Emergence, Complexity, and Self-Organization have become vital focuses of interest not only in the fields of science and philosophy but also in the wider worlds of business and politics. This book presents a series of essays by thinkers who anticipated the significance of those issues and laid the foundations for their current importance. Readers of this book will encounter the important and varied figures of Immanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill, Charles Saunders Peirce, Henry Poincaré, Henri Bergson, Alfred North Whitehead, and the British "Emergentists" Samuel Alexander, C. Lloyd Morgan, and C. D. Broad. They will also find essays by the South African thinker and statesman Jan Smuts, the American philosopher Arthur Lovejoy, the eminent physicist Erwin Schrödinger, two more recent thinkers on emergence, P. E. Meehl and Wilfred Sellars, and Ludwig von Bertalanffy, one of the founders of General Systems Theory. In their detailed and comprehensive introduction to the collection, editors Alicia Juarrero and Carl A. Rubino set the essays in contexts stretching from Heraclitus, Parmenides, Plato, Aristotle, and Hegel to some of the religious, scientific, and philosophical challenges we face today.
Emergence, Complexity, and Self-Organization have become vital focuses of interest not only in the fields of science and philosophy but also in the wider worlds of business and politics. This book presents a series of essays by thinkers who anticipated the significance of those issues and laid the foundations for their current importance. Readers of this book will encounter the important and varied figures of Immanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill, Charles Saunders Peirce, Henry Poincare, Henri Bergson, Alfred North Whitehead, and the British "Emergentists" Samuel Alexander, C. Lloyd Morgan, and C. D. Broad. They will also find essays by the South African thinker and statesman Jan Smuts, the American philosopher Arthur Lovejoy, the eminent physicist Erwin Schrodinger, two more recent thinkers on emergence, P. E. Meehl and Wilfred Sellars, and Ludwig von Bertalanffy, one of the founders of General Systems Theory. In their detailed and comprehensive introduction to the collection, editors Alicia Juarrero and Carl A. Rubino set the essays in contexts stretching from Heraclitus, Parmenides, Plato, Aristotle, and Hegel to some of the religious, scientific, and philosophical challenges we face today.
Technological systems become organized by commands from outside, as when human intentions lead to the building of structures or machines. But many nat ural systems become structured by their own internal processes: these are the self organizing systems, and the emergence of order within them is a complex phe nomenon that intrigues scientists from all disciplines. Unfortunately, complexity is ill-defined. Global explanatory constructs, such as cybernetics or general sys tems theory, which were intended to cope with complexity, produced instead a grandiosity that has now, mercifully, run its course and died. Most of us have become wary of proposals for an "integrated, systems approach" to complex matters; yet we must come to grips with complexity some how. Now is a good time to reexamine complex systems to determine whether or not various scientific specialties can discover common principles or properties in them. If they do, then a fresh, multidisciplinary attack on the difficulties would be a valid scientific task. Believing that complexity is a proper scientific issue, and that self-organizing systems are the foremost example, R. Tomovic, Z. Damjanovic, and I arranged a conference (August 26-September 1, 1979) in Dubrovnik, Yugoslavia, to address self-organizing systems. We invited 30 participants from seven countries. Included were biologists, geologists, physicists, chemists, mathematicians, bio physicists, and control engineers. Participants were asked not to bring manu scripts, but, rather, to present positions on an assigned topic. Any writing would be done after the conference, when the writers could benefit from their experi ences there.
A complexity perspective on leadership, this book considers factors such as risk and conflict, spontaneity and motivation, bullying and the use/abuse of power to express a new view of business ethics.
Emergence and complexity refer to the appearance of higher-level properties and behaviours of a system that obviously comes from the collective dynamics of that system's components. These properties are not directly deducible from the lower-level motion of that system. Emergent properties are properties of the "whole'' that are not possessed by any of the individual parts making up that whole. Such phenomena exist in various domains and can be described, using complexity concepts and thematic knowledges. This book highlights complexity modelling through dynamical or behavioral systems. The pluridisciplinary purposes, developed along the chapters, are able to design links between a wide-range of fundamental and applicative Sciences. Developing such links - instead of focusing on specific and narrow researches - is characteristic of the Science of Complexity that we try to promote by this contribution.
