Seminal Papers in Complexity

Posted by Russell Standish on Jun 17, 2007; 1:50am
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/Seminal-Papers-in-Complexity-tp524047p524059.html

On Sat, Jun 16, 2007 at 02:42:12PM -0600, Michael Agar wrote:

> 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
>

"Sum of the parts" is more metaphoric than literal. IMHO, the key to
the kingdom is emergence, and nonlinearity is only necessary to
distinguish between simple or "resultant" emergence, and the more
general kind.

Whereas some nonlinear systems (eg a two body gravitationally bound
system) are not complex in anyone's book.

Cheers

--

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