is there any common  
thread running through the conversations you've had and the sections  
you've commissioned so far? Only anti-reductionism, he said.

So I just wrote that story and all of a sudden wondered, what the  
hell is reductionism anyway? Cheated by looking it up in Wikipedia  
and of course there's many different kinds. The old philosophy joke  
is, when faced with a contradiction, make a distinction. The first  
line of the major Wikipedia entry is, "In philosophy, reductionism is  
a theory that asserts that the nature of complex things is reduced to  
the nature of sums of simpler or more fundamental things."

Sums. So is nonlinearity the key to the kingdom? Are we really  
looking for germinal papers in nonlinearity?


Mike


On Jun 16, 2007, at 1:47 PM, sbarr at clarku.edu wrote:

> Here are a few bibliographies:
>
> http://www.psych.lse.ac.uk/complexity/bibliography.htm
> http://www.santafe.edu/~jpc/EvDynBib.html
> http://www.barn.org/FILES/eybiblio.html
>
> -Shawn
>
>> One problem with the seminal papers on complexity is that they don't
>> connect.  Take the foundational works of H.T. Odum, the systems
>> ecologist(1) or the cybernetic systems thinkers Ross Ashby (2) or
>> Norbert Wiener(3).  It's hard to link them to other branches of  
>> complex
>> systems study like Prigigene's 'Exploring Complexity' or Wolfram's  
>> 'New
>> kind of Science' or Barabasi's 'Linked' (leaving out numerous  
>> important
>> others).  As a consequence few people are aware of the general  
>> timeline
>> of complexity as a subject(4), and any timeline of the field is  
>> bound to
>> be missing major contributions.
>>
>> The problem seems is partly that the study of complex systems is
>> interdisciplinary, because systems are, and what happens is each
>> discipline goes off on its own tangent and acts like it is trying to
>> take over the subject as a whole, each vying to erase each other  
>> rather
>> than connect with each other.  My work seems to be an example of an
>> attempt to link approaches, a new form of physics intended  
>> expressly for
>> use by any discipline, and incorporating unique useful pieces of  
>> what's
>> been developed from all the disciplines I've been exposed to.  My  
>> work
>> may be 'odd' in more ways than that, but it's partly because I'm  
>> trying
>> to write in a common language that makes it look 'foreign' to every
>> discipline, so no one'll publish it...  Catch 22!   :-)
>>
>> (1) Odum: 1994 'Ecological and General Systems' (see
>> http://www.eoearth.org/article/Odum,_Howard_T.)
>> (2) Ross Ashby's 1947 'Ecological and General Systems' or his 1956
>> "Introduction to Cybernetics" (& see
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Ross_Ashby)
>> (3) Weiner 1948 'Control and Communication in the Animal and the
>> Machine'
>> (3) complex systems thinking timeline from the cybernetics soc.
>> (http://www.asc-cybernetics.org/foundations/timeline.htm),
>>
>>
>> Phil Henshaw                       ????.?? ? `?.????
>> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
>> 680 Ft. Washington Ave
>> NY NY 10040
>> tel: [phone]
>> e-mail: pfh at synapse9.com
>> explorations: www.synapse9.com
>>
>>
>>> -----Original Message-----
>>> From: friam-bounces at redfish.com
>>> [mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com] On Behalf Of Owen Densmore
>>> Sent: Friday, June 15, 2007 7:38 PM
>>> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
>>> Subject: [FRIAM] Seminal Papers in Complexity
>>>
>>>
>>> Several of us have been attending the SFI Summer School this year.
>>> One thing that has stood out for me is that there are very few
>>> appropriate texts on the detailed, seminal ideas within complexity.
>>> Either the books are "popular" or they are technical/formal enough,
>>> but without broad view of complexity itself.  Indeed, they may be
>>> *too* advanced in their speciality for the broad use complexity
>>> wishes to make.
>>>
>>> One example today was the intersection of computational theory and
>>> statistical mechanics given by Cris Moore:
>>> A Tale of Two Cultures: Phase Transitions in
>>> Physics and Computer Science
>>> Here are the slides: http://www.santafe.edu/~moore/Oxford.pdf
>>> You'd be unlikely to find a book bridging algorithms, computational
>>> complexity, and statistical mechanics.
>>>
>>> This leads me to believe that seminal papers are likely to be a good
>>> solution for bridging the various cultures, hopefully with some that
>>> *do* bridge gaps between specialties.
>>>
>>> Sooo -- gentle reader -- this brings me to a request: I'd like to
>>> start a collection of seminal papers who's goal is to bridge the gap
>>> between popular books and over-specialized texts, which are formal
>>> enough to be useful for multi-discipline complexity work.  This may
>>> be daft, but I think not.
>>>
>>> As an example, I'd say Shannon's 1948 paper A Mathematical Theory of
>>> Communication would be good.
>>>
>>>      -- Owen
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> ===========================================================> FRIAM
>>> Applied Complexity Group listserv
>>> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
>>> lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>> ===========================================================FRIAM  
>> Applied
>> Complexity Group listserv
>> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
>> lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
>>
>>
>
>
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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