bactra.org

Complexity (and/or "Complex Systems")

Last update: 13 Dec 2024 22:24
First version: 25 September 1997 (or earlier?); major revisions 23 November 2002, and (even more substantial) 18 October 2024.

If pressed to explain what I mean by this, I'd say that it's processes showing some combination of non-linearity and lots of strongly interacting components --- but ones where the interactions aren't so strong that there is an effective low-dimensional description. The common thread is that you need lots of information to understand what's going on. As for more precise definitions, well, I give complexity measures their own notebook for a reason. My fuller views are expounded in some of my papers, linked to below.

My own views on this subject are, naturally, hard to separate from the fact that I've been going to the Santa Fe Institute since 1997, worked there full time 1998--2002, have been on its external faculty since the '00s, etc. That place, and the scientific network around it, has not only provided me with training, resources and professional opportunities, but mentors, collaborators, close personal friends, a professional agenda, and sense of belonging to something valuable. Like any home, it has moments when the other occupants make me roll my eyes, but it would be absurd for me to pretend to be an impartial critic. I'm only too aware that someone else interested in the same topics, but not inducted into the same epistemic community, the same network-and-tradition, might well make very different judgments about the literature...

To develop, someday: An exposition of how the whole field is a "series of footnotes" to Norbert Wiener and Herbert Simon.

The linkage/references here are sparser than they could be, because today my lumper/splitter pendulum has swung towards "split", and I've moved a lot of stuff to the more specialized notebooks.

    Recommended, big picture, less technical:
  • Robert Axelrod and Michael D. Cohen, Harnessing Complexity: Organizational Implications of a Scientific Frontier
  • Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart, The Collapse of Chaos [A great book, except that, as they themselves say of Dawkins, the philosophy is completely backwards, especially on reductionism and emergent properties.]
  • John Holland, Emergence
  • Steven Johnson, Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software [What I buy my relatives when they ask me what all the fuss is about.]
  • David C. Krakauer (ed.), Worlds Hidden in Plain Sight: The Evolving Idea of Complexity at the Santa Fe Institute, 1984--2019
  • Melanie Mitchell, Complexity: A Guided Tour [Disclaimer: I used to work for Melanie.]
  • Heinz Pagels, The Dreams of Reason: The Computer and the Rise of the Sciences of Complexity [What I used to buy my relatives. Deserves to be brought back into print.]
  • Herbert Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial [Especially the last chapter, "The Architecture of Complexity".]
    Modesty forbids me to recommend:
  • CRS, "Methods and Techniques of Complex Systems Science: An Overview", chapter 1 (pp. 33--114) in Deisboeck and Kresh (eds.), Complex Systems Science in Biomedicine, nlin.AO/0307015
  • CRS, Chaos, Complexity, and Inference [Materials for an undergraduate statistics class I taught in 2008 and 2009]
  • My papers listed under complexity measures
    Dis-recommended:
  • I have a long list, available upon request. I may add it here sometime when I'm feeling more full of venom than the present.