Is it possible to guide the process of self-organisation towards specific patterns and outcomes? Wouldn’t this be self-contradictory? After all, a self-organising process assumes a transition into a more organised form, or towards a more structured functionality, in the absence of centralised control. Then how can we place the guiding elements so that they do not override rich choices potentially discoverable by an uncontrolled process? This book presents different approaches to resolving this paradox. In doing so, the presented studies address a broad range of phenomena, ranging from autopoietic systems to morphological computation, and from small-world networks to information cascades in swarms. A large variety of methods is employed, from spontaneous symmetry breaking to information dynamics to evolutionary algorithms, creating a rich spectrum reflecting this emerging field. Demonstrating several foundational theories and frameworks, as well as innovative practical implementations, Guided Self-Organisation: Inception, will be an invaluable tool for advanced students and researchers in a multiplicity of fields across computer science, physics and biology, including information theory, robotics, dynamical systems, graph theory, artificial life, multi-agent systems, theory of computation and machine learning.
'This book is epic in the sense that it covers so much ground that one is left somewhat dizzy. And yet, it all makes sense once one realizes how it is possible for something that is complex, for example a flower, to evolve via natural processes from humble beginnings. After all, starting with single-cell creatures such as amoebae we follow a complicated but rational evolutionary path to arrive at the most complex organizations that we know of - ourselves. So, if you follow the logic of this book, starting with the basic concepts of thermodynamics, symmetry, quantum theory and so on, you will be treated to many many thought-provoking ideas, which will likely challenge your own preconceptions and leave you thirsting for more.' (From the foreword by Prof. A. M. Glazer, University of Oxford) Science is all about trying to understand natural phenomena under the strict discipline imposed by the celebrated scientific method. Practically all the systems we encounter in Nature are dynamical systems, meaning that they evolve with time. Among them there are the 'simple' or 'simplifiable' systems, which can be handled by traditional, reductionistic science; and then there are 'complex' systems, for which nonreductionistic approaches have to be attempted for understanding their evolution. In this book the author makes a case that a good way to understand a large number of natural phenomena, both simple and complex, is to focus on their self-organization and emergence aspects. Self-organization and emergence are rampant in Nature and, given enough time, their cumulative effects can be so mind-boggling that many people have great difficulty believing that there is no designer involved in the emergence of all the structure and order we see around us. But it is really quite simple to understand how and why we get so much 'order for free'. It all happens because, as ordained by the infallible second law of thermodynamics, all 'thermodynamically open' systems in our ever-expanding and cooling (and therefore gradient-creating) universe constantly tend to move towards equilibrium and stability, often ending up in ordered configurations. In other words, order emerges because Nature tends to find efficient ways to annul gradients of all types. This book will help you acquire a good understanding of the essential features of many natural phenomena, via the complexity-science route. It has four parts: (1) Complexity Basics; (2) Pre-Human Evolution of Complexity; (3) Humans and the Evolution of Complexity; and (4) Appendices. The author gives centrestage to the second law of thermodynamics for 'open' systems, which he describes as 'the mother of all organizing principles'. He also highlights a somewhat unconventional statement of this law: 'Nature abhors gradients'. The book is written at two levels, one of which hardly uses any mathematical equations; the mathematical treatment of some relevant topics has been pushed to the last part of the book, in the form of ten appendices. Therefore the book should be accessible to a large readership. It is a general-science book written in a reader-friendly language, but without any dumbing down of the narrative.
