Complexity and Emergence: Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the International Academy of the Philosophy of Science. Bergamo, Italy 9-13 May 2001 PDF
Preview Complexity and Emergence: Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the International Academy of the Philosophy of Science. Bergamo, Italy 9-13 May 2001
AND EMERGENCE Editors Evandro Agazzi Luisa Montecucco Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the International Academy of the Philosophy of Science COMPLEXITY AND J EMERGENCE This page is intentionally left blank Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the International Academy of the Philosophy of Science COMPLEXITY AND EMERGENCE Bergamo, Italy 9-13 May 2001 Editors Evandro Agazzi & Luisa Montecucco University of Genoa, Italy V fe World Scientific «b NNeeww J Jeerrsseeyy L • oLnodnodno-nS i• nSi ingapore • Hong Kong Published by World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd. P O Box 128, Farrer Road, Singapore 912805 USA office: Suite 202,1060 Main Street, River Edge, NJ 07661 UK office: 57 Shelton Street, Covent Garden, London WC2H 9HE British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. COMPLEXITY AND EMERGENCE Copyright © 2002 by World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission from the Publisher. For photocopying of material in this volume, please pay a copying fee through the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc., 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. In this case permission to photocopy is not required from the publisher. ISBN 981-238-158-9 This book is printed on acid-free paper. Printed in Singapore by Uto-Print Contents Introduction vii E. Agazzi and L. Montecucco PART I THE NOTIONS OF COMPLEXITY AND EMERGENCE 1. What is Complexity? 3 E. Agazzi 2. On Levels and Types of Complexity and Emergence 13 H. Lenk and A. Stephan 3. Formal Metatheoretical Criteria of Complexity and Emergence 29 C. U. Moulines 4. Beyond Reductionism and Holism. The Approach of Synergetics 39 B. Kanitscheider 5. Kolmogorov Complexity 45 J. Mosterin 6. Modeles de Structures Emergentes dans les Systemes Complexes 57 J. Petitot PART II COMPLEXITY AND EMERGENCE IN NATURAL SCIENCE 7. Emergence in Physics: The Case of Classical Physics 75 R. Omnes VI Complexity and Emergence 8. Classical Properties in a Quantum-Mechanical World 87 A. Cordero 9. Reduction, Integration, Emergence and Complexity in Biological Networks 101 J. Ricard PART III THE EMERGENCE OF THE MIND 10. Complexity and the Emergence of Meaning: Toward a Semiophysics 115 F. T. Arecchi 11. Complexity and the Emergence of Intentionality: Some Misconceptions 147 M. Casartelli 12. Can Supervenience Save the Mental? 161 L. Montecucco 13. From Complexity Levels to the Separate Soul 181 G.Del Re Index 205 Introduction Complexity has become a dominant concept in contemporary science, especially as a consequence of the increasing impact of the perspectives of general systems-theory. And its fruitfulness essentially consists in the fact that it has rendered possible a deeper understanding of the functional and structural interrelations existing within a given system and between this system and surrounding systems. The advantage of this point of view is that it offers conceptual tools for a more adequate understanding of the novelties that complex systems evince with regard to their constituent parts, novelties that are often called emergent and that give a rather precise sense to the old maxim that "the whole is more than the sum of its parts". This "more", however, can be interpreted according to two contrary approaches. The first consists in maintaining that the knowledge of the parts and their properties is sufficient to account for the new properties of the whole. Since these are deterministically entailed by the properties of the parts, they result from them and, in this sense, are reducible to them. The second consists in maintaining that the properties of the parts are necessary but not sufficient to account for the properties of the whole, since the latter are further dependent on the occurrence of particular conditions not inscribed in the properties of the parts, and whose contingent configuration could have led to a totally different result if they had been only slightly different. In this sense the second approach relies on an indeterministic view of the dynamics of natural phenomena (which is also extended to phenomena studied in disciplines different from the natural sciences). This fact explains why the thematic of complexity has become more important in the natural sciences as a consequence of the obsolescence of the classic deterministic view and of some of its most characteristic corollaries. The classic view is well portrayed in the famous statement of Laplace: a superior Intelligence that could know at a given instant the exact state of the universe (that is, the positions and velocities of all its material points) and also know all the natural laws regulating their motion, and that in addition could also calculate the exact solutions of the differential equations VI1 Complexity and Emergence Vlll expressing these laws, would be able to predict exactly the state of the universe (that is, the position and velocity of every material point in it) at any future