An important consequence of this is that he opened the door to the existence of fundamental laws at different levels of complexity, e.g. In, he gave specific examples where reductionist thinking fails and highlighted the fact that the most fundamental physical laws were unable to explain new properties and behaviours arising in the assembly of a large number of units obeying those fundamental laws. It was during the 1970s that the Nobel Laureate Phil Anderson warned against the perils of reductionism. Ludwig von Bertalanffy, in particular, was among the founders of general systems theory, providing the first mathematical ground to describe the complexity observed in biological and social systems. In fact, cybernetics deals with systems and their causal feedback loops: among its founders there were Norbert Wiener and John von Neumann, the latter being the first to propose cellular automata and a universal constructor, both concepts strictly related to emergence. The concept has been invoked by emergentist philosophers such as Samuel Alexander and Charlie Dunbar Broad in contrast to reductionism in the 1920s, although a more formal approach was developed by the pioneers of cybernetics in the 1940s. The same concept, but with a slightly different meaning, can be found in Gestalt psychology, based on the intuition that organisms do not merely perceive individual components but entire patterns or configurations: in a nutshell, ‘the whole is other than the sum of the parts’, and a similar concept appears in the work by William M. In the following, we will briefly review the phenomenology concerning emergent phenomena and provide an operational definition of emergence as a hallmark of complexity that can be applied to a variety of complex systems, regardless of whether they are natural, social or artificial.Ī primordial concept can be already found in the ‘Metaphysics’ written by the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, where it is argued that a totality is something besides the parts. the cosmic web, in complex adaptive matter. in molecular interactions within a cell-to the macroscopic one-e.g. Rather intriguingly, such a spontaneous appearance of meaningful structures in space and time is a ubiquitous phenomenon observed from the microscopic scale-e.g. the characters) and their interactions (i.e. In other words, language is an emergent phenomenon requiring a symbolic representation for units (i.e. a sentence) exchanged between a sender and a receiver becomes meaningful when both of them spontaneously start to use repeating patterns which they identify as meaningful. Concisely, we can argue that there is no concept or knowledge in a single character: a sequence of characters (i.e. However, there is apparently no intelligible knowledge that can be extracted from the above example: from the perspective of the reader there is a lack of those familiar patterns that one routinely uses to communicate and expects to find with respect to some prior (e.g. In the previous sentence, each character is randomly generated: the way characters cluster together, while being separated by spaces, are usually interpreted as words and sequences of words used to transmit information, e.g. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Emergent phenomena in complex physical and socio-technical systems: from cells to societies’.ĭ oijw ao o fyrg bafjdsdpw dweoda wdhao jrfgb sag wdgy d ias dsih sig qqpdjwe fjrfb dvvs. Our short review also serves as an introduction to the theme issue Emergent phenomena in complex physical and socio-technical systems: from cells to societies, where we provide a synthesis of the contents tackled in the issue and outline how they relate to these challenges, spanning from current advances in our understanding on the origin of life to the large-scale propagation of infectious diseases. We offer here a general overview of the phenomenon of emergence and sketch current and future challenges on the topic. Despite the ample phenomenological evidence of the existence of systems’ emergent properties, central theoretical questions to the study of emergence remain unanswered, such as the lack of a widely accepted, rigorous definition of the phenomenon or the identification of the essential physical conditions that favour emergence. It is ubiquitous, from non-living entities such as oscillators that under specific conditions synchronize, to living ones, such as birds flocking or fish schooling. This non-trivial phenomenon, known as emergence, characterizes a broad range of distinct complex systems-from physical to biological and social-and is often related to collective behaviour. When a large number of similar entities interact among each other and with their environment at a low scale, unexpected outcomes at higher spatio-temporal scales might spontaneously arise.
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