Adventures in Thought Space

  The following several pages are a  thought experiment  that’s a supplement to the two Extralogical Complexity articles ,  not an essay . Much more concrete explanations and examples of the following concepts are given in those posts.      Emergence and self-organization are the heart of Nature, and it beats with awesome power. Novelties bootstrap themselves out of randomness and into existence. But they must obey the laws of causality and energy conservation. Emergence and self-organization aren’t, by definition, driven by any directed, conscious agency—so what empowers them? Synergy. In addition to being a more figurative notion, synergy is, in a way, the opposite of energy:  It can emerge, but it is not conserved . Then how does it emerge?    Consider a system of 26 highly interactive but still independent variables/parts/or subsystems, A-Z. They can be anything from businesses in an economy to lifeforms in a biosphere to the cells ...

  Nature’s elements, by definition, arise  naturally . Novelties emerge from randomness and self-organize. Thus, one must understand emergence and self-organization to understand Nature.   Nature is an emergence that exceeds the sum of its many parts, or substrate. Such an emergence can only occur if the system of variables undergoes feedback that allows outcomes to surpass its initial causes. Physical laws--i.e. the laws of causality and energy conversation—are always satisfied, but this requires accounting for an arbitrarily large number of intermediary events, which is next to impossible in any real network. Part one showed that synergetic emergences are made possible by the prevalence of nonlinear change—i.e., Complex  causation / feedback . This article, part two, is a treatise on the structure and dynamics of self-organization in emergent systems, also known as Complexity theory.   Complex systems theory is a multi-disciplinary subfield and cousin of chaos...