instant. Since humans are far from being endowed with such exceptional cognitive powers, they must compensate their ignorance by resorting to the calculus of probabilities, thanks to which they are able, starting from a good approximation in their knowledge of the initial conditions, to predict with an equally good approximation the knowledge of future events. And this because a "small" change in the initial conditions was believed to lead to a "small" change in the deterministically following final state. This tacit postulate is known as the condition of linearity for the physical phenomena; and it is well-known that already with Poincare this postulate was seriously challenged in his study of the famous "three-body problem", in which the application of the most deterministic of the laws of physics (Newtonian gravitation) was shown to be insufficient to grant the expected exact prediction even of the behavior of such a simple system as that constituted by three material bodies. The awareness of the non-linearity of the great majority of physical effects is now one of the most generally recognized features of scientific phenomena, and appears as a direct consequence of their complexity. A strong aspect of the classical perspective seemed to be that it was the best suited to account for the order and harmony of the universe. If this is regulated by eternal, immutable and strictly deterministic laws, it is sufficient to admit that a certain wise disposition of the initial state of the universe was posited (perhaps by a divine intelligence, as Newton himself had suggested), in order to be sure that this "cosmos" (that is, ordered totality) will persist eternally and be intrinsically explorable by humans. Within classical physics, however, this view soon appeared hardly tenable. When the second principle of thermodynamics expressed the "irreversibility" of thermal phenomena, the problem became that of reconciling this feature with the time-reversibility of all the mechanical laws. The ingenious solution elaborated by certain famous physicists of the 19th century was at the same time reductionist and probabilistic: heat and temperature are only macroscopic magnitudes corresponding to the mechanical kinetic energy of the molecules constituting matter, which are subject to continuous agitation and collisions regulated by classical reversible mechanical laws. In this interpretation something such as the "irreversible" passage of heat from a body at a high temperature to a body at a lower temperature was explained to be not really irreversible, but only Introduction IX endowed with a very high probability. Therefore, reversibility in thermodynamics was not theoretically excluded, but shown to be so highly improbable a process that it should be practically excluded. In the technical elaborations of this point two salient aspects are worth mentioning: disorder is much more probable than order, such that the natural tendency of the dynamic of a closed system is towards an increasing state of disorder of its constituent parts. In terms of energy, this was expressed as a law of the degradation of energy according to which the evolution of a closed system is toward a state of thermal death, in which all forms of energy have been reduced to the lowest form, i.e., to heat. Since the universe was considered a closed system, this was the famous thesis of the thermal death of the universe. As a conclusion of this story, the deterministic view, once it had been applied to the understanding of complex systems and of real processes, appeared to entail a transition from order to disorder and from stability to death. More appealing was the perspective elaborated in a much more intuitive and less "rigorous" way by biology. Determinism has always been rather alien to the conceptual space of biology, and this precisely because any living organism is in itself such a complex entity that an exact prediction of its behaviour is almost meaningless. The most we can do is to formulate probabilistic predictions based on the empirical ascertainment of relative frequencies. This general attitude was greatly reinforced by the appearance of evolutionistic theories in the 19th century. Independently of the differences existing among these theories concerning the postulation of the "mechanisms" of evolution, all of them agreed on the admission (that was also supported by empirical evidence) of the unpredictable appearance (and extinction) of living species. In particular, novelties constituted by the appearance of new species were accounted for by an improbable encounter of contingent situations. According to the Darwinian theory of natural selection (but, to a minor degree, also according to other theories of evolution), the concurrent presence of certain contingent "exceptional" features in a few individuals of a given species—that also contingently happened to make them more fit vis a-vis their environment and better able to survive in it, and which also happened to be inherited by their descendants—would gradually lead to the extinction of the offspring of the "normal" individuals and to the consolidation of the new species endowed with the "favorable" characteristics which initially occurred "by chance". According to this view,
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