This book offers a unique perspective on the evolution of scientific theories through the lens of their changing complexity.

To explore this non-trivial connection, the author draws on well-known historical cases from the philosophy of science tradition to test the central theses of the work. At the same time, the book develops a conceptual framework in which the debates on emergence and complexity play a central role.

The opening chapter provides the historical background of emergence, examining both classical and contemporary perspectives, highlighting diverse viewpoints and their contributions to the current discussion.

The second chapter turns to the foundations of complexity science, detailing its key methodologies and emphasizing the role of information in describing and modeling systems.

Building on this foundation, the book introduces a novel quantitative definition of emergent properties, grounded in the concept of parametric model complexity. It discusses how slight variations in control parameters can generate universal features and explores the implications of these dynamics for our understanding of systemic behavior.

Finally, the author shows how this framework illuminates critical aspects of scientific practice, ranging from the criteria guiding theory choice to the relationship between technological innovation and the risk of the appearance of anomalies. By combining historical analysis, conceptual innovation, and formal modeling, the book presents a compelling vision of how complexity and emergence can be predictive indicators of theoretical transformation, recognizing the moments when our current models have reached their limits.

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Cristian Axenie , Meisam Akbarzadeh , Michail A. Makridis , Matteo Saveriano , Alexandru Stancu

The book purpose is to build a foundational knowledge base by applying antifragile system design, analysis, and development in technical systems, with a focus on traffic engineering, robotics, and control engineering. The authors are interested in formalizing principles and an apparatus that turns the basic concept of antifragility into a tool for designing and building closed-loop technical systems that behave beyond robust in the face of uncertainty.

As coined in the book of Nassim Taleb, antifragility is a property of a system to gain from uncertainty, randomness, and volatility, opposite to what fragility would incur. An antifragile system’s response to external perturbations is beyond robust, such that small stressors can strengthen the future response of the system by adding a strong anticipation component. The work of the Applied Antifragility Group in traffic control and robotics, led by the authors, provides a good overview on the current research status.

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This book brings together key findings, insights, and theories at the intersection of two disciplines – city science and complex systems. It features a curated collection of chapters contributed by emerging scholars conducting cutting-edge research in complexity science, interdisciplinary physics, and quantitative geography. The compendium is tailored to a thematically diverse audience, spanning quantitative fields such as statistical and mathematical physics, as well as socially-focused domains such as geography and urban planning. By integrating novel methods and insights from physics, economics, and geography, this book aims at an interdisciplinary spectrum of graduate students and academic researchers studying cities as complex systems.

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In the tradition of classics such as The Lives of a Cell, a bold reframing of our relationship with technology that is more positive and human centered.
In the digital world, code is the essential primary building block, the equivalent of the cell or DNA in the biological sphere—and almost as mysterious. Code can create entire worlds, real and virtual; it allows us to connect instantly to people and places around the globe; and it performs tasks that were once only possible in science fiction. It is a superpower, and not just in a technical sense. It is also a gateway to ideas. As vividly illustrated by Samuel Arbesman, it is the ultimate connector, providing new insight and meaning into how everything from language and mythology to biblical texts, biology, and even our patterns of thought connect with the history and nature of computing.

While the building block of code can be used for many wondrous things it can also create deeper wedges in our society and be weaponized to cause damage to our planet or our civilization. Code and computing are too important to be left to the tech community; it is essential that each of us engage with it. And we fail to understand it to our detriment.

By providing us with a framework to think about coding and its effects upon the world and placing the past, current, and future developments in computing into its broader setting we see how software and computers can work for people as opposed to against our needs. With this deeper understanding into the “why” of coding we can be masters of technology rather than its subjects.

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* Offers an integrating framework for natural philosophy
* Connects biological and physical evolution through novel theory, elaborating an extended evolutionary synthesis
* Analyses science from a philosophical perspective and looks at philosophy from a scientific perspective

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A new theory of Neurobiological Emergentism that explains how sentience emerges from the brain.

Sentience is the feeling aspect of consciousness. In From Sensing to Sentience, Todd Feinberg develops a new theory called Neurobiological Emergentism (NBE) that integrates biological, neurobiological, evolutionary, and philosophical perspectives to explain how sentience naturally emerges from the brain.

Emergent properties are broadly defined as features of a complex system that are not present in the parts of a system when they are considered in isolation but may emerge as a system feature of those parts and their interactions. Tracing a journey of billions of years of evolution from life to the basic sensing capabilities of single-celled organisms up to the sentience of animals with advanced nervous systems, including all vertebrates (for instance, fish, reptiles, birds, and mammals), arthropods (insects and crabs), and cephalopods (such as the octopus), Feinberg argues that sentience gradually but eventually emerged along diverse evolutionary lines with the evolution of sufficiently neurobiologically complex brains during the Cambrian period over 520 million years ago.

Ultimately, Feinberg argues that viewing sentience as an emergent process can explain both its neurobiological basis as well its perplexing personal nature, thus solving the historical philosophical problem of the apparent “explanatory gap” between the brain and experience.

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Humans are the ultimate complex systems. In this monograph intended for psychologists and social scientists interested in modeling psychological processes, Han L. J. van der Maas argues that we can only succeed in exploring the psychological system by understanding its complexity. By applying the tools of complexity science to psychology, researchers and practitioners can achieve desperately needed breakthroughs in the social sciences.

The book has three primary objectives: to provide a comprehensive overview of complex-systems research, with a particular emphasis on its applications in psychology and the social sciences; to provide skills for complex-systems research; and to foster critical thinking regarding the potential applications of complex systems in psychology. Readers should have a basic understanding of mathematics and knowledge of the programming language R.

