This book applies complexity theory to cognitive science, and the result is a transformation of this field. It proposes a biophysical theory of human relations, attempting to expand all its implications (for research and theory). It presents the potential clinical applications of this theory in neuroscience and clinical psychology — a general theory of mind change.
This book provides a lens through which modern society is shown to depend on complex networks for its stability. One way to achieve this understanding is through the development of a new kind of science, one that is not explicitly dependent on the traditional disciplines of biology, economics, physics, sociology and so on; a science of networks. This text reviews, in non-mathematical language, what we know about the development of science in the twenty-first century and how that knowledge influences our world. In addition, it distinguishes the two-tiered science of the twentieth century, based on experiment and theory (data and knowledge) from the three-tiered science of experiment, computation and theory (data, information and knowledge) of the twenty-first century in everything from psychophysics to climate change.This book is unique in that it addresses two parallel lines of argument. The first line is general and intended for a lay audience, but one that is scientifically sophisticated, explaining how the paradigm of science has been changed to accommodate the computer and large-scale computation. The second line of argument addresses what some consider the seminal scientific problem of climate change. The authors show how a misunderstanding of the change in the scientific paradigm has led to a misunderstanding of complex phenomena in general, and the causes of global warming in particular.
Connections between genes and molecules, neurons and hormones, thinking and language, people and organizations create a continuous flow of synchronized interactions. These intermingled interactions form dynamical networks across many scales, from molecular, to biological, to cognitive and social. In a sequence of cycles, the reader is guided in this heterogeneous hypernetwork to discover the fields and landscapes of Mind Force. Mind, brain, body and society emerge from the same stream through the complexity of nature: the energy of Mind Force and human attractions.
This book presents the proceedings of the Eighth National Conference of the Italian Systems Society. The contributions underline the need for Systemics and Systems Science in order to address multiple, changing systems involving several coherent versions. The conference focused on identifying, discussing, and understanding possible interrelationships between fundamental theoretical advances in different disciplines. Given their scope, these proceedings represent a valuable asset for all researchers whose work involves multiple systems.
This publication reviews the foundations of ethics in the history of Western thinking. It connects these philosophical matters with evolutionary theory and contemporary bioethics, biology and medicine, posing new questions for the current dialectics between categorical and contextual ethics. Novel answers are presented from complexity theory ? self-organization and nonlinear dynamics.
This exceptional book is concerned with the application of fractals and chaos, as well as other concepts from nonlinear dynamics to biomedical phenomena. Herein we seek to communicate the excitement being experienced by scientists upon making application of these concepts within the life sciences. Mathematical concepts are introduced using biomedical data sets and the phenomena being explained take precedence over the mathematics.In this new edition what has withstood the test of time has been updated and modernized; speculations that were not borne out have been expunged and the breakthroughs that have occurred in the intervening years are emphasized. The book provides a comprehensive overview of a nascent theory of medicine, including a new chapter on the theory of complex networks as they pertain to medicine.
A nonsimple (complex) system indicates a mix of crucial and non-crucial events, with very different statistical properties. It is the crucial events that determine the efficiency of information exchange between complex networks. For a large class of nonsimple systems, crucial events determine catastrophic failures - from heart attacks to stock market crashes.This interesting book outlines a data processing technique that separates the effects of the crucial from those of the non-crucial events in nonsimple time series extracted from physical, social and living systems. Adopting an informal conversational style, without sacrificing the clarity necessary to explain, the contents will lead the reader through concepts such as fractals, complexity and randomness, self-organized criticality, fractional-order differential equations of motion, and crucial events, always with an eye to helping to interpret what mathematics usually does in the development of new scientific knowledge.Both researchers and novitiate will find Crucial Events useful in learning more about the science of nonsimplicity.
This invaluable book captures the proceedings of a workshop that brought together a group of distinguished scientists from a variety of disciplines to discuss how networking influences decision making. The individual lectures interconnect psychological testing, the modeling of neuron networks and brain dynamics to the transport of information within and between complex networks. Of particular importance was the introduction of a new principle that governs how complex networks talk to one another ? the Principle of Complexity Management (PCM). PCM establishes that the transfer of information from a stimulating complex network to a responding complex network is determined by how the complexity indices of the two networks are related. The response runs the gamut from being independent of the perturbation to being completely dominated by it, depending on the complexity mismatch.
This book provides an interdisciplinary introduction to the notion of fractal time, starting from scratch with a philosophical and perceptual puzzle. How subjective duration varies, depending on the way we embed current content into contexts, is explained. The complexity of our temporal perspective depends on the number of nestings performed, i.e. on the number of contexts taken into account. This temporal contextualization is described against the background of the notion of fractal time. Our temporal interface, the Now, is portrayed as a fractal structure which arises from the distribution of content and contexts in two dimensions: the length and the depth of time. The leitmotif of the book is the notion of simultaneity, which determines the temporal structure of our interfaces. Recent research results are described which present and discuss a number of distorted temporal perspectives. It is suggested that dynamical diseases arise from unsuccessful nesting attempts, i.e. from failed contextualization. Successful nesting, by contrast, manifests itself in a "win-win handshake" between the observer-participant and his chosen context. The answer as to why a watched kettle never boils has repercussions in many a discipline. It would be of immense interest to anyone who works in the fields of cognitive and complexity sciences, psychology and the neurosciences, social medicine, philosophy and the arts.
