ZenPundit
Tuesday, July 11, 2006
 
EMERGENCE IN COMPLEX SYSTEMS

Had the pleasure of extended discussion over coffee with Dr. Von last night. A good part of our exchange revolved around the recent posts over the resilience of networked civilizations and complexity inspired by the Bar-Yam paper. A subject which in turn brought us to considering emergence and phase transitions and how that might apply to social networks.

Von made reference to an old post of his that I missed the first time around- "Our Universe:Continual Emergence"- that I think might be helpful to the bloggers who have been mulling over this topic. An excerpt that sums up the problem with a collective knowledge base built on the legacy of reductionism being applied to analyze systemic complexity:

"In other words, we know a lot about the basic rules and principles that govern individual components for each individual step of the evolution of the universe and life on earth. However, what we don’t understand very well is how steps make the transition to the next step. We don’t understand the organizational principles or the rules that govern the phase transitions between steps, which means we don’t understand the emergence of complexity in our universe. This is where we are now and, in my opinion, such studies will dominate whole fields of physical science, biological science, mathematics, economics, social science, behavioral science, technology, and even philosophy, for decades to come. To those who have suggested the end of science is near, think again."

Read the post in full here.

LINK:

Dave at Thoughts Illustrated has a link to a podcast with Valdis Krebs
 
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