- Title Pages
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Sources
- Introduction
- Introduction to Philosophical Perspectives on Emergence
-
1 The Rise and Fall of British Emergentism -
2 On the Idea of Emergence -
3 Reductionism and the Irreducibility of Consciousness -
4 Emergence and Supervenience -
5 Aggregativity: Reductive Heuristics for Finding Emergence -
6 How Properties Emerge -
7 Making Sense of Emergence Jaegwon Kim -
8 Downward Causation and Autonomy in Weak Emergence -
9 Real Patterns - Introduction to Scientific Perspectives on Emergence
-
10 More is Different: Broken Symmetry and the Nature of the Hierarchical Structure of Science -
11 Emergence -
12 Sorting and Mixing: Race and Sex -
13 Alternative Views of Complexity Herbert Simon -
14 The Theory of Everything -
15 Is Anything Ever New? Considering Emergence -
16 Design, Observation, Surprise! A Test of Emergence -
17 Ansatz for Dynamical Hierarchies - Introduction to Background and Polemics
-
18 Newtonianism, Reductionism and the Art of Congressional Testimony -
19 Issues in the Logic of Reductive Explanations -
20 Chaos -
21 Undecidability and Intractability in Theoretical Physics -
22 Special Sciences (Or: The Disunity of Science as a Working Hypothesis) -
23 Supervenience -
24 The Nonreductivist’s Troubles with Mental Causation - Annotated Bibliography
- About the Authors
- Index
Alternative Views of Complexity Herbert Simon
Alternative Views of Complexity Herbert Simon
- Chapter:
- (p.249) 13 Alternative Views of Complexity Herbert Simon
- Source:
- Emergence
- Author(s):
Herbert Simon
- Publisher:
- The MIT Press
This chapter elaborates on the varying conceptions of complexity and complex systems. Interest in complexity can be divided into three eruptions of interest: first, the eruption after World War I that gave birth to the term “holism”; second, the eruption after World War II that gave birth to terms such as “information,” “feedback,” “cybernetics,” and “ general systems”; the third and current eruption associates complexity with “chaos,” “adaptive systems,” “genetic algorithms,” and “cellular automata.” These three eruptions selected different aspects of complexity on which to focus. The post-WWI interest focused on the claim that the whole transcends the sum of the parts, and was strongly anti-reductionist. The post-WWII eruption remained neutral on the issue of reductionism, focusing on the roles of feedback and homeostasis in maintaining complex systems. The current interest in complexity focuses mainly on mechanisms that create and sustain complexity, and on analytic tools for describing and analyzing it.
Keywords: complexity, complex systems, holism, general systems, chaos, adaptive systems, reductionism, homeostasis
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- Title Pages
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Sources
- Introduction
- Introduction to Philosophical Perspectives on Emergence
-
1 The Rise and Fall of British Emergentism -
2 On the Idea of Emergence -
3 Reductionism and the Irreducibility of Consciousness -
4 Emergence and Supervenience -
5 Aggregativity: Reductive Heuristics for Finding Emergence -
6 How Properties Emerge -
7 Making Sense of Emergence Jaegwon Kim -
8 Downward Causation and Autonomy in Weak Emergence -
9 Real Patterns - Introduction to Scientific Perspectives on Emergence
-
10 More is Different: Broken Symmetry and the Nature of the Hierarchical Structure of Science -
11 Emergence -
12 Sorting and Mixing: Race and Sex -
13 Alternative Views of Complexity Herbert Simon -
14 The Theory of Everything -
15 Is Anything Ever New? Considering Emergence -
16 Design, Observation, Surprise! A Test of Emergence -
17 Ansatz for Dynamical Hierarchies - Introduction to Background and Polemics
-
18 Newtonianism, Reductionism and the Art of Congressional Testimony -
19 Issues in the Logic of Reductive Explanations -
20 Chaos -
21 Undecidability and Intractability in Theoretical Physics -
22 Special Sciences (Or: The Disunity of Science as a Working Hypothesis) -
23 Supervenience -
24 The Nonreductivist’s Troubles with Mental Causation - Annotated Bibliography
- About the Authors
- Index