Posted by
Phil Henshaw-2 on
Jun 17, 2007; 1:15am
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/Seminal-Papers-in-Complexity-tp524047p524057.html
I mentioned it before, but it's worth mentioning again. There's a new
way to reveal structures of real complex physical systems that is
amenable to analysis, that is, other than the one way we've been using
for the past few hundred years, i.e. assigning numbers to them.
Assigning numbers to things is what I always thought of as being the
'reduction' part of reductionism.
That aside, when you consider a system as a network of internal
relations, as network science does, and study it as a cell with a
topology, it gives you a whole new kind of analytical window on real
complex systems. Real complex systems are probably not the only kind
worth studying, and projecting their internal networks for analysis is
still 'reductionist' in a real sense, but it's a reduction having far
more depth and a true relation to the original thing than representing
things as numbers does. Whether it goes fast or slow, I think NetSci
forms a whole new kind of horizon for analytical methods.
Phil Henshaw ????.?? ? `?.????
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680 Ft. Washington Ave
NY NY 10040
tel: 212-795-4844
e-mail: pfh at synapse9.com
explorations: www.synapse9.com <
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-----Original Message-----
From:
[hidden email] [mailto:
[hidden email]] On
Behalf Of Michael Agar
Sent: Saturday, June 16, 2007 4:42 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Seminal Papers in Complexity
Last fall at the NECSI conference I was talking to an editor of a
complexity encyclopedia now in process by Springer
http://refworks.springercom/complexity/<
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 <
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy>
philosophy, reductionism is a theory that asserts that the nature of
complex things is
<
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reduction_%28philosophy%29> 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://wwwpsych.lse.ac.uk/complexity/bibliography.htm<
http://www.psych.lse.ac.uk/complexity/bibliography.htm>
http://www.santafe.edu/~jpc/EvDynBib.htmlhttp://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: 212-795-4844
e-mail: pfh at synapse9.com
explorations: www.synapse9.com
-----Original Message-----
From:
[hidden email]
[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.pdfYou'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
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