A major scientific revolution has begun, a new paradigm that rivals Darwin's theory in importance. At its heart is the discovery of the order that lies deep within the most complex of systems, from the origin of life, to the workings of giant corporations, to the rise and fall of great civilizations. And more than anyone else, this revolution is the work of one man, Stuart Kauffman, a MacArthur Fellow and visionary pioneer of the new science of complexity. Now, in At Home in the Universe, Kauffman brilliantly weaves together the excitement of intellectual discovery and a fertile mix of insights to give the general reader a fascinating look at this new science--and at the forces for order that lie at the edge of chaos. We all know of instances of spontaneous order in nature--an oil droplet in water forms a sphere, snowflakes have a six-fold symmetry. What we are only now discovering, Kauffman says, is that the range of spontaneous order is enormously greater than we had supposed. Indeed, self-organization is a great undiscovered principle of nature. But how does this spontaneous order arise? Kauffman contends that complexity itself triggers self-organization, or what he calls "order for free," that if enough different molecules pass a certain threshold of complexity, they begin to self-organize into a new entity--a living cell. Kauffman uses the analogy of a thousand buttons on a rug--join two buttons randomly with thread, then another two, and so on. At first, you have isolated pairs; later, small clusters; but suddenly at around the 500th repetition, a remarkable transformation occurs--much like the phase transition when water abruptly turns to ice--and the buttons link up in one giant network. Likewise, life may have originated when the mix of different molecules in the primordial soup passed a certain level of complexity and self-organized into living entities (if so, then life is not a highly improbable chance event, but almost inevitable). Kauffman uses the basic insight of "order for free" to illuminate a staggering range of phenomena. We see how a single-celled embryo can grow to a highly complex organism with over two hundred different cell types. We learn how the science of complexity extends Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection: that self-organization, selection, and chance are the engines of the biosphere. And we gain insights into biotechnology, the stunning magic of the new frontier of genetic engineering--generating trillions of novel molecules to find new drugs, vaccines, enzymes, biosensors, and more. Indeed, Kauffman shows that ecosystems, economic systems, and even cultural systems may all evolve according to similar general laws, that tissues and terra cotta evolve in similar ways. And finally, there is a profoundly spiritual element to Kauffman's thought. If, as he argues, life were bound to arise, not as an incalculably improbable accident, but as an expected fulfillment of the natural order, then we truly are at home in the universe. Kauffman's earlier volume, The Origins of Order, written for specialists, received lavish praise. Stephen Jay Gould called it "a landmark and a classic." And Nobel Laureate Philip Anderson wrote that "there are few people in this world who ever ask the right questions of science, and they are the ones who affect its future most profoundly. Stuart Kauffman is one of these." In At Home in the Universe, this visionary thinker takes you along as he explores new insights into the nature of life.
During the past twenty years, a broad spectrum of theories and methods have been developed in physics, chemistry and molecular biology to explain structure formation in complex systems. These methods have been applied to many different fields such as economics, sociology and town planning, and this book reflects the interdisciplinary nature of complexity and self-organisation. The main focus is on the emergence of collective phenomena from individual or microscopic interactions. Presents a wide-ranging overview from fundamental aspects of the evolution of complexity, to applications in biology, ecology, sociology, economics, and urban structure formation.
Business leaders are expected to be 'in control' of the situation in which their businesses find themselves. But how can organizational leaders and managers control matters entirely out of their hands; such as the next action a competitor takes, or the next law a government may pass? In this book, Philip Streatfield reflects on his own experience as a manager to explore the question: who, or what is 'in control' in an organization? Adopting the perspective of complex responsive processes developed in the first two volumes of this series, the author takes self-organization and emergence as central themes in thinking about life in organizations. He focuses on the tension between spontaneously forming patterns of conversation and intentional actions arguing that the order of organizations emerges through a combination of collective interaction and individual intentions. The argument is developed by considering the day-to-day experiences of life in a large pharmaceutical organization, SmithKline Beecham. In today's organization, managers find that they have to live with the paradox of being 'in control' and 'not in control' simultaneously. It is this capacity to live with paradox, and to continue to participate creatively in spite of 'not being in control', that constitutes effective management.