Complex-Systems Research in Psychology explores a range of topics, including chaos, bifurcation, and self-organization in psychological processes, psychological network analysis, as well as agent-based modeling of social processes. It offers applications in various areas of psychology, such as perception, depression, addiction, cognitive development, and polarization.

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The Complex World, originally published in Volume 1 of Foundational Papers in Complexity Science, presents an entirely new framing of nature, of the human role in the natural and technological worlds, and what it means to prosper on a living planet.

We live in a complex world—meaning one that is increasingly connected, evolving, technological, volatile, and potentially poised for catastrophe. And yet we continue to treat the world as if it were simple: linear, unchanging, disconnected, and infinitely exploitable.

Complexity science is an approach to understanding and surviving in a complex world. In this concise and comprehensive introduction, Santa Fe Institute President David C. Krakauer traces the roots of complexity science back to the nineteenth-century science of machines—evolved and engineered—into the twentieth-century science of emergent systems.

By combining insights from evolution, computation, nonlinear dynamics, and statistical physics, complexity science provides the first scientific framework for understanding the purposeful universe.

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* Explores the potential of complex systems in shaping the future of communication networks
* Integrates network science, bio-inspired models, artificial intelligence, and higher-order graph theory
* Provides a guide for researchers to use the full potential of complex systems in revolutionizing communication networks

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Cristian Axenie , Roman Bauer , Oliver López Corona , Jeffrey West

As coined in the book of Nassim Taleb, antifragility is a property of a system to gain from uncertainty, randomness, and volatility, opposite to what fragility would incur. An antifragile system’s response to external perturbations is beyond robust, such that small stressors can strengthen the future response of the system by adding a strong anticipation component. Such principles are already well suited for describing behaviors in natural systems but also in approaching therapy designs and eco-system modelling and eco-system analysis.

The purpose of this book is to build a foundational knowledge base by applying antifragile system design, analysis, and development in natural systems, including biomedicine, neuroscience, and ecology as main fields. We are interested in formalizing principles and an apparatus that turns the basic concept of antifragility into a tool for designing and building closed-loop systems that behave beyond robust in the face of uncertainty when characterizing and intervening in biomedical and ecological (eco)systems.

The book introduces the framework of applied antifragility and possible paths to build systems that gain from uncertainty. We draw from the body of literature on natural systems (e.g. cancer therapy, antibiotics, neuroscience, and agricultural pest management) in an attempt to unify the scales of antifragility in one framework. The work of the Applied Antifragility Group in oncology, neuroscience, and ecology led by the authors provides a good overview on the current research status.

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Interdisciplinary systems thinking is complementary but does not replace conventional disciplinary analytical thinking. The book is valuable for researchers, their advisors, and other thinkers interested in deep knowledge of science. Interdisciplinary systems thinking is valuable for three reasons: The goal of all science is a unified view of the world; we cannot solve the significant problems of our time without interdisciplinary collaboration; and general theories of systems and system archetypes support the solution to those problems. System archetypes are generic system models that have stood the test of time. As specialists within a discipline, we must be able to communicate between disciplines.
Interdisciplinary generalists can offer us reliable visions and relevant research problems. The goal of interdisciplinary research is to find unified solutions to those problems. The book provides a lot of information from over a thousand sources in a structured manner to help the reader. The book includes a comprehensive chronology, vocabulary, and bibliography. The author has been a research professor in information engineering for over 25 years. During his career, he became interested in systems thinking, which is closely related to the philosophy and history of science.

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Provides an unifying approach to the study of statistical laws
Starts from simple examples and goes through more advanced time-series and statistical methods
Presents the necessary material to analyze, test, and interpret results in existing and new datasets

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A panoramic view of the evolution of life on our planet, from its origins to humanity's future.

In A History of Bodies, Brains, and Minds, Francisco Aboitiz provides a brief history of life, the brain, and cognition, from the earliest living beings to our own species. The author proceeds from the basic premise that, since evolution by natural selection is the process underlying the origin of life and its evolution on earth, the brain—and thus our minds—must also be the result of biological evolution. The aim of this book is to narrate how animal bodies came to be built with their nervous systems and how our species evolved with culture, technology, language, and consciousness.

The book is organized in four parts, each delving into a different aspect of evolutionary development:
• Definitions lays the groundwork by discussing the principles of biological evolution and explores the definition and mechanisms of life itself.
• Beginnings describes the origins of life, starting from the emergence of the first cells to the development of neurons as the building blocks for brain networks.
• The Rise of Bodies and Brains examines the evolution of animals with bilateral symmetry, the emergence of chordates and vertebrates, and the expansion and diversification of the vertebrate brain.
• A Singular Ape explores Homo sapiens and our species' unique traits, such as bipedality, tool use, culture, language, communication, and consciousness.
Comprehensive and deeply insightful, this book helps us understand our place in the natural world and the cosmos—as well as what the future might hold for life on earth.

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Either/or thinking is a major stumbling block to human development and understanding. In this book Kelso & Engstrøm offer a whole new way of looking at the world, awakening a “sixth sense” that people didn’t realize they had. It draws on the profound relationship between nature’s many complementary contraries and the paradigm shifting science of coordination called Coordination Dynamics. The human brain~mind, through the multi- and metastable modes of its coordination dynamics, gives rise to a sentient faculty called the squiggle sense. Nature's contraries are perceived not only as opposing polar states, but as coexisting complementary tendencies, symbolized by the squiggle (~). Use this book to nudge your brain~mind into its metastable mode again and again, to better perceive the complementary dances of contraries, and to transcend the detrimental narrow-mindedness of polarized, either/or thinking. As a "Metastabilian" you can wield your squiggle sense to enhance and advance your life!

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