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, [EMAIL PROTECTED] 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 ¸¸¸¸.·´ ¯ `·.¸¸¸¸
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explorations: www.synapse9.com
-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] 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
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Applied Complexity Group listserv
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===========================================================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
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
